Civil War Watch: Sentences to Ponder

Fewer but stronger partisans should lead to more aggressive proposals ("playing to the base"). This could create a feedback loop, driving more and more people away from parties, leaving a hard-core.

Whether violence comes next depends, I believe, on symmetry of suppression. Weimar judges took sides in the paramilitary battles, but they took the militarily weaker side.

I think the situation in modern US is reversed; offialdom has long indulged the left and hunted the right when it comes to paramilitary violence. If the judges are scale-fingering for the dominant paramilitary, only the true idiots on the right would take up arms.

Whatever violence comes, therefore, would look more like a massacre or purge than a civil war. Most likely it would just fill Guantanamo with English-speakers. I guess you could call that a very short civil war.

Open question how the 'silent majority' would feel if a lot of blood were involved, but assuming it was mostly idiots dying, it'd be easy to sell as domestic counter-terror.

How could the situation "if the US runs out of creditors" be dire when the dollar is a fiat currency that the United States government has the sole power to create" The US can never "run out of money" or go involuntarily bankrupt. It can always create the money it needs with the sole limitation of inflation. Selling bonds is a completely self-inflicted activity. There is absolutely no reason the law could not be changed and stop selling bonds. There is no operation reason the Treasury cannot spend and the Fed add that to excess reserves, which is not counted as debt.

In 1921, James Harvey Robinson wrote

"A third kind of thinking is stimulated when anyone questions our belief and opinions. We sometimes find ourselves changing our minds without any resistance or heavy emotion, but if we are told that we are wrong we resent the imputation and harden our hearts. We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposes to rob us of their companionship. It is obviously not the ideas themselves that are dear to us, but our self-esteem, which is threatened. We are by nature stubbornly pledged to defend, our own from attack, whether it be our person, our family, our property, or our opinion."

http://grammar.about.com/od/classicessays/a/On-Various-Kinds-Of-Thinking-By-James-Harvey-Robinson.htm

So the trend seems to be for the two parties to attract fewer supporters, but for those supporters to be more partisan.

Another way of putting it is that the weakly attached are more likely to call themselves Independents. Yet, at the same time I believe other studies demonstrate that a lot of the newly Independent consistently vote for one part or the other and are not swing voters.

True, though, that all their independence may have done is decrease their power over nominations.

I don't think anyone here denies the ratcheting up of rhetoric. But that won't lead to a civil war as it isn't evidence of a divided angry electorate. It is an increasingly irrelevant chattering class seeing their influence and perks wane. (If I were wicked I'd call these Bryan Caplan's more informed, more engaged, and superior voters.)

What we are seeing is also a natural effect of the explosion of nihes in the mas media. In 1965 a partisan crank-fest like CNBC could not survive. Now there are enough cahnnels, and enough audience for such things. CNBC can cater to that samllish segment who get high hating on republicans. This is in a sense a throw back to the days when every town had a dozen partisan papers. (I am aware that references to the eantebllum time bolster Arnold, but as another commenter noted, we have had a Great Moderation in the populace.)

"any reform of Social Security that is designed to shore up its finances is treated by the left as a threat to their self-esteem,"

What do you think of the right when they reject letting the Bush tax cuts end? Or if anyone suggests that cutting taxes does not lead to higher revenue?

"people get "high" from rejecting beliefs "

Read Caplan's posts on immigration for an example. He posts frequently about the moral righteousness of open borders but does he ever engage in the arguments of immigration critics like George Borjas?

You are literally taking away the source of their good feeling, like drugs from a junkie or a boyfriend from a teenage girl.

Let me suggest, respectfully, that this trivializes a fundamental human problem. Ideologies or religions or systems of political belief, call them what you may, but bodies of ideas, are all that stand between our selves, and our deaths (and our lives, life being a thing just as terrifying.) If the human condition is at root one of fear, against which there is no real defense, then it ought not to surprise anyone that people do not really wish to think too deeply. We go into that cold black water, bottomless and boundless, and we swim until we drown, and we cling to anything that floats.

A) Your increased use of the term Civil War is disturbing, not humorous and not accurate.

B) Approximately 1/3rd of the registered electorate are divided equally among independents, democrats and republicans (ballpark using Rasmussen and Gallop). 30% of voting age people are not registered. By multiplying .7 total adults registered voters times .666 registered GOP/Dem voters times .333 registered independent voters times .20---change in those self identified GOP/DEM voters as more partisan---one gets 3% of the adult voting age population as more partisan.

Hardly evidence of "Civil War"

C) This country has borrowed so much, people are starting to realize we are less wealthy than we thought---not destitute, not poor, not bad off, just less wealthy. So of course we will argue over who takes the bigger hit. Thats called politics.

Not yet in Civil War state.

D) You are blaming the wrong people on Social Security. Everyone has paid into the system. Yes, cost of living increase in SS is too high, but not so high that a 401k style program would not have been better. The Government/politicians misdirected (or whatever term you prefer) SS taxes to other junk to the tune of about 4.5 trillion and call it a "Trust Fund".

Again, politics will determine how this loss gets wacked up. Expect the unborn to get the biggest piece---offset by increased productivity somewhere down the line.

Still no Civil War.

Bryan's outlined a great way to deal with these scenarios: instead of talking vaguely about the possibility of civil war, define civil war, tell us what you think the probability of it occurring is, and take bets. In addition to showing the seriousness of your beliefs, it allows you to insure, shifting utility from the good state of the world to the bad state.

And yet as far as I can tell in this election both parties are trying to the party of medicare.

The people who are capable of critical thinking have all left the two parties and the people who belong to a political party they way they are fans of a sports team, have stayed. More and more people are waking up and leaving. This leaves radical loyalists in the parties. I thought I was a republican in 2000 when I heard how they wanted smaller government, no nation building and less taxes. Later I learned that government gets bigger, they build nations, and taxes are a product of spending and not the other way around with republicans--I lost any sense of party interest.

growing divide

Do I detect a hint of hope with every civil war post Kling makes?

fwiw, it doesn't get more hopeful than this:

"[Obama]'s going to try to hand over the sovereignty of the United States to the (United Nations), and what is going to happen when that happens?," [Lubbock County, TX Judge Tom] Head asked the station during a Monday interview. "I'm thinking the worst. Civil unrest, civil disobedience, civil war maybe. And we're not just talking a few riots here and demonstrations, we're talking Lexington, Concord, take up arms and get rid of the guy."

But don't worry, liberal officials and Mark Thoma do it too, amirite?