Economic Civil War

The “Righteous Cause Myth” folks would like you to think that it’s “settled science” that the War was “about slavery.” No other explanation is acceptable.

These neo-revisionists spill a lot of ink beating back “neo-Confederate” bogeymen who amount to very few mainstream academics, if any. It’s almost as if they are trying to convince themselves that the war was “about slavery.”

Because if it wasn’t, there would have to be some real soul searching in America.

How could the moral “good guys” slaughter hundreds of thousands of their fellow Americans to “preserve the Union?” Sounds a lot like “The Regulars are Coming Out!”

It has to be “about slavery” to justify the invasion and subjugation of their fellow Americans.

Just like today, it has to be about “social justice” to push the “Green New Deal” and the assault on blue collar workers in America.

It’s never about “economics,” but that is precisely what it has always been about.

A recent piece from the Claremont Institute, titled “Economic Civil War,” actually gets this right. Go figure. I’m usually hard on the Claremont folks, but every now and then they publish something worthwhile.

Joel Kotkin argues that the “culture war” hides the real rift in America, that between blue collar workers and the Yankee elites on the coasts who don’t care about “production” but “connection.”

These mostly white middle class blue collar workers, the “deplorables” according to the leftist establishment, are the people getting crushed by the woke economic social justice platform. They dig coal, drill for oil, and do the dirty work of collecting the energy that makes America run.

They just aren’t politically correct or woke enough. That makes their jobs expendable. Building a windmill doesn’t have the same job security as digging for coal.

And you only have so much land to place solar panels. Urbanites and those who work from home or in an air-conditioned office just want the power to stay on. How they get it doesn’t matter.

Which is why they can be so cavalier about cutting thousands of “deplorable” jobs.

In other words, just as in 1860, we are seeing a battle develop over economics with “social justice” as the cover story.

Culture matters, but so does a job.

I discuss this new Economic Civil War in Episode 453 of The Brion McClanahan Show.


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