Alex Garland’s just released movie, Civil War, about a modern American civil war to unseat a Trump-like authoritarian president in the name of restoring democracy, is portraying an armed uprising that won’t happen today. The possibility of such a military rebellion ended 159 years ago when General Lee surrendered the Confederate Army at the Appomattox Court House in 1865.
Garland misses the point that Americans are fighting a different kind of civil war today as ugly and brutal in many ways but has morphed into an ongoing political and economic competition waged between red and blue states. There are still many casualties, however.
I had been writing about an ongoing civil war since 2013 when a contributing writer for Huffington Post. It caught the attention of Al-Jazeera-America, who interviewed me at the time for an article on the ideological war between Democrats and Republicans during the Obama Presidency.
I said then “…It (the Civil War) was about such men attempting to preserve slavery and state rights. Today, it is about not giving more rights to minorities and the poor.”
The ruling elites of the red states are mostly Republicans wanting to preserve their wealth with lower taxes and less federal government intervention. They want little or nothing to do with expanding such government programs as Obamacare. And the ultra-conservative Tea Party was formed to lead their movement.
A NYTimes 2010 poll had found18 percent of Americans who identify themselves as Tea Party supporters tend to be Republican, white, male, married and older than 45.
It was easy to see why the Tea Party was powerful at the time. Obama’s election in 2008 had reawakened the racism of the old south that was part of an economic apartheid system between the Haves and Have-nots remaining after the abolishment of slavery.
"You're here because now is the single best time we have to defund Obamacare," declared Senator Cruz, one of the Tea Party leaders in 2013. "This is a fight we can win." It didn’t happen, of course, because of a Republican Senator from Arizona after more than 30 attempts by Republicans to defund it.
But it has been conservatives’ battle cry ever since that has caused a tremendous economic toll on the red states, whose poverty levels remain much higher than in the coastal blue states; a distant echo of the carnage that ended 159 years ago.
Why is there another movie about an actual civil war? Maybe it’s because a former president and his supporters keep threatening to wage a new civil war, which might have happened if said former president had succeeded in stopping the Electoral College vote on January 6, 2021.
A better take on today’s uncivil, civil war are films about protests happening today, like an antiwar movie by docu-drama filmmaker Peter Watkins. It was a 1971 movie made during the Vietnam War I happened to be involved in called Punishment Park.
Peter Watkins, an English film director already acclaimed for The War Game, a movie about the devastating effect of a nuclear bomb attack on London, used a dry lake in California as the movie setting for a concentration camp to house those arrested for protesting the Vietnam War, because regular prisons were already overflowing with anti-war protestors.
The movie posited that President Nixon had decreed a State of Emergency under a little-known internal security act from the 1950s to tamp down opposition to the Vietnam War.
A kangaroo court made up of local citizens was set up to try those arrested. The convicted are then given the choice—a chance to escape across the desert without being recaptured for three days without food and water while being pursued by the National Guard, after which they would be released if they survived.
And Watkins added a European news crew in the mix to film the events within the film, highlighting the hostilities and brutality on both sides of the protests.
It bombed at the box office. But I heard it was more popular in Europe, where Peter Watkins was better known.
Why the continuing civil war between red and blue states? There are so many reasons. One can start with the innate tension between states’ rights and the federal government’s role in preserving universal rights that was baked into the constitution.
The constitutional debate then was between northern Federalists led by John Adams that wanted a strong central government, and southern states righters led by Thomas Jefferson, who by some miracle were able to agree on our constitution.
The only casualty at the time was the death of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton from a duel with Vice President Aaron Burr.
In the name of lower taxes for the wealthiest and fewer government benefits for the less wealthy, red states have the same issues today, including the racial apartheid of blacks and minorities who receive much less of the economic pie in those states.
What happened on January 6 was a close call, of course, and maybe Garland was right to visualize a possible military outcome had the former president succeeded in stopping the Electoral College vote.
But the center held, as the saying goes, there has not been another civil war, because of our legal system, the third leg of government that provided the needed checks and balances.
Maybe the best description of what has preserved our democracy was President Lincoln’s reputed quote in the Lincoln Douglas debates of 1858: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”
It is the best description of why citizens of democratic countries have a voice. The upcoming presidential election will be a test of how many citizens can be fooled, and whether we remain a democracy.
Harlan Green © 2024
Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
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