American Civil War?
TALKING POLITICS
Catherine Carr
4.7 • 2.5K Ratings
🗓️ 20 January 2022
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
One year on from Joe Biden’s inauguration David and Helen talk with Gary Gerstle about what’s gone wrong. What is the strategy behind this presidency? Has it tried to do too much or too little? And are the dark warnings of another American civil war really plausible? Plus we discuss whether the original American Civil War should really be used as the template for political breakdown.
Talking Points:
It’s hard to be a transformational president when your congressional margin is as slim as Biden’s is.
- Are critics being too harsh? Unemployment is down, the pandemic recovery was quicker than anticipated, and there is a broader renegotiation of work conditions for lower-paid workers. But these are not the seismic shifts many hoped for.
- Biden may want to be a transformational president, but the conditions do not suit transformational politics.
- Did an overreading of Trump’s incompetence on the pandemic inflate expectations of Biden?
What would Biden’s presidency look like if Democrats did not have a majority in the Senate?
- The unexpected victories in Georgia have also led to heightened scrutiny of the holdout Democrats, Sinema and Manchin. Republican senators seem to be getting a free pass.
Are fears about a looming American civil war overblown?
- What do we mean by civil war? The idea of the federal government fighting a group of secessionist states seems inconceivable.
- The notion of factions vying for control over the center is somewhat more plausible.
- The American Civil War was not just about tribalism or ideology. There were incompatible political economic systems.
- The very fact that the United States has had a Civil War, however, is still part of American politics. As T.S. Eliot said, ‘Serious civil wars never come to an end.’
- Will the burgeoning discourse around illegitimate election results actually translate into more overt political violence in the future?
Mentioned in this Episode:
- Biden’s recent speech on voting rights
- Barbara Walter’s book, How Civil Wars Start
- Gary’s forthcoming book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order
Further Learning:
- Is Civil War coming to America?
- More on Merrick Garland’s investigation
- Eric Foner for the LRB on the electoral college
And as ever, recommended reading curated by our friends at the LRB can be found here: lrb.co.uk/talking
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, my name's David Rumsman and this is Talking Politics. Today we're going back to the United States. |
| 0:10.9 | We're joined by Gary Girstle, who is there, Helen Thompson, and myself are going to talk about Biden one year on, but also, are we really approaching another civil war? |
| 0:23.7 | Talking Politics is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books, |
| 0:28.1 | Europe's leading review of culture and ideas. |
| 0:31.9 | And the LLB is returning to first principles |
| 0:34.2 | with their latest exclusive offer for Talking Politics listeners. 12 issues of the magazine for just £12 and they'll also send you one of their surprisingly famous tote bags acclaimed by the likes of New York Magazine and Vice. Just use the URL my lrb.combecom.com.uk slash talking bag. That's mylrb.com.com.uk slash talking bag. |
| 1:17.2 | Gary, we haven't caught up with you for a while, and also we haven't actually talked about American politics for a while, but we have talked about American politics a lot with you |
| 1:22.0 | over the past few years. And we talked quite a lot during and after Biden's inauguration about his prospects. This podcast |
| 1:30.8 | is going out exactly a year to the day after that inauguration. So we're one year in. One of the |
| 1:36.1 | things that you said that always stayed with me was that some democratic presidents who are |
| 1:41.9 | essentially in the center of American politics get pulled left by their party |
| 1:46.6 | when in office. And FDR is the classic example of that. And that there was a serious possibility |
| 1:52.5 | that this would be, I'm not going to say Biden's fate, but also his opportunity. And some of that |
| 1:57.7 | seems to have come to pass. Joe Biden has in some sense been pulled left, but it's not going very well. I mean, if that was a template for getting things done, certainly recently it feels like a template for not getting things done. Is that because this is actually a very different pattern or model? Or do you even want to say that it is still going the way you thought it might? |
| 2:18.2 | The model is working, at least in its initial stages. Biden definitely moved left. There is a left |
| 2:25.4 | in the Democratic Party of a sort that has not existed, at least since the 1960s and perhaps |
| 2:31.7 | since the 1930s and 40s. They have had a lot of influence in the party. |
| 2:37.3 | And Biden made a decision when he thought he needed to become a transformational president |
| 2:43.9 | a la FDR to bring the left into his administration, to think big, to think boldly. |
| 2:51.6 | It was always going to be a difficult road for him. |
| 2:54.6 | We have to keep in mind the very radically different circumstances |
| 2:58.6 | under which he's operating from what Roosevelt operated under in the 1930s. |
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