A good place to begin this thread is Jeet Heer’s essay, about which I don’t have much to add, except to amplify this point: an actual civil war between states is incredibly unlikely, despite what Anton suggests. What Anton’s essay does — much like his no-good, awful, terrible Flight 93 Election essay — is to amplify the sense of crisis and intensify the discourse of white grievance among the MAGAs. In other words: I would recommend reading both of these Anton pieces, if you want to get a sense of the apocalyptic sensibility that animates his work and agitates his readers. At the same time, it’s profoundly important to acknowledge that this kind of work is irresponsible: what it will do, like the Turner Diaries and other works of its kind have done in the past, is inspire groups or individuals to engage in acts of white supremacist terror. Jeet Heer makes this point. I agree with it.
When I was in graduate school, maybe even in my first year, one of my professors started the term with a brief exhortation to responsibility in our work as teachers and scholars. He read a quote — from Keynes, I think it was — about the power of ideas, the notion that they have consequences that ramify well beyond our awareness or intention. His intention, as a prominent liberal thinker, was to tamp-down the enthusiasm that some of us felt, the Bakuninian appetite for destruction as a creative activity, the radical sense of both dissatisfaction and hope for redemption.1 In short, I didn’t like the sermon, but it stuck with me as a kind of superego command when I feel the inclination to rant in the classroom, or go on a tirade in a piece of writing.
One gets the sense that Anton’s teachers never gave the sermon. In fact, looking back, it would seem that the West Coast Straussians are one of the key origins of the right-wing histrionics that have become so commonplace to our political world. What started out as a rhetorical pose, a stylistic inclination, has now filtered into the discourse through two influential essays that: 1) compare the Clinton election to the attacks of 9/11, and now 2) tout the possibility of civil war in contemporary America, even going so far as to pick a winner (it’s Texas, if you haven’t guessed).
I hope I am not channeling Keynes when I say that there are no winners in this kind of game, that writers like Anton need to take a step back and chill the fuck out.
In fact, one of my friends in that seminar, Joel Olson, often wore a t-shirt with a Bakunin quote on the back, something about destruction being a creative act. And btw: Bakuninian anarchy isn’t the same as Schumpeter’s “creative destruction;” don’t get it twisted ;)