Perils of Democratic Factionalism: Equality Versus Freedom

Political factionalism and the violence it unleashes is hardly an unknown factor in Democratic or Republican life. Yet many presentist-minded Americans seldom give it a thought. But Democrats killed Socrates in factional strife, just as elite Roman conservatives killed their own populist cousins. (This is the first act of the “Roman Revolution,” which saw the murder of Tiberius Gracchus by his cousin Scipio Nasica. Less than a century later, Dictator Julius Caesar was assassinated.) Nineteenth century Americans

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did no less, whether they were nativist New York gangs or their “Know-Nothing” agitators. Factional strife murdered Germany’s first democracy, Weimar. Radical conservatives assassinated democrats like Matthias Erzberger and Walter Rathenau, igniting the Leftist/Communist vs. Rightist/Nazi conflict that destroyed a republic and dragged humanity into a holocaust that haunts our world still.

The forces behind these factional divides are many and complex. Wartime violence and post-war traumas feed on poverty and hunger, whether it be classical Athens or Weimar Germany. There are narrow-mindedness and ignorance, as in the case of the Know-Nothings and their lineal American descendants (QAnon), and more latent, subtle forces, including racism, are denied or ignored no less than the economic and political inequities that impel social conflict, division, and alienation.

How do we understand these developments? How can their specter be contained if not limited? Understanding is simpler than finding an agreement between solution and resolution. Yet life itself may offer a place to begin. As we deal with the ongoing struggle created by the coronavirus, we come across media reports telling us how the “virus” hunts down its victims, as if it was animate. Like war and violence, the coronavirus is an inanimate force. The crisis the American public faces combatting it emerges, to a degree, from within. It comes from the decisions we citizens make, whether it be individuals ignoring medical-scientific recommendations such as face masks and social distancing, or federal and/or state governments that do no less respectively, abdicating their raison d’être of providing for the Common Good.

The kind of political factionalism encountered by societies since the Greeks and inherited by Americans is like this too. Divisions and the violence they create come from within because society and culture are integrated. The former creates the other, which in turn inspires or nurtures and incites its creator, sometimes for good and sometimes not. As biologist Edward O. Wilson writes in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, “the undeniable truth is that each society creates culture and is created by it” (1998, passim and 141).

This provides the background to an understanding of the factionalism that has now thrown contemporary American democracy into rancorous turmoil. Is the storming of the Capitol a

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harbinger? There is lots of talk in our newspapers and media like the social network Parler and the streaming website Dlive (hopefully now defunct) that touts violence, especially on the Right and among the QAnon folks, the Proud Boys, and Michigan militias—opponents of the putative or imaginary “deep state” and advocates of Donald Trump’s politicized narcissism. In opposition, and perhaps not quite as extreme, is the amorphous Antifa, often appearing more than willing to swagger affecting menace and seeking to elevate political tension and discord.

Advocates of violence, whether militias or lone rangers, should step back. Talking about violence is easy, especially if you’ve never been face to face with it, never had to clean up after the ugly physical fallout, or the no less lingering psychological consequences. Those most experienced with violence, veterans, will tell you that you might not like the results very much if you survive. I’ll only allude to the impact of the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination on how reconciliation took the course that it did. In short, out of all the members of the American community, veterans, especially combat veterans, realize that violence is not the way to express opinions and differences.

Few of the veterans identified in the Wednesday storming of the Capitol, I suspect, actually spent much time “downrange,” that is, in the boonies getting shot at. In a pre-Iraq War forum at Loyola Marymount University, a student advocating war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was unwilling to put any skin in the game when pressed. My cousin, Jason Warren, a West Point educated and now retired Army officer, has heard of similar remarks from elite families, rejecting offers to attend West Point and preferring that their sons seek the advantages and prosperity an Ivy League education would bring. Service, military or public, was for, as the likes of Leona Helmsley and Donald Trump might put it, “the little people.”

What are the forces behind such attitudes? It would seem that there are ongoing issues in the public recognition of what actions constitute civil society, community values, and responsibility. These have always been part of American society, but some time ago sociologist Thomas Sowell called attention to how the public’s grasp of this issue was slipping. Today reaffirmation seems more essential than ever. As remarks attributed to Donald Trump make clear (standing before military graves, for example, saying, “I don’t get it—what was in it for them?”), this includes military service, but wider disdain for public service exists too. While the American

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public, as public polls like Gallup attest, regards highly those who serve in uniform, the All-Volunteer Force (AVF) not only undermines democratic values but also accommodates the policies of the “Forever Wars” waged by the United States of America these last 20 years. As attorney Steve Cohen explains in The Hill on the day of the Army-Navy game, Ivy Leaguers regard any form of public service, not to mention military service, as “OK for thee, but not for me” (“The Army-Navy Game may not be as important as the Academy-Ivy Contests”). Cohen notes the near absence of Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) numbers and graduates at Brown and Harvard. Most other “big-time” or well-known schools are not much different.

In truth, the AVF hardly represents a cross-section of American society. This is evident in my own community of West Los Angeles. Here a tent-city of homeless veterans crowd around the West Los Angeles Veterans Administration facility, sitting amid LA’s affluent “3Bs”—Bel Air, Beverly Hills, and Brentwood—communities not suffering a single death in Afghanistan and Iraq. Meanwhile, humble Clovis, California, and other communities like it have suffered multiple losses, both dead and wounded. This doesn’t include those suffering psychological wounds like Ian David Long, who shot up a bar in Thousand Oaks, California in November 2018, killing or critically wounding 30 people (just to be clear, several psychological issues plagued Long even in high school, as a track coach reported after the event). Is it possible—and this is not a defense—that some of the anger, discontent, and alienation that was seen on the steps of the Capitol on January 6^th stem from factors such as these?

Critics and skeptics of these observations might argue that there is no coercion, no one forcing young people from places like Clovis to join up. Really? This is a bogus argument and objection. Elite communities like the “3Bs” offer much in the way of education and preparation for life—decent, perhaps not great schools, parks, public libraries, and other amenities, not to mention livable if not profitable employment opportunities. Ready access to these in communities like Clovis is more difficult, to say the least.

In reality, it is even worse than this. It is no secret that in this COVID-19 era, less affluent kids have more challenges than elites facing them with schooling, especially access to the internet. For many of them, an even greater challenge is eating. For weeks now public media has reported on the food lines and food shortages

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across the country. Many of these are currently taking place in east and south-central Los Angeles County, areas now bearing the brunt of the coronavirus.

Such issues as these are the result of social-economic inequalities, and this is in Democratic-heavy Los Angeles County! On January 11^th, the LA County Department of Public Health reported on the “numerous inequities in our system, where low-income residents and people of color (i.e., Black and Hispanic) have higher risk of death” and followed up with, “In LA County, our current death rate in people living in the lowest resource areas is approximately 4 times higher than people living in the highest-resourced areas” (available at Public Health, “LA County Daily COVID-19 Data”). These include the just mentioned “3Bs.”

In reality, this is a familiar, notorious story well-known to area residents. California’s fifth-ranked world economy enables “West” LA health care to be far better than the rest of the city and county—after all, this is where the doctors, hospitals, and, most importantly, the money are to be found. Whether “Blue” like LA County or in “Red” states controlled by Republican-dominated legislatures, spending for the public welfare is driven by social-economic forces that place the “lowest resource areas” at the end of the line for the amenities taken for granted by the “highest-resourced areas.” In the debate over the “big” and “bad” government, it is curious that the political democratic opposition has missed telling the public, particularly regarding battling the coronavirus, that it is the “little” government that is, in effect, killing them.

In his 19^th century classic Democracy in America (1835), Alexis de Tocqueville touched on points that contributed to the forming of American society and culture. He made note of the triumph and passion for equality and how this took precedence over the notion of freedom. He might be surprised at how different this is today. Americans clamor for and revel in their freedom despite the many inequalities that surround them—in the access to health care, the dispensing of justice, and who goes to war or stays home and makes lots of money. The passion for equality that de Tocqueville perceived led him to suggest that this inspired a mutual understanding among American citizens: “everyone feels subject to the same weakness and to the same dangers; their concern as well as their sympathy prompts them to lend one another assistance when the need arises” (Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

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and Two Other Essays, Isaac Kramnick, ed., 2003, 583-587, 662). This mutual understanding and regard for equality are under assault in today’s American Democracy. Time will tell if Americans come to realize that freedom is poor compensation for the absence of equality, particularly if freedom is in the hands of only a few.

Some readers may find that some of the foregoing conveys unpleasant realities too frankly. But the state is confronted by even more fiery language and intolerance as a CNN analyst, who is a friend of mine, found in a response just this week to comments regarding impeachment: “name, name, name, you just wait you piece of shit… Traitors will be taken care of.” Before January 6, 2021, this might have been dismissed with a laugh. But now?

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