The U.S. Cold Civil War

In her book, "Shut Up and Sing," radio talk show host Laura Ingraham devotes a chapter to analyzing how the present situation has come about where the elites in the media, the universities, the business world, and the entertainment world are bashing the conservative values held by ordinary Americans and undermining the liberal democratic traditions of the country that are founded in the Constitution. In the chapter called "When It All Started to Go South," Ingraham describes this cultural and political struggle between liberals and conservatives and suggests its historical roots. Ingraham writes:

"To elites, the South, like the Midwest or anywhere in Middle America, is as distant as the moon. William Faulkner captured this attitude perfectly in Absalom, Absalom!(which was published in 1936 but is set mostly in the nineteenth century), when Canadian Shreve McCannon quizzes his Mississipian roommate about Southern life. 'Tell about the South. What's it like there,' he asks. 'What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.' As I said, this stereotyping of the South goes back a long way."

Ms. Ingraham suggests that this antagonism between the left and the right goes back to the Civil War. That insight seems plausible. Having won the Civil War, it appears that the North has evolved into a cultural elite which has assumed its own superiority over the South and attempts to lord it over the values espoused in the South, values which include the deeply held moral and religious values which ordinary Americans hold to today.

This self-proclaimed superiority typical of elites was seen in the last elections after elite candidate John Kerry lost to George W. Bush. The "blue" state spokesmen boasted of the economic wealth of the cities and lamented the fact that the "backward" "red" states had so much influence in the elections. The U.S. Civil War essentially congealed into a cold war between the liberal elite and religious conservatives. This is a mirror of the conflicts in international relations where the liberal elite continues to align itself with Marxists-Leninists, and lately, with Islamofascists.