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Does Greene-AOC-Barlett Fight Presage Civil War?

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Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene takes a selfie with energy sector workers as the House passes the Lower Energy Costs Act. March 30, 2023. Photo courtesy of House Republicans.

Many Americans watched with horror last week as Representatives Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Jasmine Crockett burst into a raucous, name-calling argument during a session of the House Oversight Committee. At LewRockwell.com, Karen Kwiatkowski suggests this, and other signs point to the coming irrelevance of the Constitution and, potentially, to civil war. She writes:

In a recent article, Alistair Crooke quotes former Israeli diplomat Alon Pinkas, who observes that Israel is in early stages of a civil war between the secular, modern Israel and the “Jewish-supremacist, ultranationalist” theocratic Israel.  The vision of Israel cherished by each side is very different, and each side is increasingly unable to grant the other legitimacy of argument.

Israel was and remains held together by fear and hate of a common enemy.   This condition is predictable for any nation at war, so predictable it leads to widely-accepted revisionist history that suggests politicians will indeed predictably seek war to prevent internal political collapse.

The current MICIMATT [Ed. Note: From Urban Dictionary: Acronym for the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think Tank complex. The MICIMATT is an extension of the concept of the MIC (Military–industrial complex).] plans, outlines and demands a US-initiated war with Russia and China as the new normal.  Israel, to normalize itself as a Zionist “democracy,” requires constant and ultimately complete destruction of its non-Jewish neighbors and residents.  As national raison d’etre, living for war, which is to say, living for the state, is politically, economically and socially counterproductive.  To put it a different way, living for war, committing all you have to the health of the state, for most of us is a sure path to a Hobbesian life – solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

Crooke draws a parallel to the early stages of civil war in the United States, a popular topic today among mainstream and independent media alike. Today, governors, attorneys general and secretaries of state continue to find new ways to express their sovereignty within the federation.   Societal and economic divisions between urban and rural America continue to grow and a great many people – on both sides of this division – increasingly refuse to obey government authorities, not because they are rugged individualists, but because they simply feel that their government is illegitimate.

States are leading the way – often with power in mind, rather than liberty.  California and New York are interested in acquiring continued tax revenues from those who have left the state.  This is nothing if not an expression of state power, an assertion of “their” laws on “their” citizens.  Whether these laws will ultimately conflict with the 14th Amendment, or other parts of the Constitution is not clear, but one wonders if soon, the federal Constitution will even be viewed as relevant.

Thomas Kuhn explained in “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” that paradigm shifts in science seem to occur out of nowhere; they appear revolutionary. But he shows that the death of paradigms is always preceded by small, slow, heavily criticized challenges to the status quo, punctuated by persistent and generally ridiculed rejections of the status quo, on and on, until “the whole world suddenly” wakes up to the now “obvious” fact that the old paradigm was wrong, inappropriate, and scientifically irrelevant.  The US Constitution as a document “holding the country together” is on this very path to irrelevancy today.

The recent catfight in the US Congress’s House Oversight Committee is a case in point.  Incompetent senior leaders in identical suits look on helplessly as the ruling class’s epidemic of self-centered petulance explodes over fashion choices and culturally creative insults. It could have been any day in America over the past 220 years, resolved in a duel between ideologues and enemies, as in 1804. A nationally televised cage match might be more suitable today than pistols, but the state hasn’t come very far, after all.

There is more disagreement in Congress about manners, fashion sense, and comportment than there is about philosophy of the state, the true nature of our republic, and the proper role of debt-funded warfare. The Greene-AOC-Crockett incident does give us a glimpse of the very real and calcified contempt felt by urban and rural districts for each other, and between politicized divisions within those congressional districts.

Instead of a duel over what Hamilton said about Burr, or the what Greene and Crockett said about each other, we may find far more is at stake.  Most Americans instinctively understand the decrepit and discredited House and Senate – what they see is a United States deep in late-stage unravelment.  Secessionary expression, and new paradigms of decentralization are within view, and palpable.

The only factors that unite Congress today are the Israel lobby and the defense industry – both of which peaked in performance well over 30 years ago, and became endemically lazy. Intellectually lazy, in choosing to label any and all critics as anti-Semitic or anti-American, rather than debate or defend; Physically lazy in focusing on short-term profits via expensive and unreliable offensive systems, and elimination of policy competition through targeted and corrupt lobbying of Congress and the state bureaucracy to achieve policy goals.

Read more here.

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Richard C. Young
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