The first Civil War happened because the belligerents believed that neither cultural nor political means could be sufficient to achieve their demands. One faction wished to preserve chattel slavery. The other wished to abolish it. There was no obvious way to comprise between preservation and abolition. An attempt at compromise was nevertheless made, but powerful forces rendered it moot.
Because of those forces, the nation had to endure a war that killed around 2 percent of its people. The bloodshed did result in the abolition of chattel slavery, but it did not end the cruel oppression of the former slaves and their descendants. Legal slavery was replaced by an economic, cultural, and political system that was only barely an improvement. The political part of that system was called Jim Crow, and it was not abolished until a century after the war's end.
Whether the oppression continues, or the degree to which it does, is debated, but there no reasonable doubt that its consequences are still with us. Race relations today in the United States are not what they would have been if slavery had been no part of our history.
They are also not what they would have been if Karl Marx had never become famous. While I must confess to having read hardly anything Marx himself wrote, the thinking of his intellectual descendants on the matter of power relationships in any modern society is clear enough. Whether Marx himself would have allied himself with modern Marxists or their progressive soulmates need not detain us here.
Marx opened the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto thus:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master(3) and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
This is an attractive thesis for anyone whose life is not what they wish it were: If I can't get what I want, it's because someone else who does have it won't let me have it.
This idea was not original with Marx, but it seems to have found a special resonance among intellectuals who saw some consequences of the Industrial Revolution that they disapproved of. The 19th century witnessed a great deal of the Enlightenment-induced progress that Steven Pinker identifies in The Better Angels of Our Nature, but as is always the case, the changes were neither uniformly distributed nor uniformly beneficial. Contrary to some of his critics, Pinker neither denies nor trivializes this, arguing only that humanity as a whole is better off now than ever before.
For some, it seems, the condition of humanity as a whole is beside the point as long as a few people are conspicuously better off than most others. To hear the usual rhetoric, one would think we have won the war on poverty. The problem apparently is no longer that some people don't have enough to live on, but that other people have so much more than enough. The enemy now is inequality, not poverty.
This perception is not good for our democracy. Even worse for our democracy is the perception that those with the most can maintain the inequality only by oppressing those who have less, by preventing them from getting any more than they already have.
So long as such ideas are prevalent among the citizenry, they foster a suspicion that there can be no peaceful solution to the problem. The suspicion will persist even if the problem is only imaginary, and sooner or later the people will act on it.
Next: On religion, faith, and public debate
(This page last updated on June 4, 2020.)