A DEIsease in the Public Mind

A Diagnosis

Thomas Fleming’s 2013 revisionist history, A Disease in The Public Mind, is a must read for anyone seeking to understand how the American Civil War happened. The title comes from a line from a speech by President James Buchanan in reaction to the John Brown raid on Harper’s Ferry, the idea being that abolitionist sentiment amounted to a kind of mental disorder, a paranoid mania, a fanaticism that pushed otherwise reasonable people to demonize their countrymen to the point of murder and treason. This wasn’t to say that Buchanan, a Pennsylvanian, liked slavery. Rather, he, like most Americans of his age- like Lincoln- saw it as a lesser evil compared to disunion and the potential for war. But a vocal minority, committed to a religiously-inspired vision of themselves as an elect, anointed by God to redeem the world in blood to realize their more perfect vision, saw no human obstacle as too great to stand it its way. This minority is still with us today.

They were there at the inception of America, shivering on the beaches of Massachusetts Bay, an ocean to their East and a dark wilderness to their west. But they had no fear, because what united them was a deeply-rooted sense of spiritual purpose. They knew that God had sent them there to conquer, and that like Saul fighting the Amalekites, this would involve a total commitment with maximum violent energy. They carved out cities in that wilderness and prospered. They fought the natives and destroyed them. They looked askance at their neighbors to the south, who lacked their vision and their fervor. They faced adversity, attempts to control them on the part of the lukewarm temporizers of the Church of England and its king. They dealt with malcontents and saboteurs with maximum severity. They, largely, gave us liberalism.

But their biggest weakness was always one another. Convinced of both God’s perfect justice and his utter unknowability, they searched for signs of his favor. Theological disputes were necessarily political disputes and led them to hive off from one another into tiny settlements that one day became tiny states. Theodicy became the dominant heuristic; God’s love was manifest in prosperity, and they did enjoy his abundance. This was so much so that the disputes began to fade. A driven and educated people, they embraced philosophies from Europe that critiqued the Bible and taught that truth came from within. This made possible a culture of theological tolerance and quietude. It also made it possible for them to climb to the heights of power in the new country. But such developments did nothing to temper their sense of cosmic purpose. History, not God, now took sides between the righteous and the damned. Progress was the new creed, and tradition was the devil. And standing in the way of that fully realized progress ordained by the providence of history were those people still benighted enough to cling to their old ways- The Catholic New World Empires, the Indians, and all of the enemies of the American Empire right up to the benighted Russians who long for progress as much as the people of Iraq and Afghanistan surely did.

They liberated the crap out of this guy.

Now all of those other enemies of the regime, up until the later Cold War, were soundly defeated, and in a gesture of good imperial manners, forgiven. The Empire has nothing against Japan or Germany, or even Vietnam where things didn’t go so well. But there is one enemy that still inspires terror, one that, no matter how thoroughly defeated on the battlefield still plagues their nightmares. And it’s easy to see why. For that enemy- the South and its erstwhile government, the Confederate States of America- was the only one that formed an actual, existential threat, not merely to its political forms, but to its self-conception as the America that was chosen by history. The South is a might-have-been America, the ghost that haunts them, its rattling chains a reminder that their power is not and was never so certain as they pretend.

This investigation probably cost the DoD $21 million dollars, and it’s not what I mean. Metaphors, people…

Fleming’s book is above all a psychological study, a case history of a people consumed with a sense of persecution and wrath, who come to see their fellow citizens as depersonalized manifestations of regression that needed to be excised from the public. As viruses replicate themselves in certain organs, so too did this disease perpetuate itself memetically, in their Churches (when they still attended them), in schools and universities, and in the media. It spread everywhere, into places previously untouched by the plague- into sports, the military, and even video games. Like all illnesses, this disease mutated over time, becoming endemic. It retained its characteristics as a mania, but now took on aspects of an autoimmune disorder, a kind of AIDS of the soul. Progress fully realized is an utterly fanatical and comprehensive hatred of all manifestations of regress, to include the self and its connections with the past and the formative aspects of one’s culture. Were it a plant disease, it would manifest as a tree with branches growing downward so as to pull up its own roots. And in America, nothing so says “regressive past” like any instantiation of the South or its culture.

Witness this article from the Philadelphia Inquirer, written in response to the decision by Governor Greg Abbott of Texas to defy the federal government and continue to enforce immigration laws the latter refuses to implement despite its statutory responsibility to do so:

…Abbott — channeling the Confederate spirit of Gen. Shelby, who must be looking up from his fiery repose and smiling — won’t back down. Adopting the narrowest possible interpretation of the high court’s ruling, the Texas governor is not only not surrendering Shelby Park, but is putting even more razor wire up along the river at the site of frequent refugee crossings. On Tuesday, he posted photos on X/Twitter of a fortified river bank that looks like East Berlin in 1961 and declared, “The Texas National Guard is holding the line in Eagle Pass. Texas will not back down ...”

With a rebel yell, Abbott doubled down on Wednesday in a letter that accused Biden as the one who is violating immigration law with his border policies, as America struggles to cope with a long-running surge in refugees who are mostly fleeing gang violence, political repression, poverty, or a climate-induced drought in Central America. The governor, whose border bravado has cost Texas taxpayers an astronomical $10 billion, insists Texas has a constitutional right to protect itself from an “invasion,” pretending that desperate mothers and kids are instead the second coming of Pancho Villa.

Ignoring the giant pile of lies on which this piece rests (like the implication that these illegal immigrants are “desperate mothers and kids” rather than military-aged men), note the characterization of Abbott and his supporters, rather than the actual foreigners, as the “other.” The threat to America as author Will Bunch understands it is not the millions of illegal aliens swarming into America’s cities unbidden, but the people trying to stop it, because the latter bear the signifiers of the true enemy of the class Bunch represents.

Behind the scenes, not everyone is insane.

The bundling of hatreds here make perfect sense once one understands the nature of Bunch’s psychology. Somewhere in his mind a statistic is dancing around, the 600,000 plus people who died the last time someone threw up the banner of rebellion (actually more like 850,000, but I’ll guessing he learned the old number. The history books were full of proclamations that the South was always going to lose (even Rhett Butler was blackilled) but the examples of the American Revolution and all of the America’s latter-day colonial adventures have demonstrated that having the F-16s or their old-timey equivalent is no guarantee of victory. He knows in his heart that the regime for which he toadies was a very dearly-won thing, that it could have gone differently a hundred different times, and in his darkest places he knows that were it to happen again nothing of the world he knows and loves, the world of progress, would be certain to survive. He lives in terror of that old spirit, of that Americaness built not on creed but on culture, on shared heritage rather than a theological commitment to progressivism. He attacks its statues, its religion, its history, its notions of family and tradition and above all its memories. But he suspects, deep down, that it isn’t working. It terrifies him. It terrifies all of them.

This man got three years in prison for carrying a flag. The lawyers who firebombed a police car for BLM got 15 months on a charge that normally carries ten years.

Bunch demands the regime suppress this act of lèse-majesté. His mania blinds him to the implications. Does he want the Democrat president, in an election year, forcibly opening the border at the hands of the US military? Does he want Trump elected, imperiling all the abortion and street crime and the actual open border that he feels are essential to American life? That would be the almost certain practical result of what he is advocating here, and it may be the result even if the regime does nothing. For all of the talk about MAGA being a bastion of whiteness (as if that’s bad) Trump’s rhetorical support for immigration controls has only resulted in greater support among minorities.

The truth is that this really is what he wants. He doesn’t care about winning or losing elections any more than Thoreau cared about the implications of the John Brown raid when he compared his execution to Christ dying for our sins. When one understands that the outlook of our elites is informed to a large degree by a political form of mental illness, a lot starts to make sense. Consider the push for diversity, equity, and inclusion to the point that airplanes are falling apart and no one can put out a fire on a Navy ship, to the point that Harvard humiliates itself elevating a non-entity to president who can’t even write her own meaningless papers. Consider the War in Ukraine- all the recent wars really- where they are pitched as existential for the continuity of our way of life at the same time our way of life is relentlessly denigrated- you stupid rednecks need to fight in foreign lands to preserve the democracy of your racist, evil country! They make movies no one will watch, books, no one will read, and music no one will listen to. They destroyed a brand of beer that practically sold itself in the interest of feeding the bizarre fetish of a man who thinks he’s Audrey Hepburn.

If this were simply limited to business decisions or expensive state idiocy, one could laugh about it to a degree. But it must be remembered that if you are on this side of things, any kind of normiecon, dissident rightist, or worst of all a cultural Southerner, the regime violently hates you. They want a war. They want to unleash the power of the state on people they view as others. You’re the rebel; you’re the one in need of some “Reconstruction.” In their view, all Trump supporters are guilty of the “insurrection” of January 6th, and all need to be punished. Abbott in Texas is just the latest manifestation of this.

Remember that a key thesis of the leading contemporary Civil War Historian Eric Foner, a lifelong communist, was that the last Reconstruction didn’t go far enough. He’s the dean of the field, and his view informs those of our elite. In their collective imagination prescriptive politics is the means through which the purging of evil from American society will take place. But at the same time their inability to escape the effects of their fanaticism and hatred mean that they spin their wheels in fruitless efforts that (temporarily) comfort them psychologically but result in nothing but frustration on their part and elector failure when the opportunity to repudiate them arises. But as I’ve said before, they are relentless. Prepare accordingly.

Every person posting this meme would denounce this man as a genocidal, patriarchal racist if they met him in real life, because they’re insane.