Un-ominous Parallels?

We are now in the fourth year of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War. Unlike the centennial in the early 1960’s, the sesquicentennial has gone largely unmentioned in the traditional media. I think there are several reasons for this. The most obvious is simple ignorance. There are many in the media who do not know or understand much history.  Beyond that, attitudes and prejudices common among people in  the media preclude a sense or appreciation of the idea of an epic struggle.  Then too the fact of a war where hundreds of thousands white Americans fought and died to free black slaves runs counter to the official  political myth of unrelenting and exceptionless evil behavior  of whites toward blacks at all times before 1964. Also, for some on the left,  reflecting on the outcome of  Civil War would produce mixed feeling  because besides freeing the slaves, it preserved the nation they hate most in the world.   

Of course many of us think about the war, and Lincoln, and Grant and Sherman and Lee and the rest. I have lately thought and written about the divisions in the country in the years leading up to the Civil War and some similarities between that time and ours.

Recently I noticed something  I had not thought of before. In the years before  the Civil War, many Southern slave holders underestimated the abolitionists, dismissing them as a fringe group funded by a few wealthy troublemakers  and excited by a passionate novel written by an opinionated woman.  They misjudged the strength, growth, and appeal of the movement and ideas opposing them until the rise of Lincoln and the Republicans made it obvious.  Replace some New England merchants with people like the Koch brothers and Harriet Beecher Stowe with Ayn Rand, and you would be pretty close  to the attitude of the American statist establishment toward the libertarian and anti-establishment agitation of the present time. We can hope that they too are missing something, that the parallelism holds,  the leftists continue to underestimate us, and  our ideas have a similar influence, though of course without a civil war. Seemingly stranger things have happened. In the early 1980’s few would have expected the Soviet Empire to collapse within ten years.  Perhaps we can see a new birth of freedom in this country. We surely need to try to get one.