Wikidworld (#134) / Is the United States on the Brink of a Civil War? The Answer Lies with Tennessee's First Congressional District.
So will we go to war? The best and most honest answer to this question might be that we are already at war. The more pressing questions might be, how will we find our way to the peace?
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The Second Coming
William Butler Yeats
This newsletter is the third and final chapter of my effort to map the American Revolution to our current political moment. My question has been whether the United States might be on the brink of civil war and if the Revolutionary War might serve as a more appropriate analogy for understanding this possibility than the American Civil War.
In this newsletter, I’d like to try to answer that question by following my own recursive logic in the previous newsletters of this series, a logic that has itself been turning and turning in the narrowing gyre — from the 13 American colonies as a whole to the Southern colonies and then finally to Appalachia and East Tennessee.
Today, I’ll use the 1st Congressional District in Northeast Tennessee (TN-01) as my final resting spot, from which I’ll make the argument that this single district tells us nearly everything we need to know about the nation’s prospects for civil conflict. Let’s start with a bit of background.
Historians have long been aware of and pondered the culture of honor and violence that the Old South fostered prior to the American Revolution and has sustained to the present day. As Stacy Schiff chronicles in her biography of Samuel Adams, mob violence sometimes also flared up in northern port cities like Boston and New York. However, the higher literacy rates, population concentrations in urban settings, and greater social interdependence generally reduced isolation and conditioned restraint in private disputes.
By contrast, the southern plantation and frontier cultures normalized and glorified casual violence, reinforcing the notion that “wars between neighbors are apt to be next in bitterness to religious wars.” This helps explain the intensity of internecine Patriot-Loyalist conflicts in the South during the Revolution, epitomized by the carnage following the Battle of King’s Mountain.
In his acclaimed 1982 book, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South, Bertram Wyatt-Brown systematically examined the honor code derived from Celtic herding traditions brought to America by immigrants like the Scotch-Irish. According to Wyatt-Brown, the Southern honor culture valued pride, self-reliance, kinship, deference to social hierarchy, and local autonomy. Insults to personal reputation or to the patriarchal and race-based social hierarchy required scripted violent responses, which included dueling, caning and pistol-whipping, feuding, vigilantism, and lynching.
Wyatt-Brown emphasized that the Southern code of honor was at odds with the values of emerging industrial capitalism in the North prior to the Civil War, constraining the development of a more sophisticated moral sensibility and social conscience in the antebellum South, contributing to the perpetuation of slavery, retarding economic modernization, and hastening the slide into civil war in the 1850s.
Southerners themselves — in the antebellum era and today — have frequently invoked what they perceive to be the organic, medieval, pre-industrial foundations of this honor culture. I’ve written in Wikidworld about the patterns of casual, personal violence that characterized the Middle Ages in Europe, which Southern violence has echoed (to the extent that its litany of violent practices also included cutting off or mutilation of victim noses to spite their faces). The instinctual and reactive behavioral attributes of this honor culture continue to remain a point of pride among Southern conservatives.
At a deeper level, we can point out the recursion that characterizes these behavioral patterns and that is also characteristic of closed systems. Violence will simply beget more violence. The Southern honor code is indeed a pre-modern state of mind, although obviously one that “modernity” has not come close to effacing — leading us back to the proposition that modernity and pre-modernity are not times but places.
Both John Sevier and Isaac Shelby — the leaders of the Overmountain Men militia that routed the Loyalist soldiers in the 1780 Battle of King’s Mountain — hailed from the territory now covered by TN-01, which is indeed a land that time seems to have forgotten.
While both Sevier and Shelby were frontier revolutionaries who each owned dozens of slaves, slavery never rooted itself deeply in the rocky, mountainous soil of Northeast Tennessee, where cash crops like tobacco and hemp were produced mainly by small landholders rather than big plantations and did not rely heavily on slave labor.
The district was the home of the first exclusively abolitionist periodicals in the nation, The Manumission Intelligencer and The Emancipator, founded in Jonesborough in 1819 by the Quaker, Elihu Embree, who had married a granddaughter of John Sevier. Although the abolitionist paper was published in a slave state, The Emancipator achieved remarkable popularity. At the time of Embree's early death in 1820 it could boast of 2,000 paying subscribers, likely as large as that of any newspaper in either Tennessee or Kentucky.
In June 1861, nearly 70 percent of East Tennesseans voted against secession. When the remainder of the state voted overwhelmingly to secede, opponents in East Tennessee attempted to create a separate, pro-Union state called Franklin. Pro-Union guerilla bands operated in East Tennessee mountains, leading to violent clashes with Confederate occupiers.
TN-01 is one of the oldest congressional districts in the nation, dating from 1805. Republicans have held the district continuously since 1881. Trump-aligned pharmacist and businesswoman Diana Harshbarger was elected to the seat in 2020, running on a campaign emphasizing the opioid crisis, anti-choice abortion legislation, pro-choice education legislation, gun rights, religious freedom, and a foreign policy focused on threats from China and Iran. She successfully fended off challengers who had called attention to her husband’s 2013 criminal conviction and four-year prison sentence for fraud involving the sale of mislabeled pharmaceuticals from China.
Following the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, Harshbarger joined 139 other Republican House members who voted to sustain objections to the certification of the results of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, based on false claims of voter fraud. Harshbarger is also a close ally of rural North Georgia’s congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.
TN-01 is in many respects a microcosm of Tennessee, which is itself a microcosm of the South. Bordering — or nearly bordering — with ten states (Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, and Kentucky), Tennessee is representative of the region’s cultural identity as a whole.
Since the enfranchisement of Black voters following passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the South — and Tennessee — has ossified and hardened into a permanent political establishment of aggrieved reactionaries leaning into a rural, White, provincial, and fundamentalist base of voters. The South was always the South, but now it’s even moreso.
So let’s profile TN-01, on the assumption that any civil conflict on a regional or national scale would engage Americans mapping to this profile. TN-01 receives a Cook Partisan Voting Index rating of 30, which makes it the 3rd most conservative congressional district in the nation (out of 435 districts). Donald Trump received more than 76 percent of the vote in TN-01 in both 2016 and 2020, with Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden each hovering around 20 percent of the vote.
The district is 92 percent Non-Hispanic White, 3 percent Hispanic, and 2 percent Black. The heritage of the White residents remains largely Scotch-Irish. Like other parts of Appalachia, economic activity has historically centered on extractive industries — agriculture, mining, timber, and manufacturing. The region is distressed economically, with high rates of poverty, especially among children, where levels within the district range between 20-30 percent, nearly double the national average.
Tennessee has experienced high levels of net in-migration in recent years – largely into the state’s major cities, from neighboring border states, but also from Florida, California, and New York — ranking 4th among all states. By contrast, TN-01 has experienced significant net out-migration, leaving the region with an increasingly imperiled demographic profile and weakened tax base.
The district is socially and culturally extremely conservative, with high levels of church attendance and adherence to evangelical sects that are common in the Southern Bible Belt. Only 21 percent of adults possess a bachelor’s degree.
The district also includes high percentages of children born to single mothers, high rates of domestic violence, and a constellation of drug overdose levels, alcohol-related liver disease, suicides, and related mental health issues that indicate an above-average prevalence of deaths of despair and substance issues.
Nearly half of the households in the district report owning guns. While homicide levels are significantly lower than in Tennessee’s major cities, the district’s suicide rate of 18 per 100,000 residents is well above the national average and the average for the state as a whole. Guns are responsible for most of those suicides.
What can we conclude about the potential for more widespread civil conflict in the United States based on the threads of continuity between the culture and beliefs and behavior of this region of the Appalachian South during the American Revolution and in the 21st century? Here are some general thoughts.
The legacy of revolutionary zeal survives with the Republican Party base, but within a miasma of traditionalism and localism that is self-subverting. Online media and grassroots organizations such as Moms for Liberty can energize and organize the Republican base. But the vision of conservative “patriots” today is nostalgic, reactionary, backward-looking, and punitive, seeking to reanimate a world based on “traditional values” that never actually existed. It’s difficult to imagine meaningful pockets of active political resistance emerging from the most beaten-down and immiserated rural regions of the nation. Even Moms for Liberty appears to thrive mostly in more affluent, suburban Tennessee enclaves.
On the other hand, it’s important to appreciate that districts such as TN-01 represent raw material, something inert that can be activated. There is an enormous amount of this material in thousands of right-wing legislative and congressional districts spread across rural and exurban America. This is the material that the Democratic Party has for decades taken for granted or dismissed or ignored, only to learn in 2016 that it had fully slipped away from them. This is the new base of the Republican Party.
The Republican base mistrusts democratic institutions. It is susceptible to conspiratorial, apocalyptic (and Biblically infused) narratives of cultural deviance and decay associated with racial difference and is responsive to cults of personality, autocratic leadership, and calls to arms from above of the sort Trump issued on January 6, 2021 to his followers, whom he termed “great patriots.”
Seventeen-year old Kyle Rittenhouse, rushed across the Illinois border with an assault rifle to Kenosha, Wisconsin during Black Lives Matter protests of a police killing, is emblematic of this reactive version of “patriotism.” Rittenhouse’s stated goal was to protect small business in the city. He subsequently shot three men, killing two of them. Rittenhouse’s attorneys argued in court that he acted in self-defense. He was subsequently acquitted of all charges and has since become a right-wing celebrity.
Probably the most critical difference between the modern-day “patriot” movements associated with the Republican Party base and the patriots of the American Revolution is intellectual. Samuel Adams was both a tactician and a man of ideas. He planned systematically and proactively and managed always to stay several steps ahead of the royal governor in Massachusetts and the British crown.
Where one finds intellectual ferment and systematic planning of this sort on the political right today is not from within the schismatic, parochial, paranoid, and anti-intellectual traditions of Protestant evangelicals but from within the Natural Law traditions of the conservative wing of the Catholic Church, the legal machinations of conservative Christian public interest law firms, and the “post-liberal” adherents of the National Conservative movement.
An essential truth about the American Revolution is that, unlike the American Civil War, it was not a singular event. The American Revolution was many different regional and local revolutions, just as the Constitution itself was based on many different local and colonial and state constitutions. In the South, the revolutions were largely on behalf of slave-based plantation economies, nascent mining and timber industries, and territorial acquisition at the expense of native populations.
Over time, the more liberal and capitalistic versions of this revolution based in the Middle Atlantic and Northern states proved they could more readily scale and adapt to the imperatives of finance, mercantile, and industrial capitalism. As a result, they were able to absorb the Southern slaves states within relationships of colonial dependence.
The connection between the British Crown and Tory Loyalists in 1770 and to Democratic Party elites 250 years later is not so far-fetched as it may seem. Both regimes represent established administrative and imperial institutions and authority largely done in by entropy, propped up by tired ideals and captured by special interests, and perhaps overly given to procedural notions of the rule of law that appear increasingly to be devoid of substance and lacking in legitimacy. They have become victims of their own success, blinded by their own sense of entitlement.
The major questions facing establishment liberalism are whether it can reinvent itself politically and intellectually, where fresh leadership will emerge from, and what institutions can source fresh ideas for its invigoration. Elite academic institutions appear largely bankrupt and increasingly insufficient, if not irrelevant, for this task. So does Big Law. On the other hand, some millennials now in positions of authority such as Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan provide a models for this leadership. Khan is smart, tough, principled, visionary, and fearless, communicating with actions that speak louder than words.
Issues surrounding race relations also remain pressing. The psychological and cultural dimensions of our national agony are real and cannot be wished away by good intentions. The reactionary leadership of the Republican Party benefits politically by being emotionally (if not analytically) honest about these challenges — thrillingly so to its partisans — in ways that liberals and progressives are not. If the coalition of liberal and progressive factions within the Democratic Party doesn’t trust each other on matters concering “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” why should anyone else? We need a new model here, as well.
So will we go to war? The best and most honest answer to this question might be that we are already at war. The more pressing questions might be, how will we find our way to the peace? And how will we know what it looks like when we arrive?