Let’s first address the obvious and burning question. Whom does the movie blame for war? That’s another way of asking, what is the political bias?
The brilliant thing about the film is that none of this matters. What it shows is a reality of war itself, in which the only issues are power and control. Nearly everyone in the film is merely doing their jobs, from the military commanders and the enlisted to the press secretary and the president himself.
This is a profound point and the most powerful point of all. None of the obvious questions are answered or asked, but it is engaging at the most granular level, told through the experiences of wartime photojournalists. If anything in the film is idealized, it is the role of journalists, who are valorized like it is still 50 years ago. But we can forgive that.
People say, “Oh, this is not realistic because in the film, Texas and California are in a coalition to regain control of Washington.” Actually, this makes the point: War consists of everything except that which seems to matter in an ideological sense. Texas and California are the most powerful states and the ones that can most imagine their own independence, so it is not crazy at all.
We can imagine a situation in which they would both secede but for different reasons, and join together in a partnership to resist the federal government. Politics makes strange bedfellows, and so does war.
In any case, the film is not about politics except in the overarching sense. It’s about power by force and who will win the great struggle, and all the horrible carnage that unfolds solely because of the decision to fight.
So I would say, yes, see this movie. It is more descriptive than cautionary, which makes it all the more alarming.
One chilling aspect of the film concerns the way in which normal life goes on in small towns in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The traveling film crew reminds people that there is a brutal civil war going on but that the merchants and residents can’t be bothered with it and don’t want to know the details. It’s a reminder that this is a huge country and vast numbers don’t care at all about national politics. The merchants in particular just want to stay out of it.
Is this good or bad? It’s hard to say, but it has always been so, and it is so now. The combatants are those who are engaged and have a stake in the outcome. Most everyone else is just interested in staying safe and detached, understandably. This, too, seemed realistic. We see it in our own time with the stock market that keeps rewarding pharmaceutical companies regardless of the human damage they have done and are doing.
Commentators have noted that the president in the film has Trump-like qualities. He speaks in wild hyperbole. In passing, there is a mention that in his third term, he has abolished the FBI. I could have done without those winks and nods, but I know why they are there. They confound the usual critics who would decry the film as a stalking horse for alt-right fantasies. If the president is hinted at being Trump-like, the symbol and TDS-ridden left has a brain explosion.
My overall comments are incredibly obvious, but I offer them because I don’t see anyone else pointing this out. Civil war in general is about who or what will control the center. If there is no center, there is no war. That’s always been true. Growing the central state increases the stakes in dangerous ways, regardless of who is struggling and who wins. Rulers set people against each other, centralized rulers even more so.
The founders established a decentralized Republic that allowed most if not nearly all important political decisions and impositions to be taken at the level of the states. This comes from the experience during the Colonial period. Each colony had a different policy, ethos, religion, economic structure, and set of leaders. The only remaining problem, as they saw it, was the King of England, who was trying to rule all with an iron fist in the interest of collecting as much revenue as possible.
The priority of 1776 was ending that problem. Once done, the colonies put together Articles of Confederation that preserved local control. It established no national government at all. That lasted for many years until the Constitution replaced it but still with a huge deference to the states.
Crucially, the U.S. Congress in the Constitution was bicameral. The House represented the people by vote, but the Senate was to represent the whole state by appointment of the legislatures of the states. In a catastrophic move in 1913, the 17th Amendment was ratified to allow direct election of the Senate, thereby distorting the entire institution. Now, the Senate represents the interests of the big cities, not the states.
In the ensuing 100 years, thanks also to the income tax and the Federal Reserve, power became more and more centralized in Washington. This tendency is utterly contrary to the whole idea of America. Lord Acton wrote that the decentralized federal structure was the number one contribution that the experiment in the United States presented to world understanding. It was its unique feature and what guaranteed freedom. With that gone, we are left with an older form of despotism like that of Rome and other empires.
The founders were so deferential to the idea of states’ rights that they permitted the continuation of slavery, which was a disaster that eventually led to our own Civil War. After that, however, the United States reset and preserved the original structure, which in postbellum times led to the greatest boom in prosperity and technology seen until that point in history.
Do we have the makings of another today? The great thing about this movie is that it helps us to imagine the possibility and warn against it. But what is the way out? It is not for one faction to win all and force everyone and everything into compliance. That seems to be the path we are on today. It is not going to work. The only real path to peace is to discover the founders’ wisdom and decentralize all things.
Actually, the real situation is even worse than what the movie suggests. The sovereignty of the American nation itself is right now being tested with a treaty at the World Health Organization that seems to obligate the United States to do another pandemic mitigation exercise of the same catastrophic sort pursued in 2020 and following. That’s only the beginning: The centralization of finance, health, energy policy, and other regulations is proceeding apace.
The whole idea of centralization of power is based on a wicked fantasy of obtaining full population-wide agreement on issues on which we cannot and will not ever agree. The attempt alone will always and everywhere produce dystopia and disaster. Why we even have to point that out at this stage is preposterous, but there it is. The desire for power and money is so strong in the human personality that not even the settled wisdom of the ages can overcome it.
I wish to congratulate the makers of this brave film. Maybe having a serious and sane national conversation about where we are headed is one way to stop this trajectory. If we do not, our descendants are going to look back at this generation with utter disdain and condemnation for allowing this to happen.
The first Civil War might have been avoided with moral clarity and some kind of peaceful negotiated settlement, just as happened in the UK in the 19th century. We should have done the same. We have the opportunity now to stop the next one by rediscovering the original U.S. Constitution and its purposes. But instead of doing that, we see mainstream media denouncing it and trashing it even more. That’s a very bad sign.
