Vox Popoli

As the prospects for actual conflict grow, more and more right-wingers are beginning to realize that conservatives cannot be relied upon to fight for anything:

Would conservatives achieve an easy victory against the left if it came down to civil war?  The question seems less absurd by the day as tensions increase between the right and left.  Many conservative writers seem to think the left would fold quickly and the right would triumph. One has good reason to doubt that.  Consider basic issues like political bias in universities, or religious integrity.  After decades of exposés and outcries from conservatives over liberal tyranny, universities are as biased as they ever were….

I am nowhere near as confident as Kurt Schlichter that the right wing could trounce the left wing in battle.  We can’t even unite to keep Alex Jones on Facebook.  It is true that conservatives have more guns and are probably better street fighters.  But conservatives also cave in large numbers even when their most sacred cows are in danger – such as the First Amendment or Christian principles.  The two latter issues sit at the core of academic bias and debates on sexuality, respectively.  I have the war wounds from both battles and can attest to the repeating scenario: conservatives talk and talk about what they believe and how bad the left is.  Then they give up droves when it comes time to fight.

Take the question of defending the gospel.  We hear constant sermons from Christian preachers that speak of standing by God’s word even in the face of popular criticism.  In anticipation of the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting, I spent months searching for people be willing to sign on to a resolution affirming Christian sexual ethics and supporting churches’ rights to offer counseling in defiance of laws like California’s “stay gay” bill.  Almost sixteen million Americans claim to be Southern Baptists.  I could not find a single person willing to back the resolution.  When I submitted it under my own name, it was killed in committee and never brought to the floor.

If you look at the history of ideologically-based civil wars, the odds most certainly do not favor the more conservative sides. The Spanish Civil War was one of the few in which the socialists were ultimately defeated, and yet, neither Franco nor the Phalange were ever embraced by the Right throughout the West.

I’ve been reading James Burnham’s Suicide of the West, and one of the things that is particularly shocking is his 39-question poll which divides the conservatives of 1965 from liberal-progressives. I’ll post it later today, as it shows very clearly that today’s conservatives are yesterday’s progressives.

From the transcript of the Darkstream:

I’m going to talk about Civil War 2.0 and I’m going to talk about the book Ages of Discord by Peter Turchin and what it has to do with the situation that the United States is presently facing. Now this is not a book that I would recommend to everyone, although it’s an important book, unless you’re someone who regularly reads history for fun, unless you’ve got an IQ in the 120 and up range,  this isn’t going to be the book for you. It’s an academic book it’s written in a very academic research style. The author, Peter Turchin, is very intelligent, but he is also very caught up in the mainstream narrative and so you need to be aware of that and not get too carried away by it. You know, not take it as gospel truth.

The way that it’s interesting, what’s interesting about it,  is that it gives you some new tools with which you can analyze the current situation. The thing that I thought was particularly striking about it, and what I’d liked about it, is that Turchin makes a real effort to put things in a proper historical context. He doesn’t just come up with a thesis and apply it solely, or even primarily, to the situation right now, but he also applies it to other historical situations. I believe he had a recent blog post, the one that I linked to today, where he talks about how he applied his calculations to thirty different historical situations, and that is taking a really intelligent approach to it. Instead of just saying, “well I think X is going to happen” and taking shots in the dark, what he did was he looked at the thirty historical situations and then measured their outcomes, and what he came up with should be disturbing to those who think that things are always going to work out just fine is that in ninety percent of the high-stress societal crises there was what he considers to be a negative outcome.

So what he is projecting, using his own metrics, his own tools, is a situation that he considers to be mid to high-level severity, and that ranges from serious societal disruption to full-blown civil war. Now I personally don’t subscribe to the full-blown civil war theory simply because there are no two obvious sides. I think that we’re much more likely to see a breakup and a collapse of the central government as well as the basic societal narrative rather than two discrete sides like we had with the North and the South during the U.S. Civil War of 1861-1865, but what’s particularly interesting about Turchin’s work is that it’s based on the concept of measuring societal stress.

The level of stress in the United States in 2016 was roughly comparable to the level of societal stress seen in 1860, and that’s very, very consistent with observations that you’ve seen from other students of history and military history, where it’s been said everything that’s happening in the United States – I
woud actually push that further and I would say everything that’s happening across the West – is essentially positioning for civil war.

An interesting experiment in applying WAR to war. Which is to say, Wins Above Replacement:

Among all generals, Napoleon had the highest WAR (16.679) by a large margin. In fact, the next highest performer, Julius Caesar (7.445 WAR), had less than half the WAR accumulated by Napoleon across his battles. Napoleon benefited from the large number of battles in which he led forces. Among his 43 listed battles, he won 38 and lost only 5. Napoleon overcame difficult odds in 17 of his victories, and commanded at a disadvantage in all 5 of his losses. No other general came close to Napoleon in total battles. While Napoleon commanded forces in 43 battles, the next most prolific general was Robert E. Lee, with 27 battles (the average battle count was 1.5). Napoleon’s large battle count allowed him more opportunities to demonstrate his tactical prowess. Alexander the Great, despite winning all 9 of his battles, accumulated fewer WAR largely because of his shorter and less prolific career.

However, outside of Napoleon’s outlying success, the generals’ WARs largely adhere to a normal distribution. This suggests his success is attributable to command talent, rather than an anomaly in the model’s findings. In fact, Napoleon’s total WAR was nearly 23 standard deviations above the mean WAR accumulated by generals in the dataset.

There were also generals that had surprisingly low total WAR despite a reputation as master tacticians. Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate States Army, finished with a negative WAR (-1.89), suggesting an average general would have had more success than Lee leading the Confederacy’s armies. Lee was saddled with considerable disadvantages, including a large deficit in the size of his military and available resources. Still, his reputation as an adept tactician is likely undeserved, and his WAR supports the historians who have criticized his overall strategy and handling of key battles, such as ordering the disastrous ‘Pickett’s Charge’ on the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg. In the words of University of South Carolina professor Thomas Connely, “One ponders whether the South may not have fared better had it possessed no Robert E. Lee.”

German field marshal Erwin Rommel, nicknamed the ‘Desert Fox’ for his successes in North Africa during World War II, also performed poorly in this model, finishing with -1.953 WAR. This finding disputes the praise Rommel has received as a tactician from modern generals, including Norman Schwarzkopf and Ariel Sharon. However, like Lee, Rommel has been the subject of considerable historical debate. In particular, critics have attributed much of his reputation as a tactical genius to both German and Allied propaganda. British generals reportedly exaggerated Rommel’s tactical abilities in order to minimize disapproval regarding their defeats.

Modern generals performed relatively poorly in the model. American general George S. Patton, described by historian Terry Brighton as “among the greatest generals of [World War II],” accumulated only .9 WAR. The failure of modern generals to perform well in WAR may be attributable to changes in warfare which have prevented individual generals from participating in a large number of battles.

Among post-World War II generals, Israeli commanders stood out. Israeli military leader Moshe Dayan finished with 2.109 WAR (60th overall), an impressive amount for a modern general but relatively modest compared to pre-20th Century tacticians. Similarly, former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon accumulated 2.171 WAR (58th overall) for his battlefield successes in the Suez Crisis, Six-Day War, and Yom Kippur War.

It’s more an entertaining experiment than a serious statistical analysis, but I suspect the incredible tactical success it assigns to Napoleon is much more reflective of the French general’s strategic brilliance than anything else. In like manner, the Israeli generals appear to be overrated due to the low quality of their opposition; if I recall correctly, it was Dayan himself who said that the key to his military success was the fact that he was fighting Arabs.

Napoleon, on the other hand, fought the military creme de la creme of Europe, was often outnumbered, and usually won anyhow. But when you analyse his career, it tends to be his strategic actions that are the more striking and decisive.