What if Obama is elected, and the Right goes nuts?

The United States is a republic marked by a fetish of domestic peace and a very long record of political violence. One doesn't have to reach back to Gary Nash's interpretation of the revolution to see that. Andrew Jackson's supporters terrified the respectable with the sort of easy violence and bitterness that their General's career had been characterised by. Native Americans and Black people, no angels of peace as historical groups, could testify to the violence inherent in American society.

To a very large extent, American freedom was won by the combination of legal method and very great political violence, of which the apotheosis was the Civil War. This combination when successful had a very great and instantly rewritten effect; when not, became 'conspiracy', 'random event' or unknowledge.

I note that, of three genuinely American religions--Mormonism, Scientology, and the Nation of Islam--many of the leaders, apostles or disciples of two of the movements died lived or died in gruesome circumstances. Civic insurrection has been endemic in some states, and not always on the right. Immigration was a violent, vicious process, as was the development of trade union rights, the experiment with prohibition, and the iteration both of civil rights and of recent Republican Jacksonianism. Occasionally, even the Presidents or politicians who have stirred, released, or drawn upon the dark, underlying energies of American society have had to try and rein them in.

The republic, like Rome, is saturated in violence and in its repression. It can also, often, be better than itself and is from time to time genuinely democratic. I just find myself wondering, not alone, and and amongst bad company, what happens if Obama wins in just over two weeks time?

Americans are indebted, pressurised, and used to the twin narcissisms of the therapeutic, somewhat close-minded left, and the radicalised, probably mainstream, right. There have been plenty who have inflated the stakes, and many who in the recent past have taken up arms against their own to pursue their political ends.

When John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Robert Kennedy last tried to reform the place, they were met with near-treason, mutiny, and a culture of violence at the top and bottom of things. How near are we to civic disorder in America if Obama wins, or civic protest and the plunging of worse depths if he doesn't?

This is not 1968. It isn't 1848. But America could be heading to some newer, bloody rehearsal of its violent culture at a time when greedy Anglo-American style capitalism is changing seismically, and when the tensions of the world are now being fed not by rising oil prices for the producers, but lower revenues for those at the heart of terrorist networks.

God help us all. As JFK once said, in a different context, the flames from that fire will surely light the world.

The picture at the top of this blog is by Thunder Trek Kelly and depicts Geronimo in a modern setting.