This Country Needs to Split

There is a strong tendency for political currents that do not differ radically, to unite ... just like most wars are between two alliances, not three or more.
But some countries have or have had political constitutions that allow parties representing small proportions of the population -- say, 5% or more -- to stand in elections on their own, and then make their alliances later, after they get elected. The Weimar Republic was like that, Israel is like that. While abstractly it is more democratic, it makes it difficult to get a stable ruling coalition.
Of course life would be easier if we did have distinct tendencies, such as those you mention. But for the foreseeable future... well, the immediate future anyway .. it will be Democrats and Republicans, and we muse work within one or the other party.

 

I'm afraid you know very little about American politics. Your characterization of the Right is mainly slander, and you are just ignorant of the Left.
Of course, Trump is a gift to you, because he allows you to avoid engaging with ideas.
It's not the college kids, by the way, it's the faculty.
I know a hundred times more about white supremacists than you do, having been chased down roads by them while doing voter registration in the South.. and about the Left and its influence on campus. You are incapable of debating actual ideas.

 

The New Deal prolonged the depression. It didn’t end it.

More government is NEVER the answer.

 

It certainly didn't end it. Hitler, unlike FDR, used full Keynsianism and Germany was on the road to prosperity five years after he took power.

But this argument is not as important as trying to understand the cultural decay now affecting the US - actually it's not difficult to understand at all, it's so obvious -- and trying to decide what to do about it.

A 'new America', geographically separate from the dying remainder, can work out how much socialism to have, and if we make a mistake -- get too little or too much -- we can correct it. To worry too much right now about whether we should build a high-speed railway or extend Medicare is like deciding what the breakfast menu on the Titanic should have been a few hours before they hit that iceberg..

Everyone thought the Titanic was unsinkable.Everyone thinks the current USA is unsinkable.

 

Much the same way that Republicans idolize Ted Bundy and Dennis Hastert.

 

Exactly. My Democrat friend and I, sometimes meet for a drink, and once alcohol has loosened our tongues and we're sure we're alone ... we start to confess to each other. "You know, Bill ... I don't tell many people this ... but as a conservative ... I really admire successful serial killers. Especially the ones who torture their victims before killing them. And I really get off on the cannibals. True paragons of the that free enterprise spirit we conservatives love."

And he says to me, "Yeah, Doug, I know that ...but .. that's just small time stuff ... little nameless people.....now we Democrats ... we think BIG... not quantity, but quality ... that's why we really admire our guy John Wilkes Booth ... not only did he kill a Republican, always something we love to hear about, but he killed practically the only saintly Republican that every lived .. AND he really screwed up the South by doing so, because that let your crazy wing take over the party and really make life hell for the South . sort of anticipating our statue-smashers, ha ha ha. It's happening in reverse today of course ... we've got the crazies... but you showed us the way.."

Then we both have another drink and sit and think about our respective heroes.

 

I think that the US is in a fine position to move forward into a new era of peace and prosperity and help to move the rest of the world in that direction too. However in order to get there, peopl need to pay more attention to who we elect to positions of power. In order to do that, we need to get control of election security and get money out of our political process. As it stands now, corporate lobbyists write most legislation and the whores in congress from both sides pass it. What else could be expected from people that need to raise 2-5 million dollars to get elected to a job that pays $250k a year for 2 years. Do the math.

 

Everyone knows this is true. It's the American form of corruption, a bit more subtle than the way they do it in South Africa and Russia.The right combination of Democrats and new Republicans might be able to do something about that, although I suppose it might take a Constitutional amendment to make campaign finance 'contributions' illegal, as they are in many other democracies.

And you are right that we -- and not just America, but the whole human race -- is on the eve of enormous advances in science and technology that could really transform the human race. We've already just about licked extreme poverty in the Third World, despite the endemic corruption there. We're on the verge of getting control of the human genome, the real source of inequality.

But ... as America slips away from being number one in the world, and China takes our place ... there is, unfortunately, huge potential for a 1914-with-hydrogen bombs. Even a purely conventional military collision ten or twenty years from now, in which the Chinese elimnate the Seventh Fleet, could have terrible repercussions in the US -- an extreme nationalist reaction, rather like post-WWI Germany.

We've got to shake off the chains of empire. But that won't be enough. I know liberals are fine with the cultural trajectory of the USA today, or if they are uneasy about some aspects of it, are not going to say or do anything about it. Some of us on the other side --more and more, I think -- don't believe it will end well, although exactly how the implosion will come --what combination of domestic and external events will set things off -- is impossible to predict.

Which is why you side should think about this: under what conditions, if any, would you countenance a peaceful separation of some of the current territory of the USA, given that an overwhelming majority of the people living there no longer want to be in a common state?

A good way to think about this is to imagine that if the great majority of people of our last conquered colony, Hawai'i, wanted to leave. Would it be right to be China-in-Tibet, England-in-Ireland, Russia-in-Chechnya ... and hold them down by force?

If you can imagine granting them independence ... then why not, say, a chunk of the Midwest, provided the overwhelming majority wanted to leave?

 

I’m not really a Democrat Doug. I voted for Governor Johnson last time around. However I do know a lot of Democrats and none of them ever supported Booth and most revere Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower and other Republicans. The poster I responded to suggested that Booth is a Democrat icon and I said that he is as much of one as Ted Bundy or Denny Hastert are Republican icons. The guy is obviously not very smart but sadly that kind of thinking is very common among the Trump loyalists on this forum.

Many Democrats and former Republicans really feel that Trump is a dangerous tyrant, a lying crook and unfit for the office he holds at this time. I don’t hate the guy, but I do think that we certainly can do much better. This next election could be a turning point depending on who the nominees are next summer. I have not made my mind up at this point. One thing I do believe is that a person, Like Lincoln who kind of tricked his way into the Republican nomination and was seen as a lightweight hick by many eventually rose to the occasion and became a great leader in our time of need. Several of those now running have that same potential.

Either way, I am pretty certain that we will survive as a nation and there will not be any succession or civil war. There is just a lot of hateful rhetoric being spewed from all sides at this point.

 

Any peaceful solution is fine with me. As a Californian I would be glad to declare independence from the whole mess. As it stands we are massively under represented in the Senate, the Electoral College and paying hundreds of billions in Federal taxes more then we get back. However I do not see this happening any time soon. I am hoping and even a little bit optimistic that we will get a competent leader who will work across the aisle and move us forward. I’m not sure who that is at this point, but it’s still early.

 

I am one of those who believe Trump is unfit for office, although I don't think he's a dangerous tyrant. I would have held my nose and voted for Hillary, although Johnson would have been far closer to my own beliefs, or at least emotional impulses. (I'm really more of a fossilized FDR/JFK Democrat, if truth were known. But that Democratic Party is long gone. My whole family used to be Democrats, but no more.)

I know that the Democrats-love-Booth thing is not true. I think the fellow who posted that was just teasing, or sort of saying that's what logically they should do, or something, givenh ow many KKKers were Democrats over the years ...did you know we used to have a song in the South (I'm a Southerner), which began ... wait,here it is .. many Democrats used to sing this song ...more than half-seriously...maybe he was speaking historically ... lots of Democrats in the past would have loved Booth .. I doubt on mature reflection he would stick by his guns. Lincoln is one of my great heroes by the way, despite his racism.

 

Well,no one knows the future. Maybe it will be a case of "Cometh the hour, cometh the man." We got lucky three times with Lincoln, Churchill and FDR but I fear we're not going to be given another chance like that.

Did you know there was, and still is in dormancy, a California Independence Movement. You could be a major world player all by yourselves. [Hey!!! You support us and we'll support you!!! Deal???] (I lived in California for several years and loved it. When I was there, you could go backpacking, stay out for days, didn't need a tent in summer, and could drink straight out of the streams. But finally I couldn't take the weather, so I moved to London.)

 

I still love The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down by Levon Helm. I also do not think that Southerners who still revere those who fought for the South in the Civil War are necessesarly racist bigots. I am not in favor of tearing down historical statues of Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson or others either. I think of General Lee as a great American General like Patton, MacArthur or Bradley.

 

High interest rates will be our iceberg, eventually.

 

To use a phrase from a French Marxist theoretician, it's "over-determined".

 

Dont assume the majority of the country resides on the fringes... they dont.

 

Yeah, I'm sure that didnt have anything to do with the constant bashing of the president by the fringe left for years.

 

I agree completely. However, I did think that the Confederate Stars and Bars either should have been removed from state flags, where they existed (Georgia, I think), or some African colors added. Two peoples live in the Deep South -- this is the reality -- and the government must be representative of both.

As for statues, I can see what it's easy for demagogues to make these men out as symbols of slavery, rather than as what white Southerners see them as, symbols of heroic resistance to foreign intervention. But again, a large part of the South is Black. So .. either erect some statues of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, or transfer the property lease of these statues to a private organization.

What gets my goat when I see some scrawny little bearded kiddy screaming about the statues is this: the young men who beat the greatest racist in human history, Adolph Hitler, were, many of them, Southerners. I am sure that they held very politically incorrect views about Blacks, and Jews too, for that matter, although the heavily Protestant Old Testament strain of thinking in the South, which had few Jews anyway, had always tempered anti-Semitism there,despite Leo Frank. And of course now they're all Christian Zionists.

Anyway, if I had some magic soul-exchange time machine, I'd take every boy at Omaha Beach, and swap him for an AntiFa. It would be so much fun to see these little turds suddenly whipped away from beating up that gay Asian, to facing tracer rounds from a Nazi MG42 in a concrete pill box 200 meters in front of them. I'd give my left arm to see that.

 

Of course they don't.
Most people are in the middle and prefer not to see conflict.
But sometimes conflict is inevitable.

Most Americans in the early 19th Century didn't feel too strongly about slavery one way or the other, I suspect. In all other countries, it was abolished peacefully, by buying out the slaverowners.

But in America the anti-Slavery people had to agitate for years and years and years, writing books (Uncle Tom's Cabin), circulating petitions. getting resolutions introduced in state legislatures... agitate agitate agitate. How it must have gotten under the skin of ordinary people.

But ... events finally came to a head ... the slavocracy would not accept a peaceful solution. And so the war came, with every drop of blood drawn by the lash, repaid with one drawn by the sword. That was definitely not what the abolitionists wanted, but that it ended that way was not their fault.

We have to try to convince our 'masters' who want to hold us in bondage to their degenerating country, to let us go, peacefully. We could even offer to buy ourselves out. Maybe they will learn from history.

 

I have the same attitude. One of my mostest favoritest novels is Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels. Everyone should read this book.

Far from being treated as 'traitors', even with the Radical Republicans in power, the Southerners who would take the oath of loyalty were re-admitted as full citizens. Many joined or re-joined the American military and served in our subsequent wars.

It was always a kind of paradox to me, as a kid growing up in Texas: Southerners were nostalgic for the Confederacy, yet were the most ferocious American patriots. I mean ... hey ... we tried to break away from that flag, right ... we -- our great great great grandaddies anyway -- shot down the men carrying it towards our lines -- we laid three hundred thousand of them 'stiff in Southern dust' as that song goes.

But ... if some Anti-Fa type had been time-machined back to 1959 and had turned up at my high school while we were raising the Stars and Stripes and tried to burn it ... dear Lord, ... he'd be being scraped off peoples' shoes within a few minutes.

Go figure.

 

The civil war was mostly about succession, not slavery.

 

Sorry, that's just not true. They wanted to secede so they could keep their slaves. Let's not kid ourselves. Crushing slavery was a noble cause.

 

That’s a given in 1959 anywhere in the country, but these are different times. These Proud Boys are just as bad as far as I’m concerned. Bunch of wannabe thugs running in packs like gang punks. I support peaceful demonstration, (though I would never waste my time running around carrying signs or shouting slogans) but any violent form of protest should be discouraged and prosecuted.

 

From the perspective of the Confederate states, one of the reasons for succession was slavery, but more so they didn't like being controlled and dictated by the northern elites.