(no subject)

[pecunium]

In other places there has been discussion of civil war, of what happens if the center cannot hold.

I have some ideas on this (I'm against it. I've made several speeches against it at Making Light One (buried in a long thread, and lots of the pieces worth reading; in this context for more of my thinking on the subject. It's in the interplay between myself and Lance) and Two which is a specific comment on lots of things, some of which are going on; still).

So, in the event that peaceful means can't correct the course of state, and some more drastic means is employed... how do you see the situation resolving itself?

What happens should the body politic reache the breaking point and chooses to excercise its right to "alter or abolish," the Nation as it is presently configured?

I'll give my ideas later, when the rest of you have chimed in.

Comments

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

I don't foresee an outright revolution (and certainly hope there isn't one) but think that if there were such it would be accompanied by total economic collapse, general chaos, and something on the order of 30% mortality, pretty much across-the-board. Followed by the ascendancy of a Charismatic Leader -- who, with luck, won't be as bad as Hitler or Stalin. More likely, I think, we'll just continue to slip gradually into third-world status without quite noticing it, and become a subsidiary of ... maybe China or India.

If we can avoid all those, I'd say that, at best, it'll be at least a century before the United States can again be a World Leader, in anything. We're not dealing, here, with just another spot of tarnish (of which we've survived many) or superficial rust (which has happened a few times); this popular (even if by less than quite a majority of the people) acceptance of the rejection of the centuries-old concept of Law and inalienable human rights indicates a fundamental flaw that might or might not be possible to repair, but certainly won't be easy. And applying a new coat of paint (even Democrat-colored) isn't going to work in the long run.

As long as we operate under a system that continues to diminish the size of the middle class and concentrate wealth in the hands of a few, that requires the expenditure of an enormous amount of money to be elected to any significant political office, that has a voting system in which the reported totals do not necessarily correspond closely to the ways the people actually voted, and that does not have a concerned and informed Electorate, it seems to me that we cannot have a well-functioning democracy, or perhaps not one at all, no matter what we may call it.