I don’t think succession gets us back on the right track. It further divides us as a nation.
No, wishful thinking won’t get us back on track, as long as succession is the result of it.
Wishful thinking that pushes us to devise new healthy strategies to get things back on track will.
Who is us? The half the nation that voted for more debt, more free stuff, less freedom? The half that is oblivious to the state of the nation?
There are two diametrically opposed philosophies driving the two sides. There is no one right track for both sides. One side wants freedom.
The other wants someone to take care of them and they don't care what it costs. They have already run far beyond what can ever be paid for and they are hankering for more. You will never sell your ideas to them, those ideas go against their most basic beliefs.
Are you even aware that Obamacare is forcing religious people to directly pay for abortions for their employees? The left says to take your moral objections to abortion stick it and pay up. There is no reasoning with that, no compromise.
So you want to be a great nation on the world stage? By 2016 the debt will be such that the future will be deciding between paying interest on it and entitlements. Defense? Forget it. And that is only if we don't trigger inflation, and interest rates don't go up. Then it will get ugly.
“I don’t think succession gets us back on the right track. It further divides us as a nation.”
The nation is already at or close to that point where it has become irreconcilably divided.
For months now, I have been predicting in my posts here on FR that this election would not serve to “unite” the nation, but instead illustrate how divided it has become, and actually exacerbate those divisions. Can you point out any recent events that indicate otherwise?
Conservatives look from their side of the divide at the left, and wonder why they think as they do and believe what they believe. The left, on the other hand, has no interest in even considering what we think they’re doing wrong. The elements of division have grown so stark that neither side can begin to understand the other, and in most cases hates the other side’s guts.
The United States, as a people, is NEVER going to be “united” again, at least in the sense that it was in, say, 1952. Those times are past and gone (and I was alive in 1952). They ain’t comin’ back.
Having said that, as a conservative, I could live in such a divided nation, so long as where I lived was a “conservative-dominant” (red) area, and within such places conservative and old-time traditional American principles and mores prevailed. I wouldn’t care what the heathens of New York or San Francisco did, so long as they would leave me (and us) alone. I sense that you are of a like mind.
However, the left can NEVER permit this. From their viewpoint, they cannot be satisfied until everyone has come under their diktats, under their boot. They will use the full force of governmental power, including the military (if they can coax them into firing on Americans) and the increasingly-militarized police (which already does).
I see but two possible courses for the future, particularly considering the “demographic directions” in which we’re going:
1. The people “of the red” (conservatives) will eventually be forced to live under the will of the people “of the blue” (the left). They will no longer have “the national numbers” by which to resist, at least by way of peaceful, “conventional channels”.
2. The people of the red will reach the point where they realize that some kind of “separation” from the blues has become the only pathway by which to re-gain their own freedoms.
I’m a realist. That’s what I see.
Final thoughts:
Who could have predicted, ten years ago, that there would be so much open talk of “secession” today? Who could have dreamed?
Back around 1985, if someone had told you that by 1992 the Soviet Union would have voluntarily dissolved itself, you would have told them they were out of their minds. Where’s the once-mightly U.S.S.R. today?
Perhaps what we’re not ultimately headed for is “secession” per se (an event where one side proclaims independence against the other side’s will), but rather a peaceful “dissolution” (voluntarily agreed to by both sides).
One thing is for certain:
We can’t go the way we’re going now, and last too many decades longer.