Posted on 08/08/2014 11:12:49 AM PDT by Kaslin
At the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama famously wrote that our world may be at the "end of history" where "Western liberal democracy" becomes "the final form of human government."
A quarter century on, such optimism seems naive.
Consider the United States, the paragon of liberal democracy.
An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll finds that only 14 percent of the people approve of Congress and only 19 percent approve of the GOP. Seventy-one percent believe America is headed in the wrong direction.
Nor is this the exceptional crisis of a particular presidency.
JFK was assassinated. LBJ was broken by race riots and anti-war demonstrations. Richard Nixon, facing impeachment, resigned. Gerald Ford was rejected by the electorate. Ronald Reagan was highly successful -- like Nixon, he won in a 49-state landslide after his first term -- but during the Iran-Contra scandal of 1987 there was a real threat of a second impeachment. And Bill Clinton was impeached.
Our democracy seems to be at war with itself.
Now there is talk of impeaching Obama. It will become a clamor should he grant executive amnesty to 5 million illegal immigrants.
Political science has long described what seems to be happening.
From the tribal leader comes the monarch, whose reign gives way to an aristocracy that produces a middle class that creates a republic, the degenerative form of which is that pure democracy of which John Adams wrote:
"Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide." Then comes the strong man again.
Is that our future? Is Western democracy approaching the end of its tether, with the seeming success of authoritarian capitalism in China and Russia? Recent history provides us with examples.
World War I, begun 100 years ago, brought down many of the reigning monarchs of Europe. The caliph of the Ottoman Empire was sent packing by Kemal Ataturk. Czar Nicholas II was murdered on the orders of the usurper Vladimir Lenin.
Fighting off a Bolshevik invasion, Marshal Pilsudski rose to power in Poland. Admiral Miklos Horthy ran the communists out of Budapest and took the helm. Mussolini led the 1922 March on Rome. Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 failed, but his party utilized democracy's institutions to seize power and murder democracy. Out of the Spanish Civil War came the dictatorship of Gen. Franco. And so it went.
Vladimir Putin may be the most reviled European leader among Western elites today, but he is more popular in his own country than any other Western ruler, with 80 percent approval, for standing up for Russia and Russians everywhere.
Polls in France say that, were elections held today, Marine Le Pen would replace Francois Hollande in the Elysee Palace.
Eurocrats bewail what is happening, but, inhibited by secularist ideology, fail to understand it. They believe in economism, rule by scholarly global elites, and recoil at the resurgence of nationalism and populism. They do no understand people of the heart because they do not understand human nature.
People don't enlist, endure, fight and die for cerebral constructs.
Who, then, will own the future -- of Europe, America, the world?
The day of the democratist and transnational elite appears to be passing. In Europe, the Scots, Catalans, Corsicans, Venetians and Flemish seek to secede from England, Spain, France, Italy and Belgium, respectively.
Not only the National Front in France, but also the UK Independence Party of Nigel Farage and a dozen other nationalist parties on the continent want out of the European Union and an end to immigration.
And they are no longer intimidated by name-calling.
In America, a tectonic shift has taken place in public opinion with the arrival on our border of 60,000 children from Central America and the threat by Obama to issue executive amnesty to 5 million illegals.
Last week, Alabama Congressman "Mo" Brooks said there is a "war on whites" in America, being led by Obama, noting that under civil right laws the only group one may discriminate against is white males.
Nor has Brooks recanted under fire.
In a Washington Post column answering Brooks, "A Welcome End to American Whiteness," Dana Milbank concedes that, by 2043, white Americans will be less than half of the U.S. population. They were near 90 percent in 1960.
Far from being something to fear, Milbank writes, this "is to be celebrated. Indeed, it is the key to our survival." Immigrants pouring in from the Third World will bring a "fresh labor supply" and "fresh blood to cure us of what ails us." A tired America will be revitalized.
Perhaps. But sociologist Robert Putnam discovered that the more ethnically and linguistically diverse a society becomes, the more its social capital evaporates, and the less do its multicultural members gather together to cooperate in common causes.
And from those recent polls, Americans seem to look on the prospect of an even more racially and culturally diverse America of tomorrow, not with anticipation, but with a measure of dread.
As one redeemed by the Lord Jesus, I do.
I think there will be sections of the United States that attempt to secede. I doubt it will happen easily, because the areas that would like to leave have stuff like oil and agriculture and low debt that the rest covet.
Alaska might have a shot, geographically remote, maybe become a Russian protectorate.
Note: From Wikipedia:
June 10, 2008, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, along with co-sponsor Robert Wexler, introduced 35 articles of impeachment against Bush to the U.S. House of Representatives. The House voted 251* to 166 to refer the impeachment resolution to the Judiciary Committee on June 11, where no further action was taken on it.
*24 Republicans voted y
Doc Brown.
I think it's reasonable to point out that this is by no means a universal series.
It's (sort of) what happened in Greece and Rome, and in some of the Italian city-states and later in western Europe and its offshoots.
But AFAIK this path was never traveled in the ancient, Muslim, Chinese, Japanese or Indian (dot OR feather) worlds.
This percentage is, of course, split between those who think we're moving left much too fast, and those who think we aren't moving left fast enough.
Clearly Future-America will not own its then Present, when that time arrives, since it will have been spent many times over. With a $17 T debt, on its way to... well, until things break, the future cannot by definition own its own time, as it will be indebted to paying off its past and our present.
Secession is not practical. I doubt there is a state in the country where a minimum of 1/3 of the population wouldn’t be “on the other side.”
Compare that to the CSA, which had 90%+ support in its core areas.
America’s divisions, this time around, just aren’t regional, they’re ideological. Which makes for a MUCH nastier civil war.
Ask the Spanish.
Future?
It mattereth not.
Who CONTROLS the past has an AWFUL lot to do with it though!
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
Oh??
Looks pretty regional to me!
People in the cities should get out more...
...to the areas that grow your FOOD for you!
Does it matter? King 0bama will just take it away and give it to an illegal immigrant.
Certainly no one with a $14T debt and another who-knows how many trillions of unfunded liabilities.
Whoever owns the gold makes the rules
He who makes the rules owns the future
China and Russia
Future generations, not us, own the future.
All we can do is leave a good example and try to warn them.
And teach history.
I believe the remark...”We should have picked our own cotton” has the ring of truth........
Nor is this the exceptional crisis of a particular presidency. Buchanan is right.
For a few generations since 1913, congress tried to be all things to all people. In recent decades it gave up constitutionalism entirely and sought to satisfy the Left, while it attempted to placate, yet simultaneously destroy the middle class. In the process it ended up p!ssing off almost everyone outside of the DC metro area.
Until Charles De Montesquieu, republican theory held that representative or direct democracies could only exist in tiny geographical territories like the ancient Greek city-states. Over large areas, some form of despotic rule was necessary to check disparate peoples of various customs and traditions.
The beauty of Montesquieu's theory was that a republic composed of republics could dash the age old lesson of despotism across continents. He was right, and the American system of republics within a larger republic spread and nurtured untold wealth, prosperity and freedom.
Unfortunately, the American republic of republics was dashed with the 17th Amendment. It took a hundred years, but we are facing what the Framers knew, that centralized, undivided power meant the certainty of undivided tyranny.
Here are the states that voted for Romney at over 60%, therefore can be reasonably assumed to be most likely to support secession.
Utah - 73%
Wyoming - 69%
Oklahoma - 67%
Idaho - 65%
West Virginia - 62%
Alabama - 61%
Arkansas - 61%
Kentucky - 61%
As you can see, only three managed to get over 2/3 against Obama, as I said in my earlier post.
By contrast, in the 1860 elections NINE states registered not one popular vote for Lincoln.
Now that’s a regional division.
I am ignoring here the fact that a LARGE percentage of 2012 Romney voters would not support secession.
Romney as a metric? That’s pretty funny!
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