America's less than stellar future

I have, with heavy heart, come to the conclusion that the divisions in our country are so deep and so emotionally engraved in our ... respective ... collective psyches, that no election result or even decade or two of stability will cure it. The old division, largely but not entirely economic, and largely but not entirely based on the fundamental disagreement as to whether slavery should or should not be tolerated, that separated the South from the North in the Civil War, never really went away. There is no postracial America. There is a liberal... in the best sense... America, and an America that craves autocracy and authoritarianism. Even the liberal faction has embraced a form of laissez faire capitalism that is sapping our intellectual and innovative genius, and separating us into a society of wealth and an underclass that has no real opportunity to rise beyond a certain level. The two views, with all their appurtenant lifestyle and ideological divides, are simply irreconcilable. We will, if we are to survive as a nation, be like Turkiye or China. A nation of multiple nationalities, who do not really cohere as a culture, but, through the institutions of power, simply tolerate one another and divide regionally into very different cultures. It perhaps didn't need to be this way, but I'm convinced it is this way, and will not change soon. The White Nationalists, for want of a better word, feel deeply threatened because they have become a minority, which, just barely, due to the deliberate inequities built into the Constitution originally to placate them, has the possibility of gaining and retaining power over the national government, to rule the whole of the nation by force and diktat. And they are going to try this. Over and over again until they either succeed or are ultimately and firmly relegated to permanent, and perhaps to some extent protected, minority status. The sad thing is that this will sap our country of much of its greatness, harm our economy and even our military strength. Perhaps the hubris of the... now past... "American Century" has brought us this karmic retribution. But however our nation survives and moves forward, whether as an oligarchic republic or as an outright authoritarian state, we will be the weaker, and the less able to claim to have fulfilled the ideals that once were the coin of our realm ideologically. We are doomed, I fear, to be less than the potential we had as recently as my youth. 

 

______________________________

COMMIT TO PRESERVING DEMOCRACY IN OUR COUNTRY 

______________________________