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| Home Front: Culture Wars | |
| The Coming of the Fourth American Republic | |
| 2009-04-22 | |
By James V. DeLong
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| Posted by:Steve White |
| #6 Point taken, Gromgoru. |
| Posted by: no mo uro 2009-04-22 22:28 |
| #5 I think he is too optimistic, and my objection centers on his statement: "One can safely predict that the ultimate result will be a democratic republic, because that is American culture." If by "democratic" he means a government with elections, he may well be correct; but if he means a government that respects liberty and the will of the people, I suspect he is wrong. I think the culture has changed under us, and I think we face big problems when the money well runs dry. |
| Posted by: James 2009-04-22 20:29 |
| #4 Like the primacy of federal over state sovereignty, the shift continued even after the watershed event. Remaining limits on governmental authority were eliminated by the dialectic of the civil rights revolution, in which the federal power over commerce was expanded to meet moral imperatives, and the new standards were then fed back into regulation of commerce. Delong missed a key intersection regarding Federal primacy. Federal "primacy over state sovereignty" took root following the secession of states leading up to the incident at Fort Sumter in the spring of 1861, and Lincoln's failure to recognize the Confederate States and subsequent delcaration of an insurrection. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2009-04-22 08:47 |
| #3 Who spoke of actual fighting, NMU? |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2009-04-22 08:28 |
| #2 His analysis isn't completely original, but this is the best expression of the theory in easy-to-understand language I've ever seen. I don't think he's excessively optimistic. He expresses his ideas as something he desires but cannot know for sure. Agreed about points i and ii, Gromgoru, but has it not always been so? There have always been other nations inimical to the U.S. since its founding. If you're saying that technology, particularly of warfare, has changed sufficiently that those threats are more immediate now, you may have a point, but those technological changes work in both directions. I think this guy's right about the current tired state of big-government, special interest America, and the wheels coming off that incarnation of the Republic. IMO, the area where he MAY be missing the point is his presumption of a change for the better. I'd like to think that what remains of our culture would produce that, but there is also the possibility that we could get something evil. |
| Posted by: no mo uro 2009-04-22 05:49 |
| #1 IMO, his optimisim is based on forgeting that USA does not exists in vacuum. (i) It shares this planet with other countries who'd like to take it down in order to become numero uno. (ii) There is Islam = 1.3 billion people who can never be happy except when they're Jihading. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2009-04-22 03:08 |