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How Will YOU Save America?
Where did it all start going wrong?
You look at what’s happened to our beloved country and despair of ever seeing America recover from the rot and decay that infests its once-proud institutions. You wonder if we’ll ever achieve the same prominence on the world stage. You mourn the loss of real civilizational progress that marked the United States and made us a world superpower.
You’d like to enjoy the decline, but even joy has been stripped from you. The future’s so blight you’re kind of dismayed.
Here’s the set-up, bub.
You’ve just stolen my time machine*, and now have the opportunity to go back in time and change the outcome of one historical event in the past in order to SAVE AMERICA in the present and the future.
Where/When do you go, what event do you change, and how does this fix everything?
Or, to put it another way, what’s the key moment in history that set us on this dread course, and how would a different outcome change things?
Someone just doesn’t understand time travel…
Include some amendments to pound home the fact that the federal government is limited. A hands on Washington isn’t working now. Adding all that additional land without more local control would negate the listed benefits.
Maybe I’ll just take a machete to Eden and find me a serpent.
I keep waiting for my future self to show up with the blueprints for the machine, and the lazy bum keeps not coming through.
The Ricochet Fixing One Thing Fight Club has potential.
RFOTFC!
Solomon’s dream, time machine, dictator for five minutes. So many good scenarios that make sense for a weekly question. Plus simple things like “You get to fix one thing in the GOP,” or “one thing in California.”
Make it the ’84 election. Have Reagan kick Bush to the curb and install William F. Buckley Jr. as his running mate. His controversial swing to the conservative wing of his party loses him state after state, but when the dust settles it’s Minnesota, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Delaware, and he still wins in a landslide.
Okay, you wasted your one shot with a time machine to edit a Ricochet post? Set your sights higher man.
I was considering ‘Talk G. Gordon Liddy into toning it down a little maybe’ as a similar option.”
Trading on my uncanny ability to foretell the events of the Civil War I become a trusted adviser to President Grant, convincing him to outlaw the Democratic Party and prosecute their ringleaders. A new opposition party arises – let’s call them the Grays – and they and the GOP compete healthily for the votes of the newly enfranchised. The concept of ‘race’ loses its pseudo-scientific ‘biological’ sense and reverts to being a close synonym of ‘nation’. Wilson, Sanger, FDR, the Holocaust, segregation, Jim Crow and La Raza never happen. ‘Woke’ is just a past tense.
Also an interesting reply, but I think I’m going to go with the alcoholic’s logic. One more drink becomes just one more after that. And like the later career of Hezekiah or the newer episodes of Futurama what you get in the bonus years is never as good as the original run.
Too bad you didn’t succeed.
Obviously.
Interesting, but having learned they can outlaw an opposing political party what makes you think the Republicans are going to scruple to outlaw the Grays?
Done.
Do you think Thor and the other Grays would permit that?
Well, I’d want to do some research before I stepped into the time machine, but I think I’d go back and reverse the first supreme court decision that decided that the freedom of religion meant that the government can’t appear to endorse religion in any way whatsoever except when politicians are looking to dupe some votes out of the rubes. *Ahem*. Sorry. With that hangup gone then we’d still have prayer in schools, which means that the public school students will have at least had some exposure to the notion of virtue, which (don’t count on it) hopefully means some of the kids learned something in their schooling, which means that we might have better people now, which means we might have a chance of getting out of the mess we’re currently in.
Other options I’m considering:
Talking some backbone into the depression era Supreme Court that was so afraid of FDR that they let him de facto rewrite the constitution.
Introducing Margaret Sanger’s parents to the concept of Family Planning.
Heading off slavery at the pass. Not sure there’s one event that could fix this, but let’s say burning Eli Whitney’s cotton gin prototype. No cotton gin, slavery isn’t relatively profitable anymore, the gold coast slave ships head for the Caribbean islands instead, what slaveowners exist in America are a niche interest group with ever diminishing political power. The, ah, Late Unpleasantness is fought over economic grounds but without the impetus that’s the sheer mutual moral disdain the question of slavery brings, several more states flip to the confederacy, and however the war turns out I expect it to leave states with more power to influence affairs than the federal government.
Though, given that the time machine is a one way ticket, maybe convincing FDR not to ally with the Soviet Union would be the thing to do. We still win the second world war, but maybe the USSR doesn’t survive, maybe Stalin doesn’t survive. And living out the remainder of my days in post war America seems like it would be a pretty good retirement. Maybe see if Bell Labs needs any help on that transistor project, or if those ENIAC guys could use a hand.
Love it.
Bring the designs for a nuclear bomb with you, and end the war in 1939 by blowing both the Nazis and USSR to kingdom come.
“What if Hitler had an evil twin?”
Ah yes, Badolf Hitler.
I focused the ‘no watergate” one on its effect on the media and political parties. But if you game it out a little farther;
if there’s no watergate, you don’t have a strengthened D Congress defund South Vietnam, so it doesn’t fall to the North. No boat people. No Killing fields?
With no Watergate, you don’t get Jimmy Carter. Without Carter, does Reagan get elected? Does the Soviet Union invade Afghanistan in 1979, with all the downstream effects that has?
It’s hard to see how the USSR survives it’s own internal economic contradictions, but without the pressure from Reagan, does it survive?
all because of a piece of tape on a door lock.
I love this portrait of Nixon, independent of how I feel about him in general (mixed, for the record). The picture lives at the National Portrait Gallery in DC. It was featured in post I wrote several years ago.
Haven’t read comments yet. I would say prevent the formation of the Department of Education.
I regard the re-election of Obama as the moment the thing became unrecoverable, but that happened because the population’s dumbing-down and political indoctrination had become too great to bear liberty. The mass of people saw socialism pink in tooth and claw and did not care.
Obviously, the communist take-over of the US has been a century in the making. For single events with reasonably solid, counterable (given a time machine) chains of events, the DoE approach offers a way to interrupt the cycle of indoctrination.
Amen.
Shades of the middle of the Dune series.
Preach!
That would be the US of “eh”.
Maybe it’s not too late?
Spoilsport :)
I would travel back to Kitty Hawk and talk the Wright brothers into staying in the bicycle business.
Without airplanes, the world once again becomes a huge, impossibly huge place, filled with exotic lands far away. There is no such thing as a “world leader”, because the possibility is preposterous. Whatever didoes politicians get up to remains local; they can only pester their own people until the tar and feathers come out and problem solved.
The world would be filled with a rich variety of cultures, some exotic and wonderful, some horrific. Isolated by natural, human-powered distance, their influence on each other is limited to the tales from travelers, and the daring of explorers. The cultures then develop deep and lasting traditions, the world stays interesting.
The idea that everybody in the world should all think exactly the same way, at the same time, the content of those thoughts handed down by a soulless elite in Switzerland is ridiculous, so Wokeness never comes into existence.
(Of course now that we have time travel instead, whether we have airplanes or not might be moot. Hmmm.)