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How to Avoid a Civil War
John Hawkins has written a cautionary piece for Townhall.com titled “7 Forces Driving America Toward Civil War.” Those forces — upon which he elaborates — are:
- A Post-Constitutional Era
- Tribalism
- Federal Government Too Powerful
- Moral Decline
- The Debt
- Lack Of A Shared Culture
- Gun Grabbing
Looking at that list, it seems that there is sufficient overlap that it could be condensed to two: Disrespect for our Constitutional System and Lack of a Shared Culture. The reason I am reducing this list is that it results in a short-hand test for our national policies and laws:
- Does this policy or law tend to support our constitutional system of division of power, equal justice under law, maximizing individual liberty, and protection of property rights and private contracting?
- Does this policy or law tend to support or undermine a common culture that respects conscience, celebrates freedom, emphasizes personal accountability rather than collective punishment, and rewards honesty and deferred gratification?
Notice what the tests do not do:
- Discriminate for or against anyone for an immutable characteristic.
- Result in global citizenship.
- Impose costs on society to cater to anyone who does not want to fully integrate into our common culture.
- Deprive anyone of their individual liberty, speech, movement, association, and thought.
- Deny anyone the fundamental right of effective personal self-defense.
- Undermine republican principles in favor of mob rule.
@philo interesting point. It suggests that those who want a “living constitution” need only be educated in the history and philosophies underlying the constitution and everything would be good.
“We want to secede.”
”Ok. Sign this.”
”What’s that?”
”That relinquishes your citizens from their claims on Social Security, cancels their WIC cards and calls their federal student loans due in 90 days.”
”Uh, can we talk about this?”
You have been purchased. You are less of a citizen than property. Now stay on the plantation where you belong.
Well, let’s not get carried away. But, in general, yes, things would be closer to good than not. A whole lot of being “educated” didn’t help Woodrow Wilson on this front but even a hint of constitutional knowledge bouncing around between Nancy’s ears might be nice. It says a lot about a party (and a country) when monumental idiocy can rise (or be pushed) to such heights, display that idiocy on the world stage, and today stand poised to regrip that ridiculous large gavel yet again:
A general citizenry even moderately “educated in the history and philosophies underlying the constitution” would be ashamed of such performance and not likely to be fooled by the same face twice. But, here we are…
This is reassuring. I have been concerned with how we deal with coastal US states which contain and service much of our military – we just retain the bases, possibly expanding them for shipping purposes.
Also; any National Forest would remain a part of the US proper….
So here is where Bible and Constitution meet – even people who are well educated and debate these things frequently disagree. Consider freedom from religion vs freedom of religion. How on earth do you work around that?
Ironic how many “living constitution” advocates think they are free from religion but have merely adopted a different form of religion than any flowing from the Judeo-Christian tradition? And how they enable the expansion of Islamism?
Well individuals can’t secede anyway. Really secession makes even less sense now than before given the vastly more integrated society we have. If it works it works it can only work if a whole geopolitical unit is committed to it. Now you could have an armed revolt that overthrows the government and establishes a new political order. Which would really be a more classical form of civil war. Like they have in Europe. But now I think they like to call those Revolutions.
bellwether, not bell weather. /pedant
My 2¢:
If Trump is reelected and then succeeded by a non-globalist Republican, the likelihood of California secession increases dramatically and will probably happen by 2035.
If Kamala Harris or one of her ilk succeeds Trump, California stays in, but the Republic is over and wider fragmentation is likely by 2060.
Victor Davis Hanson’s article today is apropos.
Mancur Olsen makes the argument that radical change, most especially economic growth causes revolution, political instability and civil wars. It’s the best argument put forth so far and is consistent with my experience. However, this holds for non market, mixed economies, or pre market economies. For market economies rapid growth leads to lots of stress, and political movements, and special interest ( union strikes etc.) resistance, but if a truly market economy allows adjustment and entrepreneurship, growth overwhelms the disintegration caused by new jobs, new technology, divided families, evolving culture, new people and different people even within a family, because the culture of ones parents may become irrelevant to the kids.
The largest armed attempt to create a quasi-independent political territory on American soil wasn’t brought down by military action. It was brought down mostly by land-use lawsuits by environmentalists. It only lasted for about four years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajneeshpuram
It worked for Sevastopol.
Only if that non-globalist Republican cuts the entitlement spending that so much of California’s population depends on.
Baaaaah.
Autowrong at work again?
I prefer to think of it as spell[expletive.]
But, can it actually *spell* “expletive”?
Yes, but not the Ricochet edition.
“There is now so little interaction, commonality and intermarriage between rural/heartland/working class whites and urban/coastal whites that the difference between them is practically what social scientists would consider an ‘ethnic difference.’”
Amy Chua – Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations (quoted in the April edition of Commentary)
<big-eyed paperclip>: Did you mean to type “split infinitive”?
Just stirring the pot, that’s more or less one of the things in the 19th century that got described as “separate races.”
Who said anything about individuals? What part of “your citizens” didn’t you understand?
“Ohhh, this thing is heavy. Is there not a gentleman among you who’ll carry it for me?”
And then they read the 9th Amendment and discover that the Supreme Court actually does have the ability to invent individual rights out of thin air.
I always understood that individual rights were inalienable, and that if a right wasn’t specifically prohibited by the Constitution, then we had it. SCOTUS didn’t invent the right to privacy; it was there all along. It discovered it. I just don’t think the right to privacy enables the killing of the unborn.
@misthiocracy, I think @randywebster has the better characterization.
You say potato, I say legislation from the bench.
;-)
The infamous Kelo decision got me wondering: “How can there be a ‘right to privacy’ if our property is only ours in theory?”