12-08-2016, 07:04 PM
History will move fast in the next four years. We can have an America becoming an Evil Empire, and Apartheid state, a high-tech Feudalism, or some combination of the three. The high-tech feudalism is even worse than the low-tech one, for in the high-tech feudalism a would-be Robin Hood will be quickly caught and killed by the Sheriff of Nottingham... and the human suffering will be just as bad.
We can see all the post-WWII arrangements, including NATO, shatter. Nations that value their freedom will not want to coordinate their military policies with a fascistic rogue state. We can see the entire edifice of the American welfare state dismantled quickly. America could become effectively a single-Party system in which the Democrats can exist only as bickering special-interest groups that can survive only as a show of some vestige of democracy.
America has a heritage of militarism inordinate for a liberal democracy -- and a dictatorial order would only intensify that. I can imagine many countries that would rather put up a desperate fight against a brutalized America than accept subordination. Just imagine America facing a Delhi-Jakarta-Tokyo Axis. If you thought that the Japanese fascists did well at kicking a decent America early in the Pacific Theater in World War II, imagine what happens when India, Indonesia, and Japan kick America early, in the middle of, and in the end of the Second War of the Pacific Basin.
I can imagine an international war ending with some legacies of the defeat of a fascistic America. Just imagine a city like Atlanta having a Carnival that rivals the Carnival of Rio de Janeiro. Imagine Texas with the official name "Republica de Tejas". Imagine the Euro in use in New England, New York, and New Jersey.
Or imagine the consequences of a world in which the material basis of modern civilization is no more because of nuclear war, when America from about Charlotte to Boston and from Buffalo and Pittsburgh in the east to Minneapolis and Omaha in the west resemble the exclusion zone around Chernobyl.
We can see all the post-WWII arrangements, including NATO, shatter. Nations that value their freedom will not want to coordinate their military policies with a fascistic rogue state. We can see the entire edifice of the American welfare state dismantled quickly. America could become effectively a single-Party system in which the Democrats can exist only as bickering special-interest groups that can survive only as a show of some vestige of democracy.
America has a heritage of militarism inordinate for a liberal democracy -- and a dictatorial order would only intensify that. I can imagine many countries that would rather put up a desperate fight against a brutalized America than accept subordination. Just imagine America facing a Delhi-Jakarta-Tokyo Axis. If you thought that the Japanese fascists did well at kicking a decent America early in the Pacific Theater in World War II, imagine what happens when India, Indonesia, and Japan kick America early, in the middle of, and in the end of the Second War of the Pacific Basin.
I can imagine an international war ending with some legacies of the defeat of a fascistic America. Just imagine a city like Atlanta having a Carnival that rivals the Carnival of Rio de Janeiro. Imagine Texas with the official name "Republica de Tejas". Imagine the Euro in use in New England, New York, and New Jersey.
Or imagine the consequences of a world in which the material basis of modern civilization is no more because of nuclear war, when America from about Charlotte to Boston and from Buffalo and Pittsburgh in the east to Minneapolis and Omaha in the west resemble the exclusion zone around Chernobyl.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.