The Real War Against the United States
Using the corruption of the party system to advantage, some of those nations competing with the USA for world influence are working to dismantle the U.S. without a shot, and all around its centers and symbols of power. This is the real war against the USA as a distinct nation with something to offer the world.
If you destroy what a nation stands for with lots of help from venal partisans within it, you remove that competitor country without a fight. It falls within. Its missile silos, jets, carriers, tanks and troops sit impotent to defend against the fall that ensues with self-division.
This website is a good place to read and observe the partisan spirit at work. It is part of the partisan culture. It is a symptom.
Better than parties or bi-partisanship (de facto one party) would be no parties. We need a new pre-election structure to allow individual participation and issue education. The parties are an outdated anachronism that insist, no demand, to be central to the power process. Their lack of accountability bleeds into their candidates.
Worse, outside powers see the division and seize on it. They also see the maladies in our domestic life that result from the partisan corruption and divisiveness. The corruptions and divisiveness creates a gaping set of neglected problems to go along with the runaway national debt, and declining moral grounding.
While the US divides itself on party lines, the Russian Federation has large numbers of Youth Guard who recently stormed the Estonian Embassy in Moscow. There were assaults and a pig's head was thrown into the embassy. The EU intervened, claiming Estonia to be one of the EU.
When weeks ago some anti-Putin demonstrators attempted to demonstrate at the old Red Square, they were promptly arrested, removed in vans and let go later to officially permitted premises for protest.
Who do we think we are dealing with in the world? The great powers of the world, simply because they are not superpowers, are not without the means to undo the United States by other means, by proxy diversion, by confusing attacks and threats, and by elliptical ones.
Add the ordinary and daunting natural problems that arise: major hurricane events; broken levees; drug resistant diseases growing more prolific in the US; an aging and slowly reproducing educated labor population due to social engineering politics; a burgeoning unskilled labor population; and poor future insight, the US faces forces of disintegration if it will not adapt.
Parties, their media outlets, 527s et al who specialize in elaborate blaming logic toward each other, are going to be a major causal factor in the downfall of what the US stands for. Parties are non-Constitutional. They work to undo the Constitution to serve their self-righteous presumptions. The parties conduct themselves too often as bickering child siblings. Something about political parties brings back the exclusivist sibling pride and rivalry in the adults who pretend they're leading this country.
They're really good at pretending.
Partisanship (us against them, me against you) leads to atrocity.
Nations are not unlike the states and constitutions and separations of power that check and balance the inhumane control issues that partisan people have.
Partisans cannot stand to be disagreed with. They must always win.
May 4, 2007 8:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes that does work. That's an accurate description of the fall of the Soviet empire. And it will be an accurate description of the fall of the American empire too. So what? The road back to the republic leads through the ruins of the empire.
May 5, 2007 2:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
An empire is a powerful republic, overweight and on steriods. However, there's a constitutional republican democracy underneath that obese empire, just waiting for a new spring training.
The US is a place so many want to live in because of what it achieved. Then, when it seeks more resources to meet the expectations of its growing population, 300 mill and counting, it becomes a villain.
One thing I don't like: people flying Mexican flags on US soil without the American flag at same height. They do it on Cinco De Mayo here in some places, and I think they ought to live in the country whose flag they fly, or, whose flags they fly. On one hand they have labored here, however, what they inherited to labor over was labored upon by every wave of immigrant population who came before, regardless of their ethnicity, race, creed or color.
I think we've lost track of what it is important to have, to retain and to sustain. Lots of the things the Bush Administration has been trying to sustain seem to be what industries vested in the old structure want to keep, or wring out of the compost rind of that old system. I keep monitoring Russia's new-sovietist regime because I think they have been exploiting the same rind. When the rind uses the fruit for nourishing itself (i.e. a dictatorship or oligarchy of scions in US or Russia or China) it neglects the seeds (children and descendants) and the soil (intangible and material infrastructures) and feeding of the people who constitute the roots, trunk, branches and leaves of the tree for feeding the end-user top-dog elites. People who knowingly do this and don't give back liberally to the tree as a whole have cashed in their souls. Once that's been done, they are no longer really part of the tree because they've separated themselves from her, seeing themselves above the rest. They become tree-eating insects. And requires that a tree (constitutional republican democracy) engage in some political-economic pest control.
Well, there you have it, another organic model of our polity.
May 5, 2007 11:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
Mike, what happened to the love that flowed just a couple of posts ago? If we are the people that 'they' came over here to be like, then lets act like we would wish all people to act, with tolerance, helpfulness and understanding towards those who are new and scared in a strange land. The more people can adjust and adapt at their own pace, the more they will integrate with, rather than separate from, society. It so easy for us to make laws and wars against 'them', even as we go to our churches and malls and pat each other on the back for having the good sense to be born here, in the land of the superpower. Would it really kill us to just show some kindness and understanding?
“Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living.” Omar Bradley
May 5, 2007 11:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
The love Hannah Arendt spoke of is about love being non-political.
Don't isomorph my comments on flying the Mexican flag with counter-American imperialism. I don't mean that at all. Coming to America marching and saying "we built America" while flying the Mexican flag without the US flag alongside her, is very political. I am not implying deportation. I am implying the ethos of nations as discrete and decided checks and balances on excessive units of power in the world. The Spanish Conquistador ethos that is still entrenched in Mexican power ethos is imperial to the hilt.
Arendt's observation was in the Hitlerian context. I think in some sense Hitler's merging of all nations under the Reich was the sort of political predation that any nation at any time may be tempted to, and it is the most virulent and lethal totalitarian imperialism.
Elsewhere you will see that I have come out against the neocon imperialist premises, and have even several times challenged the journalist Robert Kaplan's neocon war cry for the GWOT as an imperial effort by the US. Never got much of a response from anyone here on that challenge, since it probably raised the uncomfortable reality that Democrats as well as Republicans have their imperial internationalisms.
That's a good point for all to hear. However, I do not believe they should have to wish to be like us to live here. Assimilate, get along, and contribute, yes, but imitate, not necessarily. Yet as a matter of humanity protecting order via international checks and balances I do believe in distinct nations and respect for the one that extends you a living, a domicile and help. At the same time I believe that hospitality should not be exploitative. I've worked with undocumented workers and have thrown bags of cement with them and hauled rock, stone and fixtures with them. I've personally watched the physical maladies that our mutual employer allowed them to live with. When I brought over the counter Zantac to a guy suffering from an long standing ulcer, the charming bilingual 'labor runner' found out about it and felt upstaged. It didn't bode well. The workers also lived en masse in mobile homes to get by, and sent money home. I heard stories of some folks falling off trucks and dying and getting buried right there.
People who come to the US and endure such hardships tell us a story about where they came from, don't they? Where is the discussion of Mexican accountability for hospitality to their own folks in the equation? And I'd equate the humorous barb by Putin regarding Bush's wish that his country should be more like Iraq with one that lampooned the notion of flying an unaccompanied Mexican flag on US soil, as if it were nationally prescriptive for a hopeful cultural future. It boggles the mind.
That is fair enough, minus nationalism that negates or excludes a host country, and signals a dominionist attitude toward a country you did not build, but worked by inheritance from others who built it. No doubt non-citizens help the economy, and help build. However, if they had it together in their homeland to any reasonable degree, they would not be streaming over the border. Where is Mexico's responsibility here?
If undocumented workers and illegal immigrants do not seek US citizenship but to send its money into the Mexican economy while bringing Mexican political assumptions to the United States as a condition of their laboring here, I find that not only a bad faith posture toward the US, but a self-destructive move. Turning the place you find refuge and work in toward the sort of society you came from, will slowly but surely turn your destination into your original flight.
Go on and celebrate Cinco De Mayo and have a blast. Fly the Mexican flag --its a 1st Amendment right. But don't do it without showing respect at the same time to the US flag as standing for a host to the celebration. Many do this, and I deeply appreciate it. I've called for their hospitable treatment, and to improve it here. However, with that comes a responsibility to keep the values that built this country. Many do, and for that I'm grateful. This of course should lead us to other 'citizens' we should discuss, and how well they treat the indigens of other nations: the multi-national corporation rooted in the US yet exploiting foreign labor like animals, wherever that happens. Relativistic morality seems alright for them abroad, but boy do they b.s. us here at home with their PR and advertisements about being responsible players.
You must know my point wasn't about flashing barrels. It was about preventing flashes in the future. Orderly assimilation both ways should be the way of it, and that includes respect for the core integrity and makeup of the nation you go to live, work, study, hike in or do business in.
On that, I defer to the wisdom of your question. You are right on with that, and I'm sorry if my words seemed to imply otherwise to you. My bad writing.
May 6, 2007 12:44 PM | Reply | Permalink