1/1/11

Is the American 50 State Empire Disintegrating?

Is the U.S. Crumbling from Within?

Since the collapse of the Soviet Empire, Russian professor Igor Panarin has been predicting that the 50-state American nation, a de facto empire of culturally and politically clashing regions, will likewise collapse, as it was on the verge of doing prior to the Civil War.

The concern that something like this might happened harks back to the very birth of the Nation. In making his case for a strong central government at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, New York delegate Alexander Hamilton, arguing against Virginia anti-Union advocate George Mason (who refused to sign the Constitution), held that a dissolution of the Union into thirteen independent states or three or four distinct confederacies, would not only result in inner strife, but also render the nation defenseless against economic and military aggression from Britain, Spain and France, the major powers at the time. Seven score and seven years later Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union, but only at the point of a gun. And judging by the deepening divisiveness throughout the nation in our day, it would appear that Lincoln's Union didn't quite take.

Consider the growing support for the Alaska Independence Party, the Hawaiian Independence Party, the New England Independence Movement, the South Carolina League of the South, the Free Texas Republic, the Free California Republic of northern California and Oregon, the Cascadia Republic of northwestern states and western Canada, among other lesser known yet equally serious secession movements troughout the country.

Witness further the growing number of reactionary militias, “common law” courts and street gangs; the lingering racial and ethnic divide; the mistrust of government at all levels; the losing war on drugs; the out-of-control influx of illegal immigrants; the costly, open-ended trillion dollar wars on terror; the twisting of the letter and spirit of the Constitution; the Tea Party discontent; the widening rift between Republicans and Democrats, and among Republicans and Democrats themselves; thecall for a second Constitutional convention; the claiming of Federal land by states; the dismal failure of K-12 public education; the virtual collapse of the financial system; the unbridled dishonesty and greed of Wall Street; the worsening unemployment; the bursting college tuition bubble; the deepening housing crisis; the disconnect between the global stock market and the national economy; the spiking of the national debt, the proliferation of parasitical lawyers; the sway of talk-show entertainers masquerading as sages; the increasing accusations of election fraud-- among other signs of political and social cracking at the seams. So maybe Professor Igor Panarin is not the crank that he appears to be.

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