Predicting History

[amenirdis]

History isn't over. Despite loud proclamations twenty years ago that the end of the Cold War marked "the end of history" and the beginning of a time when everything would essentially be stable and the same forevermore, that hasn't happened, and it won't. The one thing we can be certain of about the future is that it will be different from today

Comments

[amenirdis]

Thank you

[amenirdis]

Yes, when there's talk about going to a 6th Republic, people don't say it's impossible. They only wonder if it's necessary or the best option.

And we can never get to the discussion of if it's necessary or the best option or what it should look like because even bringing it up is considered INSANE! And so I fear that when it happens we will make all decisions on the fly, unconsidered, because there is no time to consider and no time to decide what we want, only time to react.

[bwinter]

On a slight tangent, what do you think of the European Union? It's definitely an attempt to come up with a new D, consciously evolving new forms and ways of government - both upwards and downwards in region-scale from the national ones - to let the region climb to a putative next evolutionary stage. Politics get in the way all the time, of course, but as a thought experiment gone wild, it's certainly interesting.

[amenirdis]

I agree with you that it's a new D, a new way of trying to deal with the dual issues of braided economies and scale. I think Federation is a possible answer. In a century we'll know how it works! But I think it's a good theoretical solution to handling both regional identity and different needs with the demands of a broader economy.

[geonncannon]

Barring Congress rejecting it, the borders of the US WILL change slightly. Puerto Rico voted to become a state and Obama has promised he would support it. So there's a chance we'll have fifty-one states before all this is over (or we'll trade Texas for Puerto Rico and we can just leave the flag alone, which would be nice and balanced ;D)

[amenirdis]

And that raises the question, doesn't it? Can you vote to get in but not vote to get out? Ok, the constitution provides no mechanism to leave, but American law is solidly based on the idea that anything that can be enacted can be repealed, even a constitutional amendment. (Prohibition -- we passed it, and then we repealed it.) So I think it's very difficult to argue that if a legislature can vote to go in, it can't also vote to go out.

[paratti]

There's also the Money factor. The Empire that wasn't the white Dominions got independence as fast as it did because we bankrupted ourselves fighting WW2

[amenirdis]

You make a very, very good point about the money. I was just reading about that, doing research for Invisible Wars, that Churchill was told he was bankrupting Britain, at which point he said that if I don't spend this money there won't be a Britain to bankrupt! But our problem on many fronts (like this stupid fiscal cliff) is not that we don't have the money. The problem is that we cannot compromise enough to pass a budget or to spend money on necessary infrastructure

[paratti]

We had a hurricaine hit in 1987. I slept through it in my basement flat of a Georgian house and walked to work. Some trees were blown over and some chimney pots taken out. Most of our electicity and other services are underground and our houses don't tend to be made of wood so they did stand up to the high weather

[amenirdis]

During the Bush years it made sense for emergency relief to go back to the states, because the bottom line was that the feds simply didn't do it. So in my hurricane prone state, we went and bought all the equipment ourselves -- generators, helicopters, everything. If you can't count on the feds to actually do it, you've got to do it yourself. Which of course feeds people being mad about taxes -- what are we paying them for if we've got to buy all the stuff ourselves anyhow?