American Dystopia?

...the current governmental failings of gridlock and impasse are not new and are not materially different than they were a half century ago

Quote: President Herbert Hoover

(Pender Island, BC) - Is the United States circling the drain? Some, like Donald Trump, think so. True or not, the election is causing unprecedented anxiety across the country for both progressives and conservatives regardless of political affiliation.

Sue Elias, a licensed clinical social worker in Manhattan, says “I’ve been in private practice for 30 years, and I have never seen patients have such strong reactions to an election.”

Some Trump supporters are even predicting violence and the potential for revolution if Trump loses—as all indications are that he will.

The American “experiment” is failing. Democracy—over-rated—is fatally flawed. Robert Caro has written a four volume (so far) biography of Lyndon Johnson. In the most recent volume Passage of Power (2012) Caro writes:

“the inefficiency of Congress was nothing new, of course—the only period since the Civil War that the pattern had been broken in the Senate, the principle logjam, was the six years of Johnson’s leadership—but now in both Houses of Congress, it was now escalating to a new level, a level at which some analysts were questioning the efficiency of the governmental framework of which Congress was so pivotal a part.
In a book, The Deadlock of Democracy, published earlier in the year the distinguished historian...James MacGregor Burns said that “we are at the critical stage of a nation...mired in governmental deadlock, as Congress blocks or kills...” both Democratic and Republican programs concluding that “we...underestimate the extent to which our system was designed for deadlock and inaction. (emphasis added)”

Writing shortly before Kennedy’s assassination, the columnist Walter Lippman said:

This Congress has gone further than any other within memory to replace debate and decision by delay and stultification. This is one of those moments when there is reason to wonder whether the congressional system as it now operates is not a grave danger to the Republic.”
He concluded that “the Eighty-eighth Congress had “sat longer than any peacetime Congress in memory while accomplishing practically nothing” and that “feebly led, wedded to its own lethargy and impervious to criticism,” it is “a scandal of drift and inefficiency.”

Life magazine wrote that “This scandal has put our whole system of parliamentary democracy in question.” (Caro quotes pp. 346f)

Note that the American electoral system was intentionally set up for failure from the get go. Note, further, that the current governmental failings of gridlock and impasse are not new and are not materially different than they were a half century ago.

In the 2016 election, the best the American people can hope for is that the Republican Party will self-destruct. The alternative would probably be another Civil War—the U.S. is that divided with more than 300 million guns available.

In fact, the U.S. can be geographically compared to the Middle East. After the First World War and the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the winning allies just carved up the territory, creating new countries like Iraq with no consideration for where ethnic or religious populations might be concentrated. As a result, many of the problems of the Middle East can be traced directly to decisions made by the Allies, nearly a century ago.

So it is with the contemporary U.S.

America is essentially four or five disconnected countries. The South is culturally and politically discrete. Then there is California and the West coast. New York and the Northeast and Oregon and the Northwest are two more discrete regions. The rural-dominated Midwest makes up another cultural region.

May Shivu spare America.