I originally wrote this for another of my blogs, which has a grand total of zero readers. I apologize if it's a little self-indulgent.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) wrote in On the Social Contract that:
"There is but one law which, from its nature, needs unanimous consent. This is the social compact; for civil association is the most voluntary of all acts. Every man being born free and his own master, no one, under any pretext whatsoever, can make any man subject without his consent. To decide that the son of a slave is born a slave is to decide that he is not born a man.
"If then there are opponents when the social compact is made, their opposition does not invalidate the contract, but merely prevents them from being included in it. They are foreigners among citizens. When the State is instituted, residence constitutes consent; to dwell within its territory is to submit to the Sovereign."
[Rousseau's footnote to the second paragraph: "This should of course be understood as applying to a free State; for elsewhere family, goods, lack of a refuge, necessity, or violence may detain a man in a country against his will; and then his dwelling there no longer by itself implies his consent to the contract or to its violation."]
Many in the United States, particularly the better educated and the more liberal, have thrown up their hands. They feel as if this is no longer their country, and they want to leave, if they have not already done so.
I find fault with the reasoning of some of these "foreigner[s] among citizens" in this country. Rousseau is right that foundations require unity. But those who would permanently depart the United States to avoid the Bush regime are not those who are left out at the outset of a society. The 'social contract' of the United States, as far as can be observed in law, institutions and norms, is made to change.
If you cannot participate in society and politics, you are truly a "foreigner among citizens," and many Americans who want to leave want to do so because they feel left out, disenfranchised. These people, and I have no doubt that many of them are undeniably wonderful, are forgetting the many lessons of liberalism. Slaves were left out. Women were left out. The landless and the poor were left out. But liberals have changed these things, from Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation to FDR's New Deal.
America is feeling the pain of a nation that remembering that it has needs. Clinton's presidency was like a big party. Oral sex seemed like our biggest problem. Our national debt was getting steadily and reliably reduced, with a plan to zero it out as early as 2010. We have awakened, as though hung over, to find that we went to bed with some people we should not have.
Remember, though; a new day will come. In a few short years, we will have a new President, and maybe a new simile. He will have a new legislative agenda, and new policy goals. And he will be a liberal, if God really is on America's side.
So I say to you all, alien Americans of all stripes: don't abandon this country now. She needs you. If all the liberals leave the United States, where will she find the liberalism that sustains her? Fight for what you believe in, and fight for what you know.