Back in the late 90s, at the height of the Clinton Presidency, a radical Australian friend of mine opined that the Cold War wasn't really over. It was his belief that as long as there was still one superpower left, the world wasn't safe.
At the time, I thought he was being ridiculous. America was obviously a force for good in the world. Our indomitable economy was able to shrug off the currency collapses in the Far East and Russia and keep chugging along, and thereby prevent a general global recession. We kept the Serbs from carrying out their planned ethnic cleansing campaign against the Kosovars.
Now that I live in George W. Bush's America, I can see he was right.
(more below)
In the last six years, I've seen a group of dangerous radicals sieze control of the government and implement a far-reaching program of domestic tyranny and international conquest. Tens of thousands of people, at home and abroad, have been killed, injured, tortured, and impoverished as a direct result of that program.
There are some who would argue that the current Administration is an aberration. As soon as America wises up, they'll be gone, and everything will be back to normal.
I disagree.
We hope we can turn the GOP out of power, but we still don't know that for a fact. The folks at BushCo sure act like they're going to be in power forever, committing crimes left and right and building up the Presidency into an unchecked autocracy. And even if we do eventually prevail against them, the fact that it happened at all is deeply disturbing. What's more, given the state of instant amnesia prevalant in modern society, there is every reason to believe that the whole thing could happen again ten years from now.
The events of the last six years have proven my Australian friend right. One superpower is one too many. As long as the USA continues to exist, it will continue to be a threat to global peace and freedom.
Ironically, the modern-day Federalists have the right idea. They want to devolve as much power as possible from the federal to the state level, and that's just what we need to do. In fact, we need to go the Federalists one better. We need to dissolve the federal government, and reset the clock to 1776, when there was no federal union, only a collection of independent states.
The federal union was a noble experiment, but it has outlived its usefulness. It's time to bring it to a close.