I think the biggest threat to the USA is not one a lot of people feel comfortable bringing up: the absence of a viable opposition party with the current *real* political party consisting of people who are lighter, softer, saner versions of the jackasses who've taken a Loyal Opposition off the table.
The US system has a tendency in the real world to turn into dictatorships if left to itself, and in this case without a meaningful opposition to provide rational (as opposed to Coughlin-Forrest politics) critiques of existing ideas, that tendency, aided and abetted by a return to the Nixonian idea of the Presidency is quite dangerous for the US political and economic system as a whole. For without a viable opposition in the USA's standard New World oligarchical system, the big corporations will move in to fill the void. As they've inbuilt structures of activism and a great deal of economic and political power to become the Disloyal Opposition without real means to stop them.
The complicating factor people overlook where economic recovery is concerned is that a lot of the economies devastated by World War II are bouncing back, meaning the US economy has to adapt to a world where it's no longer the only major economy and thus also a world once more of Great Powers. This in turn means the US economy has simultaneously to adapt to this and to confront the degree to which the Liberal Consensus wasn't much different than today bar corporate welfare being actually meaningful in some senses.
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Date: 2011-05-11 06:38 pm (UTC)The US system has a tendency in the real world to turn into dictatorships if left to itself, and in this case without a meaningful opposition to provide rational (as opposed to Coughlin-Forrest politics) critiques of existing ideas, that tendency, aided and abetted by a return to the Nixonian idea of the Presidency is quite dangerous for the US political and economic system as a whole. For without a viable opposition in the USA's standard New World oligarchical system, the big corporations will move in to fill the void. As they've inbuilt structures of activism and a great deal of economic and political power to become the Disloyal Opposition without real means to stop them.
The complicating factor people overlook where economic recovery is concerned is that a lot of the economies devastated by World War II are bouncing back, meaning the US economy has to adapt to a world where it's no longer the only major economy and thus also a world once more of Great Powers. This in turn means the US economy has simultaneously to adapt to this and to confront the degree to which the Liberal Consensus wasn't much different than today bar corporate welfare being actually meaningful in some senses.
-Revcekar-