Our Choice

Periodically, nations decide who they wish to be.

In the 1860s, for instance, the United States decided (via force of arms) that it would not be a country of planters in a semi-feudal agricultural economy. Rather, it would be an industrial, bourgeois, classical liberal, free labor society with all the good and ill that entails. By like token, in the 1940s and ‘40s, many European nations struggled with the question of whether they wished to be empires, with potent overtones of fascism, or modern states. With one or two exceptions, they choose to be states, again for good or ill.

I think that today, the United States faces a similar choice. The next elections will determine whether we, as a people, wish to be the inhabitants of an America which embodies the best ideals of the Founding Fathers . . . of reason, and humanity, and tolerance . . . or which is, instead, the America of this Administration.

That is to say, a plutocratic theocracy headed by hypocrites, thieves, and bullies.