Jim Hodgson takes on, in his Comment of the Day, the unpleasant topic of where the current escalating divisiveness may take us. It immediately reminded me of this New York Times fantasy feature from 2021, where several artists—and you know the ideological orientation of artists—were asked to “redesign the American flag.” One artist wrote,

The colors of our flag are intended to stand for unity, valor and justice. The gray, monochrome flag represents America surrendering to its fall from power and loss of the ideals it once stood for….

He produced this design:

No, that’s not a mistake, that’s it. Another flag was this:

Here is Jim Hodgson’s Comment of the Day on the post, “On The Looming Indictment Of Donald Trump”…

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“What exactly makes us a country?”

From the perspective of our federal overlords, this country is approaching the big government perfection that has been the objective of politicians since Hamilton first moved us toward empire, and Lincoln and the Radical Republicans advanced the federal hegemony against the interests of the states.

State governments have been largely complicit as well. The South, of course, was forced to remain in the Union by force of arms, and only allowed to “return” to the Union (the one they supposedly could not leave) after they wrote new constitutions acceptable to the US government. The increasing centralization of power in Washington brought the states to line up like hogs at the federal money trough. Acceding to the popular election of US senators and not moving to counter the myriad instances of federal overreach decade after decade, has led us, like the proverbial frog in slowly warming water, to the boiling point we now face. The desired outcome is for us to capitulate our freedom for the “security” of a totalitarian socialist state.

Many of us, simply, will not comply. America is heading toward a de facto, if not de jure, Balkanization, with all the ugliness that implies. The United States have become the Divided Special Interests, with Big Brother pulling the strings and manipulating the factions and “useful idiots” needed to further advance federal hegemony as they further erode personal liberty. At some point (“…maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon…”) a state, or group of states or portion of a state will decide that the federal government has in fact committed, “a long train of abuses and usurpations,” which reduce it to the “absolute despotism” that justifies revolution. I believe many totalitarian Democrats hope to provoke such a response as a pretext to a crackdown on the “MAGA Republican white nationalists” bugaboo they have conjured up, i.e., the rest of the country that doesn’t want to go along with their program. They should be careful what they wish for.

Lincoln himself upheld the right to revolution in 1848 when he stated, “Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and to form one that suits them better. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can, may make their own of such territory as they inhabit. More than this, a majority of any portion of such people may revolutionize, putting down a minority intermingling with or near them who oppose their movement.”

I believe the Founders would be appalled that we have tolerated oppressive federal power as long as we have, and that so many people today willingly embrace Big Brother.