Was there ever a United States of America?

 

Emphasis on United? No, not really.

It was doomed before it even existed, in the 17th century, the moment a black slave set foot on soil that would eventually become part of the USA. Importing slaves from Africa was the Original Sin. 

In a thinly populated country, the plantation owners believed they had no choice if they wanted labor to work in their fields. White indentured servants wouldn't do it. You couldn't hire freeborn people for that kind of work. All that. Jut the same, they were spiking the country that had yet to be born. 

As to the morality of the slave trade: it was understandable; it was immoral. But more to our point today, it set in motion the situation that led to where we are now. The Not-United States.

History, right up to the current news, shows that an African tribal culture cannot be grafted onto a European-derived republic. It has never worked; it does not work.

What about the great experiment in self-government created by Jefferson, Madison, Washington, Hamilton, and all the rest of the founders? It was as brilliant a start as any nation has ever had. But there was no United States even after Independence. The states could barely be persuaded to join in a federal union. The tensions between North and South were always there; sometimes subdued, sometimes sharp. Only a series of compromises (most notably the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and that of 1850) held the union precariously together, until finally it snapped.

The War Between the States "settled" the matter only by brute force, culminating in something close to terrorism by the North. For 20 years after the war the South was occupied territory, its governance turned over to northern carpetbaggers and blacks. This was not a United States.

 

I'll own that there was a relatively brief stretch when we were something like a cohesive country. For an arbitrary start date, I'll say 1900, when the War generation was mostly gone and personal memories of Reconstruction, so-called, were fading. The great immigration tide, which transformed the demography of the North, yet consisted largely of Europeans who came here to become Americans.

World War II probably postponed the dissolution. Americans believed they were fighting for civilization itself. Despite a few race riots and zoot suit riots, they overwhelmingly pulled together.

The era of a Something-Like-United States ended -- again, to choose an arbitrary date -- about 1960.

Unlike the majority of our population now, I remember the pre-1960 America. I was a child, but some childhood memories remain vivid. It was nothing like the super-Balkanized mess we live in today. 

In my view, it cannot be put back together again. I sympathize with people who consider themselves patriots and want to believe in a restoration of the old America, but they are far outnumbered by others who not only don't know what the old America was like, but think of it as a model of everything that was racist and sexist and imperialist.

It's time to let go of warm fantasies. 

Original Sin has caught up with us. Cultural Marxism rules the national institutions. The federal system is dead, Washington, D.C. the sun around which we all revolve.

Many people don't accept these things, but they are powerless. The national political class may yet discover what people are capable of when they feel they have no other option. We are heading for either civil war or repression on a near-totalitarian scale. The only alternative is an agreed-on set of rules whereby states or other jurisdictions can peacefully and legally detach themselves from what they deem intolerable.

Secession. Peaceful, legal secession. We have to make it possible ... not easily or at a whim, but when certain criteria are met.

We don't have much time left.