RayR wrote:Ever heard of BREXIT? The Euro-Zone Debt Crisis? It doesn't seem everyone has come to believe in your Pollyannish idea of International socialism. Expect to see more of it. It will exactly be individual identity and the desire for sovereignty that will be its undoing. The U.S.S.R. tried to hold together a international socialist republic together by force and look what happened to them. There are still commies today that say Russia shouldn't have allowed all those satellite states to secede after the collapse of the U.S.S.R.
And the United States, of course that is its future also. It's too big, its governments are too broke and corrupt, a growing number of people don't want to ruled over by big population centers that they have nothing in common with politically, and the original intent of a voluntary federal republic of sovereign states has been replaced greatly by an overbearing centralized government. There are numerous secession movements rumbling around the world today and the same is true in the U.S., not just break away movements from the union altogether, but states breaking apart into smaller sovereign entities, like New York State and California. I'm all for it!
If you don't believe that secession can lead to a condition where people are better off then you can't believe that those 13 colonies who seceded from England did the right thing.
BREXIT and its impact on the EU is too recent and intertwined with the pandemic's destructive nature on economies all over the world to be proof that it is anything more than America First...let's re-visit in a couple of years to see how the UK and the EU fared after the divorce...
there are two inexorable drivers of the movement towards more globalization and international cooperation, both of which made America great in the first place, and which we will marshal to lead the world into a more collective future: capitalism and democracy...there are more countries in the world now embracing those concepts than any other economic or political models...
few modern developed nations choose isolationism as their foreign policy philosophy...they wouldn't survive, as few nations have the necessary resources to sustain that sort of independence
even China has embraced capitalism, while maintaining communism, and we have seen signs that democracy is alive among many Chinese, but the ruthless suppression by the government is able to drive it underground...keeping a huge population under control by depriving them of basic freedoms has not been proven to be a long-term social construct
we can agree on one idea: people want to be free...and to live life with as few restraints as possible
we just differ on how that desire to be free manifests itself...I think that free men prefer capitalism and democracy over any other model...at least that's what seems to have happened over the past few centuries...monarchies, dictatorships and communism have all declined...
with large populations, scarce resources and environmental catastrophes a way of life all over the world, some form of effective government is a requirement and the participatory form is preferred...this trend will continue as people become more educated all over the world