Plenty of ink has already been spilled about the impending societal implosion of Colorado Springs. At least they have the Air Force Academy, so you know where the guns are.
The phenomenon of modern libertarianism never fails to amuse me. Down South, it basically stands for “the government should only be concerned with paying me my Social Security and killing brown people.” Everywhere else, it boils down to “I got mine, fuck you.” A bunch of people go out and read Ayn Rand and get in their heads that somehow they are the chosen few, the elect of society, and that it is only by their magnificence that humanity carries on.
(The exercise of how vital investment bankers are to the benefit of the American way of life is left as an exercise for the reader.)
What it boils down to is that these people want to live in the Wild West. They want to go armed all the time, because they want to have to go armed all the time, because they want no more restraint on them than can be resisted with the wave of a pricey custom 1911 chambered in .357SIG (which any idiot could tell you is nothing but hopped-up +P+ 9mm anyway). And if left far enough out in the woods, they could be let to do that. The problem is that the Senate gives the same representation to one-cow-one-vote square states that it does to places like New York or California, and the Senate is bound by weird and archaic rules that somehow make 59% a minority…but I digress.
The bigger problem are the ones who want to bring their libertarian paradise to the suburbs – or worse yet, the city. And the problem is that in the 21st century, there is a minimal level of government that is absolutely essential to urban life. In order to prevent the tragedy of the commons, or to facilitate a minimal level of public safety, somebody has to take responsibility for things like running water and trash collection. If you want to take a flight, you want to make sure the plane can take off and land – so there’s the FAA. If you turn the tap, you don’t want rat piss and cadmium coming out – and there’s the EPA. You can quibble about the cost or efficacy or whatnot, and no doubt some of the arguments will have merit, but the practical upshot is, you can’t run a 21st century society on 19th century rules.
This is part and parcel of why I think it will ultimately come down to shooting war – because the differences are being sorted out. Big blanket categories like conservative vs liberal, religious vs less so, rural vs urban, Republican vs Democrat, Dixie vs Everybody Else – the red vs blue divide is getting less purple with every passing year. This is why there’s no bipartisanship – because all those years of “bipartisan” legislation were brought to you by Boll Weevil Democrats and Gypsy Moth Republicans and people like Jacob Javits, who would never be a Republican today, and a whole lot of Southern Dems who either switched parties or retired and were replaced.
And here’s the kicker: almost three-quarters of Senate Republicans are only there since the Gingrich Revolution. They never read Sinclair or Oppenheimer or Fenno or “Folkways of the U.S. Senate” – and they are not particularly committed to any of those folkways. And they’ve been a lot less reticent about using the arcana of the Senate to their advantage, and you see what happens – clowns like Dick Shelby asserting a “blanket hold” on 70 – SEVENTY! – Presidential appointments.
The moral of the story is that the current American political institutions were not meant for a pole-seeking two-party system, similar to what they have in Britain or other parliamentary democracies. They were designed around two center-seeking parties with a degree of overlap in geography, ideology, and the like. And when you try to fit a 19th century system onto 21st century world, you shouldn’t be surprised when it creaks and groans – and ultimately doesn’t start up in the morning.