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> ... ample opportunity to amend the Constitution to say otherwise over those intervening centuries. That's true — but realistically it's well-nigh impossible

> ... ample opportunity to amend the Constitution to say otherwise over those intervening centuries. That's true — but realistically it's well-nigh impossible to get the requisite 2/3 of the House and Senate and 3/4 of the states' legislatures to agree on just about anything. Moreover, recent events have shown that soi-disant conservatives and MAGA adherents hold very different views than centrist- and center-left Democrats about how the country (and the world) should be governed; ditto their respective counterparts in other countries. So pragmatically, if we want to keep a functioning United States going as a unified country in a technologically-globalized 21st century, it seems appropriate to not take a cramped view of federal governing authority. Some in the U.S. have argued for splitting the country into Red- and Blue Nations. That seems like just kicking the can down the road: It's not implausible that in the future, a Putin- or Orbán-like strongman figure would climb to power in Red Nation, proclaiming that Red Nation should militarily conquer Blue Nation to restore the (re-)United States to its former glory so that it could resume pursuing the Manifest Destiny that God (supposedly) intended all along.

philwelch 3y ago
The Constitution has been amended 27 times, most recently in 1992. And there’s no need to divide the United States into two; the United States is already divided into fifty states, each of which can have its own laws. And in my view, it has consistently been the Democrats who are hellbent on imposing their preferred laws on the red states, just as they’re the ones who consistently advocate ignoring the constitution, packing the Supreme Court, and creating and strengthening an unelected, extra-constitutional fourth branch of government that saves them the need to actually win elections and convince the American people to go along with their ideology. The Republicans haven’t been great about this either but at least they’ve taken some steps towards restoring the constitutional republic.

philwelch 3y ago

The Constitution has been amended 27 times, most recently in 1992. And there’s no need to divide the United States into two; the United States is already divided into fifty states, each of which can have its own laws. And in my view, it has consistently been the Democrats who are hellbent on imposing their preferred laws on the red states, just as they’re the ones who consistently advocate ignoring the constitution, packing the Supreme Court, and creating and strengthening an unelected, extra-constitutional fourth branch of government that saves them the need to actually win elections and convince the American people to go along with their ideology. The Republicans haven’t been great about this either but at least they’ve taken some steps towards restoring the constitutional republic.