I typically try and avoid political debate because it's generally useless, but at this point I have to say something. Don't hate me, I'm just a messenger of practical reason.
If you don't want to read a medium-length illustration, just read this:
I don't think reasonable, educated men and women in the United States have any option but to emigrate. They are not going to be able to fix their country.
Why? The situation is irreperable because
unreasonable men and women now outnumber reasonable men and women in the nation. The country is now in a positive feedback loop of uneducatedness
that will be irreversible, because
the uneducated, as Mercutio points out, have control of the very education system!
Has democracy failed Americans? No Americans have failed democracy. It might be better to say that religion, and other non-critical behavioural tendencies like partisanship have doomed it. Afterall, there are still some Americans that are reasonable and fully capable of making moral decisions. Bear with me and I'll explain.
You see many people don't understand that a religious man, is inherently incapable of making moral decisions. A moral decision differs from a religious one in important ways
even when they result in identical action. You see for a decision to be moral it has to be self-legislated (self-imposed) and freely so. The only way to do this, as Kant points out quite thoroughly, is through the use of reason --sorry religion doesn't qualify. It's almost curious that religious Americans don't appreciate this, because you don't even need to read Kant's
Critique of Practical Reason to have this explained. Luther, the father of the majority of the cults practiced in the U.S., iterated this himself! In fact it is one of the most important principles of most non-Catholic Christian doctrines. Perhaps religious Americans are simply incapable or unwilling to make the necessary extrapolations. Of course Luther thought we were doomed (one way or another, heaven or hell). Kant pointed out that God gave Men the faculty of reason, which distinguishes us from animals, ostensibly with the intent that we use it to make moral decisions, since it isn't actually useful for much else (no Darwin yet). This allows us to overcome the doom of predestination, reasserts free will, and offers the beginnings of the glimmering hope of Modernity and Enlightenment, and is crucially necessary to set the stage for all sorts of social engineering, particularly democracy.
Now its obvious that when the majority of people in a democracy, are incapable of making moral decisions you have a serious, serious problem. Democracy was engineered as a social system with the aim of reconciling the interests of all individuals in a society in such a manner that the sum of their interests is coincident with the interests of the constituent individuals, as were its brothers communism, capitalism, totalitarianism, and anarchy (the last, at least, in its more commonly advocated iterations). However, individuals who cannot make their own moral decisions obviously cannot reconcile with others. This is why we're having so much trouble with some Muslims right now. And its also why a large group of Americans are every bit as bad as the Muslims. Consequently, I am glad I live in Canada where we are content to let idiots fight idiots, but I digress.
The fact is that democracy won't work when people vote in the absence of reason. What I have tried to point out is that implicit in the construction of democracy is the belief that human beings are rational, and consequently moral individuals, and that religious people are neither. And neither are the wierd political partisans of the United States (without a doubt the wierdest human animal in my opinion --I actually have deep sympathy for religious people, but none for partisans). So, the specific problems you have in America are partisanship and religion and they have achieved critical mass as of today.
The closest analogue is the Arabic world where democracy isn't working very well either. And it won't work, because unreasonable people (i.e. religious people) are inherently free to use unreasonable means like aggressive applications of force. As soon as one does that, reconciliation is abondoned and democracy is impossible.
I don't think Americans really understand what the division in their nation truly indicates. Reason has been abondoned by one side, and with it the hope of the reconciliation of individual interests and consequently democracy itself. The American invasion of Iraq is that most obvious indication of the failure of democracy in the United States or, more accurately, the American population's tacit endorsement of it. Bans on same-sex marriages are another good indicator, or the interest in banning abortion. It's not whether or not a majority of people opposed these things or not that make them such important barometers, but the fundamental shifts in the very
way in which American citizens are now thinking that these recent events and movements enshrine. That people even think of interfering with others in such ways, in the absence of rational justification, is terrifying to any liberal (which I use in its original philosophical sense, not as its contemporary political epithet).
Democracies don't work that way; they
can't work that way. Such things should simply not be possible in a proper, enlightened democracy. It's as if the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and Modernity never even existed. And, for the minds of the majority of Americans, it is unlikely they will ever exist again in the foreseeable future, because the unreasonable people are the majority and the majority controls the education system and the thought of the next generations. It's a positive feedback loop of idiots, and the intrinsic problem with an idiot is that you can't fix him, but you can't kill him, because deep down, somewhere, he's human even if he acts like an animal. In the end you just got to let them take care of each other. And leave them behind to do it of course.
