August 4, 2011 Does the End of Abundance mean the end of Democracy?

Perhaps.

Or maybe a better way to say it is 'maybe'.

These unsatisfactory answers rely upon the fact that in spite of all I have seen of blind and self-defeating human behaviour I still believe that we have the power to choose our futures and are not victims of fate.

However, in The Limits of Power – Andrew J. Bacevich p.23 writes: "historian Frederick Jackson Turner made the essential point; “ not the constitution, but free land and an abundance of natural resources open to a fit people,” he wrote, made American democracy possible.”( the frontier in American history, NY 1921)

a half century later, the historian David Potter discovered a symbiosis between affluence and liberty. “A politics of abundance,” he claimed, had created the American way of life, “a politics smiled both on those who valued abundance as a means to safeguard freedom and those who valued freedom as an aid in securing abundance.”

… In short, expansion fostered prosperity, which in turn created the environment within which Americans pursued their dreams of freedom even as they argued with one another about just who deserved to share in that dream.”...

In other words, no abundance, no freedom.

No love of freedom, no democracy.

End of story.

Postscript – august 5 the ratings agency S&P lowered the US debt from AAA to AA+ rating; the 1^st time this has ever happened. It looks like the maybe is coming closer to a certainty. The gift the US had of a virgin continent to plunder has been all used up – I hope and pray that we can learn the lessons and make intelligent choices for a new way to live... or else....