The historian James Billington once served as the Librarian of Congress. Billington also wrote a book named The Icon and The Axe. The work of history of the Rus from the arrival of Vikings to lead as royals at Kiev continuing through the arrival of orthodox Christianity and icons of the faithful is a portrait of the evolution of a civilization. Of course we know that Ivan the Terrible began a centuries long battle to recover land and political power lost to the Mongol invaders after Genghis Khan. Americans often lack a sense of history and fail to learn lessons of history, yet we have great world historians such as the late Brit Arnold Toynbee to help us understand the way of the world and its recurrent political cycles of evolution.
The United States experienced a manifest destiny on a lightly populated North American continent and a vigorous, healthful, rising culture of immigrants and new American-born sons and daughters of the frontiers of ingenuity, free holding pioneering, faith and invention. Democracy was a natural fit for people without an oppressive ruling class located in Europe. The American Revolution to cut away that cancer was an example for the world to follow. France and Russia would accomplish the same revolts against corrupt powers of concentrated wealth with different results.
The Russian revolution did not occur in a vacuum. Russia was faced with continental powers and even American military resistance yet overcame only to be co-opted by corrupt an oppressive ruling class leadership and bad political philosophy leading to the termination of individual free enterprise in the Soviet society. Today Russia as an emergent democratic society faces the challenge of an ad hoc global ruling class of concentrated wealth that would buy everything in Russia and repress the locals if they could. The ordinary people of the United States have already experienced their own post cold war reduction under the deregulated power of Wall Street banks, corporations outsourcing production, large scale immigration of cheap labor and bad political leadership that has failed to show any interest in ecological reform of economics or full employment for all U.S. citizens. Wealth and power is increasingly concentrated in the U.S.A. and globalism through a hoc Wall Street networking has progressively reduced individualism in economics in preference for ad hoc corporate and government collectivism.
The Cross and the Switchblade was the title of a film with the actor Pat Boone highlighting the difficult moral choices of a New York gang member. We see that the weapon of choice had moved downscale from the war axe to the switchblade; a smaller, more concealable weapon selected for a modern urban culture. The sort of individualism that might have made Erik the Red a good Viking explorer and outlaw of Iceland had been suppressed by the N.Y.P.D. Individualism in New York and America still flourished in the 1950s- an era before the rise of the World Wide Web and instant global stock trading.
While personal weapons have downsized, in the collective era social weapons have vastly increased in scale. Nuclear weapons, microwave cookers of mass destruction, designer biological society terminators and innumerable others have made the future of humanity dubious. As individualism has been drowned out by collective social environments and as the ecosystem has declined in health with a vast repository of insults by economic activity social irresponsibility has increased. Personal egoism developed as a Wall Street philosophy and the capitalist philosophy of Adam Smith was transformed into a Frankenstein monster running roughshod over the moderate purpose of democracy and its ability to adapt to the dense population era. The poor increased in the United States as wealth was concentrated consistent with party political theory.
Contemporary U.S. political leadership has made this an era aptly titled The Queers and The Rich. The Obama administration made homosexual service in the military and homosexual marriage it's basic political goals along with creating a corporatist national health care infrastructure. It has failed to close Guantanamo Bay incarceration centers or prosecute 2008 Wall Street collapse actors sufficiently to put a single principle in prison. The administration has supported Federal Reserve printing of 90 billion dollars per month of free no interest loans to banks too-big-to-fail and supported development of war in Syria. These are the actions of a nation in Toynbean decline piling of vast national debt and moving into a Universal economic phase of civilization.
Before the modern trends of decline in the U.S.A. Arnold Toynbee wrote his 'Study of History' detailing more than 20 civilizations that had arisen and fallen and considered the reason why. America seems to have little interest in not proceeding to it's own fall. That fall may not coincide with the apocalypse at the end of the world foretold by three or more different religious faiths. Instead the failure of U.S. political leadership may simple place the U.S.A. in receivership or get its population decimated by global warming, mass epidemic or collapse of political institutions and infrastructure.
The major political parties essentially serve the queers and the rich. Neither Democrats nor Republicans are mutually exclusive of ends or means. Democrats are the shop stewards to the global corporatists. With the Obama administration the apostles of global homosexual marriage propping of Wall Street the Democrat Party has no leadership cognizant of ecological economic reform or an interest in full employment. It has not even built trans-continental express bicycle lanes for the unlazy or those with electric engines for their bike.
In the age of fracture with existentialist atheism supporting an ethics of social irresponsibility well serving to concentrate wealth and power ad hoc collectivism has repressed the American ideal of individualism. De facto collectivism in the ad hoc corporatist state has little interest in rebuilding or reforming public works. It seeks tax cuts for the rich-perhaps a flat tax-and is happy to pile up vast public debt to support Defense contractors for superfluous foreign military activities.
Contemporary collectivism with an evolutionary stamp of godless approval finds no reason to believe in meaning or ethics. Nationalism and pursuit of national interest, the conservation of the environment or restoration of democracy through reallocation of the broadcast media wavelengths to citizen podcast broadcasts locally to take away the power of concentrated wealth to concentrate mass communications power a little.
Then there are more elections in 2014 and 2016, yet there are few capable candidates with any visions of national change.
