United States and Conservatism

The Conservative States of America - Richard Florida - Politics - The Atlantic

An interesting article, to be sure, this is.

I, too, find alarming the homogenization that has been occurring geographically, which exacerbates things such as political views.

If someone goes their entire life hearing about one political view, then they are very inclined to agree with it.  If they do not agree with it, they are likely to be ignored and/or move to an area where people would agree.

The sad thing is this nation is too large to be governed by either the left or the right.  Recent primaries have done a good job of eliminating moderates -- both Specter's party switch and subsequent primary defeat were directly because of this.

Honestly, I think the old left/right liberal/conservative paradigm is fundamentally changing, as is the whole international political scene.

Statehood based on the Westphalian model is becoming increasingly outdated with the ever growing reach of globalization.

The four keys of this are territorial integrity, border inviolability, supremacy of the state, and lawmaking supremacy of the sovereign (yeah, I stole that from wikipedia, but I don't feel like looking it up in Leviathan, so sue me).

Territorial integrity and border inviolability are the most rapidly decaying from all of this.  Borders simply don't matter that much nowadays -- USA and Canada is not defended at all, Europe exists more as a series of states than sovereign entities, and global corporations carve out their own niches independent of borders.

Going with the latter point, these corporations dig at both the supremacy of the state and the lawmaking supremacy of the sovereign.  Using lobbyists to write their own laws and pass them, they gain more and more influence over governments, and have an increasingly large stake in the state's lawmaking abilities.

Thus the shifting paradigm is no longer the state vs the individual or the state vs the federal, but rather the corporate vs the individual.  The state is becoming more and more meaningless, more and more toothless.  The healthcare insurance industry wrote the "Obamacare" health care bill themselves, then trashed it when they realized they could do better without it, and perhaps more importantly, realized they had a very good chance of taking it down.  The Deepwater Horizon oil spill was a result of corporate negligence that should have been picked up by regulators, but the regulators are often past and future employees of these entities, and curry favor more than report instances.

The state had its opportunity in both of these circumstances to right a wrong, and failed to correct a lot of major problems in both of them.

The issue isn't more government or less government.  Less government gives corporations carte blanche to do whatever they want.  More government lets them write the laws to do whatever they want.

No, what needs to happen is a fundamental take-back, a declaration of individual sovereignty.