RE DK'S NEW POST THE DREAM

""My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere," she told the management of a Brazilian bank in 2013. That, of course, was the dream that the Europeans hastened to extend to Eastern Europe--economically and culturally a completely different region from western Europe--after the collapse of Communism, and now western and Eastern European voters alike are turning against it.  And that is the dream, as the New Yorker article shows, that West Virginians are fighting against.  They are right to do so.  Both Lincoln and FDR were keenly aware that they were fighting on behalf of the whole world in their struggles to make democracy work here at home--but both understood that the battle had to be won at home first.  We have been losing that battle for the last 40 years, and we have to turn the tide at home before we cam improve our impact abroad.  In an emerging clash of civilizations, we need to make our own civilization work."

It sounds a little like he thinks globalization needs to stop and regroup, around Western Civilization, or 'our own civilization' (maybe he means just America) then fight the clash, which has gotten in its way, before then sallying forth, once again, on the founding fathers, Lincoln, Wilson, FDR, etc., globalization road.

He does appear to think that the Civil War overcame secessionist problems, "...and since we are most certainly not about to fight another civil war, we will have no obvious means of overcoming it...." but, on the other hand, acknowledges that we have secessionist issues again, or still. Whichever it is, we got 'em.

I personally don't see why a civil war situation should not ultimately emerge (not that it would solve any more problems than the first one did), after, say, five years of increasingly violent civil unrest on a nation wide basis.

I certainlhy would not expect a constitutional or political structural reform agenda to emerge that would solve current disquietudes here, any more than the Civil War had solved disquietudes back then.