Is America as we knew it lost forever?

You have to admit it's not looking real good...

Too many people here are defeatists and ready to give up. Why would anyone want to vote for a party that has given up on the country?

American Progressives in general, and the Democratic Party specifically, don't need defeatism. So I assume you are going to drop the label and the participation in American politics. C'est la vie.

You now leave yourself with two choices: Worship the system that YOU willingly have ceded control to, or move? Which one is it?

I remember that when I was a kid in high school, the history teachers used to talk about the fact that all great 'empires' eventually failed - the Roman Empire, Czarist Russia, etc. - and that someday, the United States would not be the country as we knew it then.

I never accepted that - I always thought, "Well, yes, those others -- but not the United States, beacon of democracy!

Well, I was wrong - and I NEVER thought it would happen in my lifetime.

We have lost our traditional values, we have become a nation divided. We have lost our traditional allies, our stature in the world as a model of democracy. The American Dream is now something only attainable by the wealthy and, in too many cases, is attainable only be stepping on the backs of fellow citizens to achieve that wealth.

I believe there is a back-lash to what's going on right now, and that there will be a turnaround with a new (Democrat)Administration. But the damage that's been done is so horrific, it will never be set truly right again.

With the inauguration of a new Democratic president in 2008, we will all be back at Square One. It will be 1776 again, and we as a nation will have to struggle to create a free and democratic society from the ground up.

The great empires eventually fall,it is the nature of things. What we create or in the future remains to be seen. We can never go back. Empires failed when they get themselves into similar situations. Being too spread out in the world is one of the main ways.

Much to my chagrin I thought about this and had to conclude that yes, the America I grew up in and believed in is gone (become a homeland) but not, to my mind, irretrievably so. The forces of evil were much too effective in eroding trust in the institutions that made us what we were.
To be sure, people have always complained about the government, but by and large they believed in it as a force for good, same with the press-or the media as it's called today- and lawyers; even religious institutions which were subverted into mechanisms for the acquisition of power.It's going to take some work, but I have to believe that we can once again become the sort of place for which the preamble to the declaration of independence is a mission statement and an outline for a just society.

in 1979 when Ronnie Raygun sold america to the highest bidder. Get ready for the future america, where old money families rule, poor houses abound with a slave labor like work fare and the only jobs will be those for the sales of imported goods. Where no child left behind will mean that children will be trained to work for $.50 a day and putting in 18 hour days. There will be 2 classes in america, the extremely rich and the beggars. That has been the repiglicans agenda since Hoover.

At least until they are rewritten.

"Why did they let that happen"?

American schoolchildren won't read it at the rate things are going.

At the time,most people lauded McCarthy as a real American hero. Given some distance, we see things more clearly.

If you vote YES, I don't even see how you consider yourself a Democrat, or why you even are posting anymore. If you've given up, it's time to withdraw from politics and move. Your defeatism is not needed or desired by the large majority of Democrats that don't run scared in the face of opposition and don't panic in the face of a fight.

or the majority of Democrats and Progressives that haven't given up. Don't project your defeatism and fear on the rest of us.

Seems pretty straightforward to me. That's defeatism.

country. If you think things are hunky dory, so be it.

Puhleez.

then it is you that is truly lost.

It's really not that hard to figure out.

The first sentence said 'you appear' and the second one started 'If'.

Maybe we can rise up from the ashes and create a better society...one that actually adheres to it's principles.

Ya never know.

"It's the end of the world as we know it. And I feel fine." -REM

Once we get the morans out of Washington, we rebuild and we make damn sure those jackasses never have even the slightest opportunity to make a comeback.

That America can once again become a beam of light for the world.

where there's a class of people who work to serve a second class of people, who then all want to be in the class of people that owns the means of service in the first place.

capability to rebound.

Some people her think we are giving up. I will fight to the death. All I'm saying is America is changed forever and we will have to build a new one - with better safeguards, more checks and balances - so this can NEVER happen again!

But this will never happen unless we can have a fair election. The alternative is civil war.

for a while in America.

The 1960s/70s had COINTELPRO to undermine activists and other spying on activists. Watergate.

The 1940s had the internment of the Japanese.

The 1860s had President Abraham Lincoln shutting down presses.

The early 1800s had President John Adams putting people in prison for sedition.

one that tries to live up to its ideals and another that uses those ideals as a smokescreen to commit atrocities.

leo straus, grover norquist, pat robertson saw to it.

they changed the reality on the ground -- even if we return to a liberal majority -- the country remains immutably changed in this post modern, post industrialized and arguably post information age society that we live in.

We could see the pendulum swing back to broad support of progressive values, given how abusive this administration has been towards everything American. Or maybe just the pendulum swinging back to barely-majority political support of a progressive agenda, which is I think a reasonable hope right now.

Should that political majority happen our options run from gradually unraveling the economic, political and ethical rancidness of the past twelve years, all the way to undoing the past twenty-five years of failed free-market idolatry and phony-values authoritarianism, and even further into a much more progressive state should broad support of progressive values take hold as I think it may be. There are a positive range of things that could happen. Our country could change for the better.

On the other hand there are some things that can't be undone, like the world now appropriately looking at us as tainted. We did attack another country based on a pile of very intentional lies, and we have been torturing people to death. That has permanently sullied our history and reputation and can't be undone. Even if we become what we were, or even better than we were, the stain will remain and every time anybody else looks at us, either as a country or even in some sense individually, that will be an historical mark and additionally they'll never be sure that we might elect similar 'leaders' and possibly do it again.

We can regain our country's operation. We can regain our country's destiny to be something better than some selfish dog-eat-dog mentality, but it will be a long time, probably not in our lifetimes, before we can ever regain our reputation, and never completely. Look at the reputations of other countries. Their reputations last for decades if not centuries. Hopefully it will only be decades.

We can change for the better. We cannot erase history. We'll have to live with it.

I realized that when Bush was "re-elected". America is not the country I grew up in and it never will be the same again. Even if a Democrat happens to gain the Whitehouse in 2008, it will take years to heal the wounds that Bush has inflicted and I don't think all of them can be healed.

I left America because of what Bush has done. That tells you how seriously I believe this.

and how did we know it?

It depends a lot on one's age and race and gender and sexual orientation, doesn't it?

Each person has to read the question and interpret it themselves. I'm just trying to get a gauge on how people are feeling today with the latest revelation. I am really depressed but I'll snap out of it soon. After all, it's almost Fitzmas!

but my consciousness begins with Reagan, so it means something different to me than it would mean to someone who remembers Roosevelt or Kennedy!

However, there should have been a category for "what we thought it was." I don't know that this country has changed as much as some people want to believe, because I think that we've all been disillusioned about what this country was actually like before as a comparison. There's been a lot of crap divulged recently that I wasn't aware of; so, my perspective of what this country was like when I was younger was definitely "looking at the world through rose-colored glasses."

(I hope you can all understand what I'm trying to say here.)

Regards,

RJnAbbysNana