Can America survive?

Bush, through starting expensive wars and giving tax cuts to the rich, has destroyed American fiscal stability, running huge deficits and radically undermining the American dollar. He has dismantled almost all serious environmental safeguards, failed to address the health crisis and done nothing about the burgeoning prison population that is merely a symptom of growing class and ethnic problems.

Overseas, Bush has demolished any global collective governance system, got the US involved in two vicious wars, and created ideal conditions for the growth of radical Islamic terrorism. He has failed to deal with the North Korean nuclear and missile programs, and he is threatening to attack Iran for its nuclear program while ripping up the only real anti-proliferation program in existence, the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

He has also radically undermined the US Constitution by denying basic civil rights, including turning the National Security Agency against American citizens, and greatly weakened civil rights by the draconian PATRIOT Act.

Opinion on Bush rule has polarised. The now beleaguered hard-Right support their President with growing ferocity, while the rest of America, which is increasingly shaded brown (and there’s another division - increasingly rich whites and increasingly poor browns and blacks) distrusts him. Right now Bush’s unpopularity is just about the only real unifying force in American politics.

However, once Bush is gone this anti-Bush majority will dissolve and the great split down the middle of America will become all the more obvious. The new presumably Democrat president will face extraordinary hostility from the religious-hard-Right who are much less wary of showing outright dissent than the Democrat-Left.

If this new president is Hillary Clinton, currently the Democrat front-runner, who the Right hates with a passion, or Barack Obama, currently running second to Clinton, an African-American, America could well see unprecedented levels of social and political dissent, and perhaps sustained violent opposition.

The right has always been more prone to expressing dissent through violence than the left. Militarism and guns are icons of the right, while the left prefer to organise and debate. While we should not forget that before the extraordinarily success of the September 11 attacks, the worst terrorist attack in American history was the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Okalahoma City in 1995 which killed 168 people. Those prosecuted for the atrocity were associated with a right-wing, white supremacist group acting in revenge for government actions against politico-religious dissenters at Waco.

A Democrat national government, especially if led by a woman or African-American president, introducing new laws to restrict use of SUVS to conserve oil and limit CO2 emissions, while signing up to international treaties on the environment, would push all the buttons of the religious right. Their opposition would run straight into the comprehensive and increasingly militarised federal counter-terrorism system now in place. It is a recipe for unprecedented political upheaval.

With all these pressures, internal and external, can America remain as a unified nation? Will states and regions, increasingly polarised in their popular sentiments, opt out of the national system. Would rich, smart, progressive California, in itself one of the ten largest economies in the world, be better off alone? Should the wealthy, socially progressive region of New England pull out of the union leaving behind the ever poorer and ever more reactionary Bible Belt states to fend for themselves?

If America suffers the economic, socio-cultural and political meltdown that seems increasingly likely, will the fragile idea of national unity give way to a new sectarianism as those who can do so take to the lifeboats?

American nationalism was born of revolutionary war, and then held together by military force, economic prosperity and global power. Under the combined pressure of external decline and domestic economic and political turmoil, will this great creation - like its erstwhile Cold War adversary - fall apart?

And a final question for those of is who live in that fair land - Australia. Under Prime Minister John Howard Australia has increasingly shifted into the US orbit. In every meaningful way - international relations, environmental policy, economic policy, social policy, cultural behaviour - Australia has gone down the American road. Australia’s own unique experiment in co-operative socio-economic development is being abandoned and a market-driven, American-style model put in its place.