It is hard to envision any path that avoids the accelerating failure that is the US at the moment. This isn't to say that none exist, the country has seen dark days before; the Civil War, WWII, a nearly 50 year Mexican Stand-off with the Soviet Union with each side armed with nukes locked - cocked - and ready to rock, and the end of the Nixon administration. (Which history may one day regard as the beginning of the end of the American empire.) The Civil War was perhaps the darkest since the enemy was within, and it seems like that is where we are once again.

The Civil War ended just 148 years ago this June. Though all wars are complex events the heart of that war was simple, slavery. The Confederacy was determined to continue the practice of treating other human beings as property. The horrors that resulted are well documented and all that a compassionate, thinking, enlightened human being can say now is that it was evil. Yet I wonder if the American experiment in democracy ever fully recovered from having that evil written into its Constitution, only to try and remove it by brute force just 84 years later. Echoes of that conflict reverberate loudly in the attitudes of the Republican / T-party and many people smarter than I have remarked that the Confederacy of old are all "red" states today. Back then the enemy of freedom and humanity was the Confederacy, even if they did claim to have god on their side. The Confederacy was a declared enemy of the United States of America.

The enemy of freedom and humanity today, at least in the West, is the Republican / T-party, even if they do claim to have god on their side. And though it would be a stretch to claim they are the declared enemy of the USA, it isn't Democrats or Independents who are signing the petitions to succeed from the Union. It is the Republican / T-party who are determined to bring the government crashing down even though they lost the last election. That same party openly tried to suppress voter turn out in several states. (Why Obama's DOJ hasn't tossed a bunch of people in jail over that clear violation of both the spirit and the laws of the United States is a mystery.) Some of them actually speak fondly of slavery, suggesting it wasn't a horror after all. They are the party willing to prevent poor people from having access to health care in order to protect the tax cuts of the wealthy and preserve the profits of the insurance companies. Every action they take proves them to be the party of the wealthy over the working class, corporations over unions, and war over peace. What ever it was the Republican Party stood for in the time of President Lincoln, it is long past. And the question is, how does the country survive them?

It isn't clear that we can. The current debacle in Washington over the "fiscal cliff" is just one of an unending failure that is bound to happen when a large portion of the government is determined to see the government fail. Which, lets be clear, is the stated goal of the Republican party. They have no desire to see a capable, working, national government that is responsible to all of its citizens and a beacon of freedom and peace to the world.

(I know it is a bit harsh, labeling the Republican / T-party as enemies. I know a lot of people who vote that way, and they are not my enemies in any way. But I don't know how to avoid the conclusion. It was a Democrat who was gunned down in Arizona after the Republican / T-party types ran an add showing her district as an assault rifle target. It is Republican / T-party wing-nut radio and TV types who depict everyone who is not them as evil and beneath contempt. It isn't liberals who talk of armed revolutions or of turning the USA into an armed camp with the police checking documents at every corner. Who is it talking of succession again? And it is almost exclusively Republicans who support the NRA and its need to hold military assault weapons in order to "protect" themselves from hoards of their fellow citizens.)

The best hope is that the last election was a turning of the tide in Republican / T-party fortune and power and that the elections of 2014 will see the end of them.  The problem is 2014 is still 2 years away and there it is no sure thing that the country can endure even with  them being in the minority. Given the gerrymandering that all but assures a Republican House until the last vestiges of that party fade completely, it seems likely the country will have to survive much more than 2 years of them trying to destroy the system, and that may be too long. It has been 12 since Bush II took office and 4 since the Republicans made it their stated goal to sabotage anything government might do (other than fight wars and buy weapons). Can any country last 16, 18, or 20 years with its government in complete disarray? Germany lasted just 12 years after Hitler was appointed German Chancellor. I am not - NOT - suggesting that the Republican / T-party are equivalent to the Nazis in any way, only pointing out that it doesn't take long for a Democracy to destroy itself.

Yes, the Republican / T-party badly lost the last election. But that hasn't swayed them the least little bit. Serving the elite, ignoring any vestige of reality that doesn't align with their world view, hating an elected President and opposing anything he suggests with the burning passion of the truly pathological, is still their only real political policy. Democracy, it seems, is left wanting in the face of fundamentalism; be it religious, political or economic.

Yet what other option is there? A democracy that uses force to silence its critics forfeits it legitimacy. Running the the disciples of Grover Norquest and Ayn Rand out of power using anything but the ballot box would spell the end of a free society. Massive demonstrations demanding, say, the resignation of the T-party members of the Supreme Court, would be about as far as a democracy can go in removing people from office by force.

Roger Ailes, Charles and Bill Koch, and a few others, are lynch pins of right wing propaganda machine. If they if dismantled their machine and moved to a tropical island somewhere the US, and probably the world, would be a noticeably better place. Scooping them up at the end of a gun and dropping them off against their will however, would be a false victory. A true democracy shrugs off propaganda with a free press and an educated electorate. (Scooping them up in hand cuffs for a perp-walk would be an entirely different thing IF there is any real evidence that they have broken any laws ... like bribery or influence peddling.)

One might hope for a Paul-on-the-Road-to-Damascus kind of conversion for some of the leaders of the Republican / T-party types. Imagine the shock running through the right wing world that would flow from Roger Ailes being convinced that running a propaganda machine for greed and hate has put his very soul at risk, with an eternity in hell as his final reward? What if the Koch brother's had a vision that reveled to them the god they follow isn't the one who rewards the faithful with riches, but the one who drove the money changers out of the temple with a whip; who taught that the money grubbing and the merciless would never find their way to heaven?

But that seems unlikely. The Christian story suggests that Saul of Tarsus was actually a rather bright guy, something I'm not sure can be said of any leading the conservative movement. (This is the party of Young Earth Creationism, climate change denying, voodoo economics touting, sustainable energy hating twits who claim that pretty women don't really mind being raped but, if they should, they will not get pregnant.) Worse, the Republican / T-party are the party of a god, what are they going to be converted to? According to these true believers, progressive, open minded thinkers who believe that feeding the hungry, nursing the sick, visiting those in prison, demanding a fair legal system, clothing the naked, cherishing the children, and paying workers a fair and living wage are socialists, liberals, the very spawn of hell - the ones who need to be converted. Saul had another advantage over the current backers of Republican / T-party politics when it comes to being open to having his heart touched by grace, he wasn't obnoxiously wealthy and bent on raping as much of the planet as possible for more personal gain.

Untouched by the ballot box, immune to outright force, and beyond the reach of reason and compassion, it would seem there are no real options, no way to prevent the Republican / T- party from dragging the USA off the path of human progress. We are teetering on the edge of that path already, falling behind the rest of the first world by nearly any measure one cares to make.

And yet ... if a democracy can fail in a dozen years or so, why not the enemies of democracy? The Republican / T-party types have done a huge amount of damage, but we haven't fallen just yet. People are turning away from homophobia, racism, sexism, and the worship of wealth above all else. What if enough people turn away? Fifty-three percent wasn't enough to bring the Republican / T-party types to heel, but maybe 70% will get it done, or even 55%. Who knows where the tipping point lie? Gerrymandering has undercut the legitimacy of Congress, but even in a gerrymandered district a Republican / T-party candidate will fail if people actually think about who and what is getting their vote. Just a little bit of information beyond a 30 second sound bite on TV may be all that it takes, or one day of listening to Rush or watching Fox News with the slightest bit of skepticism. It doesn't take much light to chase away the darkness.

And if we can find that much light, maybe we can find enough to move even further away from this bought-and-sold system. Citizen's United is a horridly bad law ... but even the worst laws can be changed. Once upon a time the USA decided that Probation was the will of god, then a few years later decided it wasn't. The KKK and the John Birch Society still quote the Bible, but no one pays them much attention. Quoting the 2ed Amendment doesn't mean the NRA need be any less irrelevant. We will close our prisons and overhaul the justice system as soon as we discover they are evil failures. (Pretty soon we will have so many people in jail that no family will be untouched, and everyone will know just how ugly our current system has become.) The war on drugs will end in failure, just like all of our most recent wars. We will be a better people when it does.

The USA doesn't have much of a record when it comes to peace, but other countries have unlearned the art of war, we aren't necessarily too stupid to do so ourselves. Even if we are, we are about out of money to support our war loving habits. This one fixes itself regardless of what any politician thinks or says.

All of our problems are self-inflicted. That is no guarantee that we will fix them, but it does suggest that they can all be fixed. All we need is a little light to work by.