As the economic plight of the average American has worsened, the lies we’ve been told about the economy’s supposed recovery have become increasingly brazen.  This has widened the gulf between Americans and their elected leaders.  But is the disconnect severe enough to provoke a revolution at the ballot box?

From Monty Pelerin’s World

Rick Ackerman raises the issue of whether the American people have had enough and are ready to rebel:

And yet, even for those who care more about Snooki and the Weiner affair than about the state of the union, there is no ignoring the by-now overwhelming stench emanating from Washington, D.C. We have watched the most liberal president in the history of the Republic secure the fortunes of the bankers, even as the working man has seen his income erode in real terms, his debts mount to the point where tens of millions of homeowners may eventually face bankruptcy. As the economic plight of the average American has worsened, the lies we’ve been told about the economy’s supposed recovery have become increasingly brazen.  This has widened the gulf between Americans and their elected leaders.  But is the disconnect severe enough to provoke a revolution at the ballot box?

Properly, I believe, he answers this question in the negative. There can be no solution at the ballot box where the country is divided approximately 40-40-20 in terms of percentage representation of Dems, Repubs and Independents. Any third party effort virtually assures a win for the party most opposite the third party. A Tea Party candidate, for example, would guarantee a Democrat win because he would siphon votes from the Republican pool. Ross Perot is how Bill Clinton won.

Thus, change is likely to come via a collapse and Mr. Ackerman and I are in agreement here. Mr. Ackerman cites Andrei Amalrik who correctly predicted the Soviet Union revolution and now predicts a similar fate for the US:

“There is another powerful factor,” wrote Amalrik, “which works against the chance of any kind of peaceful reconstruction and which is equally negative for all levels of society: this is the extreme isolation in which the regime has placed both society and itself. This isolation has not only separated the regime from society, and all sectors of society from each other, but also put the country in extreme isolation from the rest of the world. This isolation has created for all—from the bureaucratic elite to the lowest social levels—an almost surrealistic picture of the world and of their place in it. Yet the longer this state of affairs helps to perpetuate the status quo, the more rapid and decisive will be its collapse when confrontation with reality becomes inevitable.”

There is no way to know when, what or how an event triggers what will result in a political collapse, nor what the process will look like. The distrust and unrest amongst citizens is palpable and grows by the day. Relief is impossible via the ballot box but will not be tolerated forever. Some other channel will open up. An economic event will could provide the catalyst. Whether that is some macro event like government missing payments promised payments is impossible to predict. It could be a banking system failure or rampant inflation. On the other hand, it could develop as a local event that spreads. Examples might be a public union protest turning violent or welfare recipients demanding higher payments. When you are in a tinder box, even the smallest spark can produce tragedy. Suffice to say, we are short on time and walking through a minefield. Herb Stein’s observation that something that can’t continue won’t applies here.

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