> But unless the nominee and Congress are pushed forward by social
> currents too strong for them to ignore or defy, nothing will alter the
> default path chosen by the country’s supreme commanders and their
> respective parties.
No question about that. The question is: how to gin up such strong social currents. Will it be more likely to happen with Kerry or Bush as President?
Personally, I think it will be equally hard with either one. What it will take is some sort of event or process which is not in the control of any activists and which has as great an impact on the public as 9/11 but in the opposite direction -- an anti-9/11. What that would be I can't even imagine at this point. Perhaps an utter collapse of the U.S. side in Iraq might do it, but I doubt it.
Of course, that would not be enough. There also has to be a potentially-mobilizable group on the brink of organizing to take power, or at least substantially increase their share of power. I can't see such a group lurking anywhere at this point, either, but maybe I'm overlooking something.
In some ways, this looks like the late '50s; some mobilizable groups were certainly in the wings, but they were invisible to the pundits, who called it the "silent Eisenhower years."
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax