Andrew Sullivan linked to a post by Nate Silver concerning American trust in various institutions. Most institutions are at 20% or below, including the Presidency and the Congress (and organized religion too), while the highest ranking institution is the military, at 52%.
That leads me to this thought. If we don't manage to make the sensible reforms in the next few years to turn around our economic, political, and cultural decline, as I mentioned in my last post, then it is likely that we could experience down the road at some point what would essentially be a military coup in order to establish law and order, in what would probably be a turbulent and increasingly disordered society. The main reason for this would be that law and order trumps everything else when the chips are down.
The closest model for this would probably be something like the fascist National Socialist takeover in Germany in the 30s. I think we are very capable of this, as were the intelligent, religious, and desperate citizens of Weimar Germany. (Some would say that we came close to this during the last eight years, under the fascist-minded Dick Cheney.)
As I said before, the urgency of the now.
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