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You happen to know the main people who were opposed to slavery were CHRISTIANS? Ahh shit, asking a leftist about a history question is pointless. John Brown was a great man, oh my gosh and guess what? I'm a fundamentalist Christian! Paul Hill was great too =)I don't understand how Americans can expect to unite the country when different regions have such different fundamental views. Honestly, the USA is being held back by the southern states; if your centers of education and tertiary industry (the north east and california) decided policy then the country would be in a much better condition. But, what Americans perceive to be virtues are in fact weaknesses (patriotism, faith, unregulated capitalism); I think that these things have to be overcome in the south before the country can move on and hopefully Obama can help that process. The cold war generation need to die out before hysterical and misinformed stigmas attached to socialism can be removed and policies can be judged on their real merits. By the way, your map is better viewed as religion versus secularism. The slave trade was justified by southerners for a long time by the bible, and it was merely a symptom of religious irrationalism.
I think one real danger to the USA if it continued on its previous course was a fall into dictatorship, or more realistically an commercial oligarchy. We have a large proportion of the population that is blindly loyal to the president, and treats any disloyalty as "un-Americanism". This sort of extreme nationalism is analogous to that of 1930's Germany. This population concedes powers to bypass human rights and basic freedoms to their government in a time of emergency, naively believing that their right to bear arms is some sort of insurance against tyranny. This paradox was growing bigger and bigger during the Bush administration. Suppose a faction of Americans objecting to a specific unconstitutional tax refuses to pay it and recruits others into joining them. The government with so much centralised power, and such a climate of paranoia, can label the group un-American terrorists and inprison them indefinitely without trial. The constitution won't help you, they already found loopholes to be exploited decades ago. It isn't a coincidence that after the only two occassions the USA was attacked (pearl harbour and 9/11), grave human rights abuses took place on a massive scale.
If you let the south dictate policy then you will end up with some christian fundamentalist draconian society with unlimited freedom until you decide you don't like the government, when it becomes unlimited penance. This is why this election was so important; it was the culmination of two conflicting ideologies: enlightenment, secularism, empiricism and humanism versus ignorance, fear, nationalism and superstition. I'm just glad the right side won. It didn't matter if Obama wasn't perfect (and he was nowhere near); when the alternative would be so catastrophic, one has no choice but to vote Obama. Hopefully the Republicans can spend the next 4 years returning to their roots and engaging in real adult politics. (I would be a classical republican by the way if you can believe it).[/b]
Also, to call Republicans nationalist is so stupid. America for sure as hell is wrong on abortion and bombing Serbia.
FYI Unregulated in Unregulated Capitalism is redundant, Capitalism is the belief there should be no regulation and the governments job is to only step in when natural rights are being infringed.
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