from NY to Israel Sultan Reveals
The Stories Behind the News

Posted: 08 Mar 2010 08:32 PM PST

What has gone wrong with America? It's a question that many
people are asking, but one approach is to look at what the present day
America has lost. Its frontier. The frontier once defined America. It was
the frontier that allowed English colonists to experiment with liberty.
The march Westward, from the frontier settlements braving Indian raids to
the Oregon trail, the Gold Rush and the Wild West, created a constant
frontier for the country to rediscover what it means to be an American.
The frontier kept America vital and as the frontier began to be lost, so
did the spirit of America itself.

A civilization has two fundamental forces that define its
nature. The Centralizing force and the Expansionistic force. The
Centralizing force contracts the civilization inward into large and
densely packed cities under a centralized government that is always
growing larger and more complex. The Expansionistic force by contrast
pushes outward into new frontiers that expand the size of the civilization
and its sense of self.

The Centralizing force marks the maturity
and decline of the civilization. The Expansionistic force represents its
youthful vitality and energy. A civilization that can transition from the
Centralizing to the Expansionistic has another shot at life. A
civilization that has no more frontiers will begin to fossilize into a
great centralized mass that becomes unwieldy, decadent and eventually
falls.

Where the Centralizing phase is marked by rigid government
control, taboo breaking and cultural sophistication, the Expansionistic
phase is marked by little government control, strong taboos and an
emphasis on religion over culture. The Expansionistic phase mixes together
cultures, but in the Centralizing phase, the existing culture is slowly
replaced through migration from colonies and less developed parts of the
world, drawn to the sophistication and wealth on display
there.

This does not only apply to America, it applies equally well
to Europe, and to global cultures dating back thousands of years. From the
fall of Rome and several Greek city states to the decline and fall of
Israel in the Second Temple period, to several Chinese dynasties and even
to some degree modern day Japan. A nation without frontiers, only foreign
colonies, is a nation without a future. As excess wealth concentrates in a
handful of urban centers, decadence and corruption become endemic. The
mores and values of the culture begin to implode. Sophistication begins to
center on taboo breaking. Taxes increase, the size of government grows to
unwieldy levels and foreigners increasingly push out the natives. By the
time the actual collapse takes place, the society has already been a shell
of itself for centuries.

The important thing to understand is that
these two forces help balance out a civilization. The Expansionistic force
creates a check on the Centralizing force. If the Centralizing force
attempts to impose too much centralization, the frontier rebels against
it. That for example is how America was born. Because the Expansionistic
force is to some degree a push against the Centralizing force, the energy
from these counter-opposing forces keeps a civilization active and
vital.

The Centralized civilization needs the frontier, because
without that it instead begins to push at cultural frontiers, breaking
taboos and destroying its own value system. The youth who might otherwise
seek their fortune in wilder and untamed lands, instead become a
disruptive social force at home. The frontier might make men and women out
of them, but the static homeland and its increasingly centralized
authoritarianism instead redirects their freedom seeking into political
and social radicalism. Because free cultural energy will always be
harnessed, a problem to which the frontier provides a
solution.

Without the frontier, there is no check to the
Centralizing force which begins the process of contracting the society in
on itself. Government becomes both outsized and corrupt. Domestic turmoil
increases as government expands. The traditions that created respect for
the political and social institutions are wiped away by the cultural
turmoil, which increases the probability of coups and violent takeovers.
This process feeds on itself until all semblance of civility and law have
been lost, submerged beneath the competing aims of struggling
factions.

It is also natural, for the Centralizing force to often resent
and seek to quash the Expansionistic force. The cultural differences lead
the former to label the latter as ignorant backward prudes who are
secretly scheming against the government, while the latter view the former
as decadent authoritarians taxing them to fund their own corruption. In
America, the usual label for this is Blue States vs Red States. In Israel,
it's Haifa and Tel Aviv vs the Settlements. In historical Israel that same
conflict inspired the story of Chanukah. In historical America, the
Revolution.

In present day America, the gradual loss of the
frontier, ended any real check on the Centralizing force. But it is
incidentally telling that recent populist Republican Presidents like
Roland Reagan and George W. Bush attempted to associate themselves with
the cowboy culture and the frontier. And Sarah Palin, currently embodying
the political spirit of Red State resistance comes from Alaska, the
closest thing America still has to a frontier.

This goes all the
way back to the start of the Republican party with Abraham Lincoln, billed
as the quintessential frontier candidate, who ironically proved to be a
centralizing figure instead. But as the Republican party has increasingly
become the voice of opposition to the Centralizing force, at least on
paper, its candidates and base of support have tended away from the
centers of centralization. For the last 50 years, with the exception of
the accidental Presidency of Gerald Ford, Republican Presidents have been
West Coasters. And every Republican President in the last 78 years was
either born or elected from California or Texas.

During that same
period, with the exceptions of Bill Clinton and the accidental
presidencies of Harry Truman and LBJ, Democratic Presidents have tended to
be associated with centralized urban elites. Barack Obama is not the
exception to the rule. He picks up on a pattern set by FDR and JFK. Both
FDR and JFK attempted to use government centralization as a metaphor for
the frontier. JFK did it literally with "The New Frontier". Of course
there was no actual new frontier. What JFK meant was that government
solutions were the New Frontier of mankind. This same rhetoric was
exploited by Obama in his own run, with the addition of marketing his own
rise to power as an act of taboo breaking that was appealing to a younger
audience.

The Centralizing force is rooted in urban environments
because it finds its own natural logic there. 10,000 people living in 1
mile need much more extensive government and can far fewer freedoms, than
100 people living in 1 mile. Population density breeds centralization. In
turns centralization provides a network of services that increases
population density. These services require a constant growth in personnel,
which helps promote migration and population density. This is an example
of how the Centralizing force acts to increase its own concentration, much
as a black hole sucks matter inside it.

In the heavy urban
environments where the Centralizing forces are based, interdependency
seems perfectly natural. By contrast the Expansionistic force promotes
independence and individualism, attitudes more typical of the
frontier.

In a healthy civilization, the Centralizing force gives the
Expansionistic force something to push against... and the Expansionistic
force gives the Centralizing force new frontiers to manage and the
imagination fuel to dream bigger dreams, instead of wallowing in its own
cultural decadence. This Push and Pull process helped make America great,
but the loss of a frontier has made the Centralizing force dominant in
American government and culture.

And so the Centralizing force is
creating a massive pile of government that cannot even afford to fund
itself. The free cultural energy is being used to smash taboos,
eliminating traditional values, while radicalizing politics. The pitched
battle of Red States and Blue States is still weighed in many ways toward
the Red States, because Americans are still more Main Street than
Broadway, but given enough cultural influence and immigration that will
change. As it has already changed dramatically over the last
century.

America needs a new frontier. Not Kennedy's New Frontier
of social justice, but a frontier where the Expansionistic force can
redefine America again. Such frontiers are possible, some require
technology, others imagination. But like most living things, America must
grow or die. And while the Centralizing force offers a congealing
cancerous growth in the middle, it is the Expansionistic force that
America needs to revitalize itself once again.