I have to say...

[starroute]

31. The problem is that the US wasn't an empire in the 1860s or 1930s

That adds another layer of difficulty. Empires just aren't very good at reforming from within. The Spanish Empire and the Ottoman Empire come to mind as examples of empires that kept making feeble efforts at reform that fell flat, while strongly repressing any real revolutionary alternatives.

On the other hand, it's a problem that I feel like I've been wrestling with my entire life -- at least since around 1957 or so, when I was ten years old and first becoming aware of world politics and couldn't help noticing that the US wasn't exactly popular in much of the world, and for good reason.

Put simply, what do you *do* if you find yourself a citizen of the evil empire? Just walking away from the situation doesn't seem like an appropriate response. But neither does hunkering down and hoping that the latest round of promised reforms will actually work this time -- since they never do. And the Snowden route doesn't amount to much more than slow-motion suicide unless there's a larger context of change to give it meaning.

The core problem may be that people who have power never willingly give it up -- but instead use it to acquire more power. The point of democracy was always that it would share power around widely enough that the parties would be willing to trade control back and forth, knowing that it would always be their turn again. But now we're beset by institutions -- the national security state, the military-industrial complex, the transnational corporations -- that are not open to democratic sharing and envision a future of no constraints on their power of any kind.

And that's not just a problem of impending civil war. It's something much larger and more intractable, and there's no simple solution.