45% of the near total population is far from "solid."
45% of that massive vote is kinda pizzed right about now.
.
Sadly, our current “leaders,” Democrat and Republican alike, have pretty much pi$$ed away everything the Founders established.
Eventually it will happen.
So, will we cheer when Texas secedes?
It could be argued that the “salon” of Jefferson, Madison, Jay, et. al. constituted a conclave of the greatest social minds in history. The French Revolution had its thinkers too, but they were so overwhelmed by their reactionary/revolutionary sentiments that they forfeited their reason. The Founders were never guilty of such consuming emotionalism, and the results speak volumes.
Most U.S. city elections have a less that 20% voter turnout. It's a "rule by those who bothered to blast themselves off the sofa to vote."
I've voted "absentee ballot" for 40 years. I can mail it in.
1. Doing it the right way would have meant that the Scottish Parliament would have held its own non-binding resolution to declare independence before any sort of polity vote would have been calendared.
2. Next would have meant a genuine declaration of independence, listing all the grievances against Westminster that compelled Scotland to break free in addition to Scotland's future goals and aims -- no matter how abstract.
Here's the problem:
1. Many members of the Scottish Parliament seemed rather astonished that Scotland resoundingly rejected the resolution on independence. Certainly took Mr. Salmond by surprise. So many MPs probably thought it was in the bag until their own constituency told them 'No'. I suppose they thought they never needed to poll their own voting base beforehand to see if independence was popular, much less holding their own Parliamentary vote on it before revealing it to the people. It makes one wonder who the Scottish MPs really represent. Maybe they should all resign like Mr. Salmond, or at least hold new elections. This wasn't just 'No' for independence, this was an equal 'No' to how they're being represented by many of their MPs, by and large.
2. The 'Yes' campaign didn't even know what they were for. I'd been educating myself on the 'Yes' position for over a month learning all I can, and I still couldn't understand where they got the ideas they had. I'm dubious that they could have articulated their position in a declaration of independence. If they had, quite a lot of their claims could have been scrutinized as judged demonstrably false. Maybe that's why they never bothered to write anything down and instead just threw up a website full of utopian agitation propaganda where imaginary SNP cartoon characters live.
This entire spectacle really only served to make almost 45% of Scottish people look really dumb. Oh, the absurdities I'd heard in the last three weeks I spent there just before the vote: "In ten years of North Sea oil profits going to Scotland rather than the rUK, Glasgow will look like Dubai!".
Just stupid. They really believed themselves to be the biggest contributors to the United Kingdom rather than the UK's net welfare recipients.
The author doesn’t realize that dependence on GB is probably why they are a welfare state. Independence could lead them out.