I believe the answer is dissolution of the Union. It's the only way anything will ever change. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The federal government was not intended to be so strong. I've discussed this before - it began some 150 years ago and got worse and worse over the intervening century and a half, so we have to deal with what's in play today. I don't see how 315 million or so people can just reverse the way things are - there are too many of those people who believe their party is right and everyone else is wrong. In a way, they're right - there are too many diverse people under one umbrella to have any kind of real freedom.
There is no way the federal government will give up any of its power. Both parties are equally corrupt, the people of the US can't see the forest for the trees, and those in power want to keep it that way.
I tend to follow the Libertarian philosophy more than anything else. There are some elements of Libertarianism in the Republican party's STATED goals, but they never work as a party to do anything more than enhance their own pockets. Socially, as far as freedom of certain things (i.e., from religion for the most part, legalizing at least marijuana if not other things as well, even gay marriage and other social FREEDOMS which have no freaking business being legislated) I agree with Democrats, but just about everything else they stand for goes against what my experience in life has taught me will actually work.
I didn't vote in the last presidential election, nor in that year's congressional nor the midterm elections - it was the first time since I was 18 that I didn't vote. I was here, which makes for a semi-flaccid excuse, but the truth is, I had stopped caring. I was caught a little on the Obama wave of hope, as many middle-of-the-roaders were, hoping for something different. McCain, particularly with what he did with the vice presidential nomination, took any desire I had to vote for him away from me. So it was easy to say it was too difficult for me to vote absentee, strengthened a little by the fact that I couldn't prove residency in the States any longer and didn't look harder to see if I could still vote.
Personally, I could never vote for Obama this time after his last 4 years. He's as dirty as any other candidate that I have seen, if not more so in some ways, while so many people still thinking he's the Second Coming.
Romney is a mealy-mouthed, politically correct politician who will do nothing really different than any other Republican or Democratic candidate, except talk out of his a** about what he's going to do and then let things continue like normal.
The US has become way too big, both in terms of population quantity and the differences between groups, as well as its influence around the world. The powers-that-be in the US have gotten drunk off of power and what they see as free money. They are forcing everyone in the States to homogenize themselves to fit into what the majority (which isn't a simple majority, nor even a 2/3 majority) believe is best for everyone - at least what they have been led to believe by their respective parties. The States have less and less power to do anything against the federal government because they don't exercise what powers the Constitution gave them to begin with, under fear of losing funding at the federal trough for their own pet projects - taken from the population of the US at large and distributed across the country to people who waste and spend the money for political benefit.
I'd love to see Texas, for example, secede from the Union. See if other states don't follow suit. I think in this day and age, a war to keep the country together wouldn't really go over very well. I don't think the US would even be able to fight a war against the States today. Texas has the 14th largest economy in the world, still has a state militia (including an air force) and it wouldn't be easy with all of the other crap going on for the US to concentrate on that as well, and when one state secedes, I'll bet there will an epidemic of other states seceding as well.
I know a lot of people will start saying things like "well, let them - Texas is only successful because they are a part of the US." I might have agreed with that 20 years ago even, but now, no way - the US is holding people back, particularly Texas.
I think Texans made a huge a mistake when they joined the US in 1845. It was a very close thing when it did, having just 9 years previously won its independence from Mexico and Santa Ana the dictator. Many people were against joining the union, and suspicious of the US turning into a tyranny. No matter how you feel about slavery at the time (and I don't think anyone is FOR slavery, I'm talking about how it was abolished), it was tyranny at the point of a gun that held the US together in that moment.
There are now some 18% of the population of Texas that admit they would like to see an independent Texas. It won't take too much longer for that to grow, the way things are going.
With the US broken up into smaller countries, federal control over a mass of some 315 million people broken, people can be much freer to organize themselves as they see fit locally rather than be beholden to a tyrannical central power that has no interests in mind except the interests of continued power, and growing that power.
