In the book “The Nine Nations of North America” (1980), author Joel Garreau attributes this idea to an unnamed University of Texas professor:
“…if Washington were to slide into the Potomac tomorrow under the weight of its many burdens and crises, the result would be okay. The future would not be chaos; it would be shift. North America would not suddenly look around to discover a strange and alien world. It would see a collection of healthy, powerful constituent parts that we’ve known all our lives - like Dixie.”
Which brings me to my question for your consideration:
If Washington were to disappear, would the country, in the long run, wish to remain a union, or would different regions with specific local interests (Dixie, the Rust Belt, the Pacific Coast, etc.) simply go their own way into separate nations?
I tend to think the latter, that they would tire of conceding to each other’s needs and seek greater self-determination, but I’d be interested to hear other arguments.
My WAG is that enough people think a federal gov’t is a good enough thing that a new union would emerge. I could see it being much weaker than today’s, though.
But wouldn’t the South, for example, simply wish to create something along the lines of the old Confederacy? Would they still want to debate the Northeast over heating oil, for instance? Or just go off on their own, with their own miniature federal government?
I think we long ago realized that the best way to reconcile our “specific local interests” is through a representative democracy. While there is some degree of cultural differentiation between the regions you list, those differences are probably not nearly so contradictory as to necessitate splitting into different nations.
In short, while Washington could disappear, the idea of representative democracy and the benefits that come from integration most certainly would not. We would just have to build another Washington. I think we would need some extremely devisive sectional differents to even merit the idea of splitting and I would be hard pressed to come up with any modern issues that fit that criteria.
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IMO pretty strong. But it is also important to remember that is it our very union that makes all of us even stronger. Splitting up can only weaken us by setting us against one another.
Maybe. Without any real evidence, though, my gut feel is that even in the South the majority would want a union. Again, this is just a gut feel, and I’d believe poll evidence (or whatever) to the contrary.
It’s pretty strong. There are too many advantages to being the US, that we’d have to give up a lot if we split up. As an example, when was the last time even a state split up into two pieces-- West Virginia, and that was all part of the civil war. California routinely has a serious initiative to be split into 2 or more states and that never gets off the ground. Something like that would have significantly less impact than the union disolving, but it still doesn’t happen.
Well, I am in and from the South, and I honestly can’t say whether or not we would succeed (sp?.) I mean the idea of washington being gone is so rare and crazy that nobody even knows how they would react.
I by no means want tto hijack the thread, but this is why I never believed that anyone like Condi Rice or anyone can predict how people in the middle east will react to Saddam being gone, because I couldn’t correctly judge how my own statesmen would react. If I, who have lived here my whole live and know a lot about the people inside, can’t predict what will happen with my own state, how can some foreigner predict what will happen in another?
Who knows what the south would want, but I would be that you couldn’t get by with some part of the South succeeding like MS, AL, TN and possibly SC and GA. Who knows?
Neoconfederates are a very small lunatic fringe in the South. Likewise, the last generation or so has seen a lot of migration into the South from other parts of the country.
What is this “Washington” which everyone is talking about, anyway? “Washington” doesn’t run the country. The President of the United States is from Texas. The Speaker of the House of Representatives and the Secretary of Defense are both from Illinois. The Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate is from Tennessee. The Secretary of State and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve System are both from New York City. The Attorney General is from Missouri. Washington is just the city where the leaders selected by and from the entire American people happen to meet to conduct the nation’s business. (In fact, the actual citizens of the District of Columbia have less of a voice in the government of the United States than do most Americans.) Even if you want to be cynical about the actual extent to which ordinary people control the national government anymore, “Washington” is still just a shorthand for a national political class whose membership is drawn from across the country (and with a conservative Republican political ascendancy, that national leadership class is disproportionately drawn from the South, the region with historically the greatest propensity to secession, so I don’t think a secessionist neo-Confederate reivival is all that likely).
If the city of Washington were destroyed in some disaster, we’d just have to pick another city.
In the US, probably more than anywhere else, the people’s sense of “country” is all tied up in the structuring of their political institutions, more so even than in the land. Let’s say you turned the territory of the US into a centralized dictatorship while exiling the Constitution and governing bodies and laws and such to Mongolia or Uzbekistan, and asked Americans “where is America now”, many of us would point to the latter. For better or worse, our patriotism is very much bound up in our form of government (usually perceived through rose-colored glasses).
I say if “Washington” vaporized (e.g., got hit by a neutron bomb and the secret shadow-government fallout shelter in the hinterlands collapsed as well), we’d thrash out the details of how to set it up again but the main sentiment would be “we’re Americans, we have to do it the American way”, even up to and including things like the Electoral College and the obligatory State of the Union address.
I wasn’t really envisioning a post-Doomsday speculation, no “What would you do if you heard DC had been blown up?” scenario.
I was thinking more along the lines of long-running low-level tensions that exist between various parts of the country, e.g., the warm regions hate the way the North’s use of heating oil affects their gas prices; the fact that the middle of the country the majority tends to vote Republican while many parts of the Coasts go Democrat; The fact that the “big sky” states where there’s no one on the road had to put up with a National 55mph speed limit for over decade; the civil rights battles of the 1950s and 60s that focused a lot of negative attention on the south; the fact that many on the Northeast stand up for the rights of illegal immigrants while many in the southwest regard them as a dangerous burden on the economy, etc…
Granted, there’s nothing along the lines of the Slave/Free debates of the 19th Century, but I’m also not necessarily considering an acrimonious split. Just putting out the question: If, for whatever reason, we had it to do all over again, in effect, with these 50 states instead of just the original 13, would the people from different areas of the States actually want to keep all 50 together as one nation, or deal among themselves as smaller parts of the former whole?
If, as you said, each state or region now had the option to opt out of the union, would they?
If the US had never existed and we had, instead, a bunch of individual states and/or regions, would they all want to come together today to fomr the US.
For #1, I would say, no. There’s just no advantage.
For #2, maybe not. It’s very unusual to give up authority and allow yourself to be engulfed into a larger whole. Just look at the slow, difficult process the EU is going thru, and they haven’t even scratched the surface on political union yet. One might argue that the forming of the US from the 13 original states is a unique event in history. How much harder would it have been to get 50 states all to agree? Probably a lot harder. Especially if they didn’t have the knowledge that we have today of what the US turned out to be.