Yep. Interstate Highways managed by the federal government for a start. And of course a thousand or two other things.
Again, you don’t know the future. A new order may come from chaos. It may not, but to definitively declare you know what can or can not happen is ridiculous. We’re in completely unchartered waters.
If he should need in the future to Cry Havoc and Let Slip the Dogs of War, it would be easier to have lots of dogs if they are convinced there would be no legal repercussions.
I’m in my late sixties and never had children. Hardly a day goes by when I’m not glad about both those conditions. Especially when I remember that even after the grand experiment of American Democracy has failed, soon enough climate change will pretty much destroy the planet.
Honestly, I think if democracy ends, it is most likely to do so not with a bang but a whimper.
To those of us who believed in American ideals, though, it may well feel like a civil war or a social collapse.
Please meet someone who said “we’re leaving” to his wife the morning after the election and made it happen nine months later.
It’s not for lack of willingness that people don’t leave. It’s really, really, really hard.
But so, so worth it. Things here in Europe are far from perfect, but dramatically better than back in the States.
From the outside, America looks like a cult. It’s terrifying.
I looked into it when trump was elected, and it’s hard. I’m too old to be a desirable immigrant to most countries, and I’ve tried and failed several times to learn a language other than English.
Portugal is one of the easier countries, but not knowing a soul there, and fearing I’d never learn the language makes it really hard.
One thing that makes it slightly more feasible is that both my mother and my husband’s mother have since passed away. Abandoning your ailing mother is a big deal.
But today, I’m going to give some money towards the mid terms.
There’s a lot of discussion about which side is better armed, but I’ve seen no talk about the role of technology and I expect this war will be fought primarily with technology, not guns. Maybe that’s wishful thinking, because I also believe that liberals rule technology, but I just don’t see how it can’t play a major role.
It’s possible that at some point, after some of the dust from the explosions and gunfire settles, the powers that be may figure it’s the path of least economic and physical pain to have a new Constitutional convention, dissolve the old union and let two (or more) countries emerge.
Right, that’s the part that always gets me. There are countries out there that are much closer to the liberal ideal, but they are hard to immigrate to.
OTOH, whenever a Democrat wins office, I hear from the right that they are going to leave the country, and the countries that are closer to their ideal are very easy to immigrate to. But they never do.
It’s not possible because America doesn’t have the capacity for managing large, complex problems. Our choice is between managed dissolution and collapse, because America is America, we’ve chosen collapse.
And if you think things are tense now, wait until climate change really gets going.
ETA: but in the 60s Kent State, so we’ll be fine or something.
If you look at the actions, voting records in Congress and Senate, what the government does under this or that party rule. The differences in the long run are minimal. In my opinion there seems a general drift to fascism over time. Neither party doing all that much to stop it. Both in many ways furthering it. I recall someone commenting once how there is less turnover in Congress and Senate than the old Soviet politics. Though the turnover there was a scarier process.
Maybe the title of the post should be, How are you preparing for the coming change of flavor fascist authoritarian regime?
I don’t believe for a minute that this has been the case. We are looking forward to a drastic change in the way our country functions.
Just look at how our society, state, and economy are organized. We live in a highly technological, integrated system that heavily relies on reliable transportation infrastructure, communications infrastructure, and all kinds of things that are completely dependent on each other.
Go to the grocery store and see how far most of those things come in order for you to purchase them. In the East, a lot of our basic foods come from the Midwest, South, and, especially, California.
Think of the complex infrastructure that delivers the most common of medications to your local pharmacy. Think of all the people who rely on reliable electric power for life-sustaining technologies.
Think about all the red and blue types of people involved in sustaining basic processes that you rely on every day–plumbers, mechanics, service station operators, power company workers.
If you are one of those people who think that they have the ability and skills to do most things themselves or think you can set up your own household independently from those dependent processes–where do your basic tools come from? Do you mine your own iron? Make your own steel? Machine your own tools? How far does your lumber come from?
Just the pandemic itself, which has resulted in all kinds of disruptions to business processes, should remind us how interdependent and fragile our systems are. So many people can’t make necessary repairs or optional upgrades to their houses because of the inability to deliver needed input at every step of the supply chain.
Government offices, for Pete’s sake, are experiencing shortages of paper and envelopes, making it difficult to deliver some basic services.
Any attempt to divide the country into smaller nation-states along political lines would be disastrous to everything that allows us to live normal lives, and it would take a long time to make any kind of reasonable adaptation. By that time, many people will have died, ones who never got anywhere near any civil-war-related violence, of lack of food, potable water, electricity, medications, and other necessary services.
This would take years or decades, and by that time, millions of people would have suffered, and the country’s infrastructure and economy would have long been in shambles.
If it’s possible to maintain order, then it should be possible to have an orderly dissolution, if the people maintaining that order desire it.
For instance, considering the hate the GOP has for California, I could see them deciding to expel them from the Union, as stupid as that would be.
Most of those jackasses seemed to make noise about moving to Canada, which is both much harder to move to that a lot of Americans seem to think, and is pretty much the Democrat’s wet dream of what they’d like the US to be.
So they’re not too smart, is what I’m saying.
California is not a monolith. And what makes you think that all the “red” people in California are going to go along peacefully with that—the ones that are the majority in the interior counties as well as the ones that are a minority kn the coastal areas? If California can be ripped from the country, then there is nothing stopping California from being ripped apart.
I’ll just go and quote myself here:
Yes, expelling California would be both difficult and stupid, but that doesn’t mean they won’t do it.
The “blue” parts of the country are scattered all over the country in small blocks of counties surrounded by red. How in the world do you think that can be a basis for a partition?
What part of “impending civil war” implies that i think this is going to be a painless transition to a Great Divorce?
I also think there is a solution that allows for a break- up, while managing less financial pain for everyone involved. That’s above my pay grade (and anyone else’s here) to figure it out, but i believe it is absolutely possible to split the country up if and when it comes down to it. We’re not that special or too big to fail.
I don’t have a link but I did indeed recently see video of Trump saying he’d pardon the insurrectionists if he’s PotUS again.
Which, personally, I sort of doubt because he didn’t pardon them the first time around when he had the chance - they hadn’t succeeded so they were losers and not worth worrying about, I assume.
But maybe he would.
Because not every red voter is a pro authoritarian, white nationalist, trumper that wants democracy to die. I live in rural Michigan, and while there are plenty of fucking nuts here, there are even more who are disgusted by the way things are going.
It’s not necessarily red vs blue in this cold war, it’s rational vs authoritarian, white nationalist religious nuts who abide by their own set of facts.
There are states that are mostly nuts, some are mostly rational, some are more evenly balanced.
Over time you may just see more migration to like- minded states. Like if i see Michigan start to swing heavily toward nuts running things, we’ll move to a new state. A civil war could lead to a great migration followed by the great divorce.