Finally Dopers see that the Red-vs-Blue struggle doesn’t split on state boundaries. But y’all still don’t get it. The divide is certainly NOT about rich vs poor. There are roughly equal numbers of reds as blues at each income level!
And to think of cities unified against rural areas is also too simplistic. Here are some ruralish California counties (none of them tiny), with Trump’s vote share followed by Hillary’s vote share: Amador 60-35
Butte 48-44
Calaveras 58-35
El Dorado 53-40
Fresno 45-49
Humboldt 32-58
Kern 55-40
Lake 49-44
Lassen 73-21
Nevada 44-49
San Joaquin 41-54
Solano 32-62
Sonoma 23-71
Santa Clara 21-73 Humboldt County was once called the “redneck” center of California IIRC — it voted strongly Clinton. Even Lassen County had 21% blues, just as Santa Clara (urban Silicon “elites”) went 21% red.
Rich-vs-Poor; Elite-vs-Blue Collar; Religious-vs-Secular — these are not the main political divisions. Urban-vs-Rural is closer to reality but still very wrong.
What is the divide about? Brain structure, perhaps genetic, may be a big factor! Racism is also strongly correlated with voting Republican.
There are bigots in cities; and there are tolerant humane people in rural areas. Let’s stop over-emphasizing a “geographic divide.”
So for all the people commenting in this thread about big cities resisting authoritarianism, do you feel like reconsidering your take now that you’ve seen how the police forces of big cities have handled peaceful protests by people that aren’t white supremacists? I find the idea that the police who are deliberately targetting journalists with rubber bullets and arrests, attacking peaceful protestors with tear gas, and shooting at people on their own porches in the ‘blue strongholds’ are going to back anti-authoritarianism. The idea of ‘blue’ big cities being against fascism seems a bit off when we see police in ‘blue’ strongholds like Chicago and New York City acting like they have been in response to the George Floyd protests.
Not a surprise to me, but to people in this thread or various secession-themed threads, there seems to be an idea that ‘blue states’ are unified bastions of anti-authority sentiment. And that ‘blue sentiment’, in the sense of an ‘opposed to everything Trump and the Republicans stand for’ has undisputed control of the major cities. How people can say that when the record of the LAPD, NYPD, and CPD has been quite clear for decades is beyond me, but I’ve seen it a lot, including in this thread.
Whichever authority matches the side they identify with in the civil war. Expecting that everyone will obey the authority that you like and ignore the authority you don’t like seems like a really good way to get disappointed in general. In the case of police who are badly infested with white supremacists and one side of the civil war explicitly supporting white supremacy while the other rejects it, I know where my money is on what authority they obey.
When the US Civil War broke out, people identified much more strongly with states than they do now and the war was carried out by open, conventional warfare between armies. States successfully raised militias that could function in the field against the US army, which was tiny and mostly functioned by incorporating state militias. Police departments didn’t exist in all large cities, and if they did they were small and fairly new. If the US were to break down into civil war now, I would not expect the participants to follow state borders, and if actual conventional warfare did break out I would expect it to be over very quickly as the (Federal) US army is the strongest military in the world by far and operates with equipment and training that can’t be duplicated in short order, so it would be over very, very quickly. In the US CW, state governments had more moral authority and a strong enough infrastructure to make independent operations by police forces suicidal. In a non-conventional war based around idealogies rather than geographical identity, police departments would play a very different role and modern police departments are much larger and more established than anything around in 1860.
Despite fevered screeching from some people around here, our military is not that big. I mean, it’s big in an absolute sense, but it’s nowhere near large enough to occupy any reasonable chunk of the country.
And that’s assuming that the military would comply in the first place. I suspect that barring some sort of declaration of insurrection/rebellion, the generals in charge would cite the Posse Comitatus act and opt out. And I also suspect that they’d opt out unless it was an entire state or states who were actively and publicly rebelling. They’d probably interpret anything else as unlawful orders.
I mean, look how much trouble it was to occupy Iraq and/or Afghanistan, and the US is something like 10 times larger in population, and 20 times larger in size.
What if the military just destroys armed opposition, then tells New York ‘we’re arresting the leaders of this insurrection and placing our own people in charge, NYPD and the rest of you need to maintain order’ and lets the police forces vital to the large cities do the occupation, while getting volunteers from the ‘red’ portion of the state to help out as needed? The problem for a military occupying a foreign country is that it has to assume all of the policing functions. In a situation where “blue states” and “large cities” are trying to resist the federal government with force, it can use the police and the non-blue population for general policing.
No. My contention is that, in the event of civil war, conservative police forces (especially the far-right elements of them) would work with the legitimate government to put down the open rebellion. If there’s fascist rule and a civil war, the fascist Feds are going to declare that people opposing them are engaged in insurrection, which then means that if the police forces to find and arrest the insurrectionists and their supporters, they are supporting law and order. If there isn’t an outright civil war, then the conservative police forces (especially the far-right elements of them) will work with the federal government (perhaps unofficially) to track down the people breaking the law to provide the ‘meaningful resistance’ mentioned in the thread title, again supporting law and order, just not the law and order you hope they would.
Ultimately, yes. If you consolidate power into an institution it is inevitable that that institution becomes the prize for the power hungry. This is why the concepts of checks and balances and multiple types of sovereignty are so important to propagate. Otherwise, might eventually becomes right.
I’m not the one postulating a civil war in the first place, I don’t see how one is supposed to come to a good conclusion for just about anyone. I definitely don’t see how ‘blue states will resist’ is going to work in the event of one.
Not all, but most. And don’t forget the people with the money, and the land, and especially the food-growing land. People postulating ‘Blue State’ resistance don’t seem to consider things like who has physical power and essentials, and the fact that if you’re opposing ‘lawful process’ a lot of people will go with the law.
If Joe Citizen does something that relies on the cops being on his side instead of on the side buying them fancy tanks and riot gear, yeah he’s pretty fucked.
It’s unlikely (though not impossible) that we’d have a full-scale state vs state conflicts. The dynamics that led to the Civil War were an ongoing battle between two versions of America over which version would have more power (yes, I realize this is a bit of simplification here). The South feared losing its economic system, cultural identity, and political autonomy, which is why it seceded as an entire region. It was a massive political confrontation between two nation-states within a nation-state.
Any conflict now would be a bit more complicated - maybe a little more like the Russian Revolution or the struggles between the fascists and anti-fascists in 1920s Europe. It would not break down neatly along political boundaries. If the Republic of California wanted to secede, you’d have loyalists (or secessionists, depending on how one looks at it) within the state of California who’d want nothing to do with a Gavin Newsom-led Republic.