I don’t see it happening, at least in what’s left of my life [narrator: which isn’t much], but assuming arguendo that they both vamoosed, how long would it be before other states started edging, nay, stampeding toward the exit? And what would the resulting segments be?
Surely it wouldn’t be every state for itself; New England, for example, would I think likely affiliate into its own country, perhaps even petition to join Canada. I suspect the Southern states would happily form their own nation; the Midwest might form another coalition; and so on.
Perhaps there would be mass migrations of people who found themselves in an inhospitable country.
Would there be federal resistance, to the point of another civil war? Would matters spiral into warfare between states/multistate nations?
the author suggests that North America can be divided into nine nations, which have distinctive economic and cultural features. He also argues that conventional national and state borders are largely artificial and irrelevant, and that his “nations” provide a more accurate way of understanding the true nature of North American society.
The book was published in 1981, so some of the conglomerations might need tweaking.
The “Snow Crash” scenario named over a dozen corporate states, franchulates, and burbclaves and most of that was in former-California. That was satire, of course.
If even one state leaves the Union, the Union will fall apart immediately. There will be no incentive, no desire for any state government to remain when there is nothing keeping them in the Union.
I agree that the centrifugal forces will increase as each incremental state departs without open warfare vs the remining Feds. But that doesn’t mean there won’t remain a rump USA of states who collectively understand that the Leavers are the dumb maniacs, and sticking together actually makes more sense than splitting.
of course the whole scenario is nonsense because the issue is NOT “red states” vs “blue states”. It’s the red regions of each state vs the blue regions of each of those same states.
This was backstory in Heinlein’s “Friday” novel. The story did involve people moving from one political body to another and the differences for the common people living in them.
Isn’t this theoretical?
I’m not from the US so I might be wrong but I thought Texas v White (1869) rules that no state could unilaterally secede from the Union.
California and Texas can only secede if the US government agrees to that and I don’t think that is likely. If they did make a decision to allow CA and TX to secede it would probably also apply to every state probably resulting in the US fragmenting into 3 or more countries, for exampe Oregon and Washington might join California as a single country.
There are similar issues in other countries. In 2017 Catalonia had a completely meaningless referendum for independence because the Catalalonia has no power to unilaterally secede. In 2014 Scotland had an independence referendum because the UK government had agreed that they could but the vote was in favour of maintaining the Union. Since 2016 the Scottish Nationalist have been calling for another referendum but there has not been one becasue the UK government has blocked it.
If the USA dissolves, some national entity will have to assume guardianship over the nuclear arsenal, Federal Reserve, and national debt. Otherwise, every nation in the world, not just the newly created ones, will be screwed.
In the event of the USA dissolving, I can easily imagine that national entity trying to assume guardianship over the nukes etc being China or some such, unless Canada and Mexico stepped in, in a pre-emptive take over to keep everyone else out.
Neither CA nor TX has the capacity to maintain regulated borders with its neighbor states. Though TX has a more-or-less independent power grid, CA is heavily dependent on other states’ grids. I could go on and on, but it seems to be a ridiculous premise.