Yes, theoretically this could be done. But my point is that you seem to think it could be done peacefully. What is the historical precedent for that?
That doesn’t even remotely follow my post. What border? In this instance, there is no civil war. You are the only one that is wanting that.
All I’m saying is that if agricultural subsidies were ended, then the vast majority of small farms would go bankrupt within a couple of years. Then Monsanto and other agricultural corporations can buy the land and grow food on it. The only thing that those in the cities notice is that there is now more food available at a lower cost, and that their taxes are no longer being used too make viable a horribly inefficient business model.
This is not the outcome I want, necessarily, as there is value to some extent to keeping small farms around, but at the same time, I don’t feel any need to be taken hostage by the people who depend on my tax dollars to survive.
They “provide” food, but not so much in manufactured goods. There are factories in those areas, but they were just put out there to take advantage of poorly educated populations with little economic requirements. That manufacturing doesn’t need to be done in rural areas anymore, and can be more efficiently done in and around urban areas. One of the big complaints of people living in rural areas is that all the local factories are closing up, leaving them all out of work.
The rural people need the factories much much more than the factories need the rural people.
Plenty of ways to get food. How long do you think a family farm will operate without fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, fuel, spare parts and repairs for equipment, genetically enhanced seeds, weather reports, veterinary services, antibiotics, and electronics?
Blue areas can get the food they need from other countries easy enough, it may cost a bit, but that’s fine.
Where are your rural farmers going to replace all of the things that elevate them above a subsidence farmer, scratching out a bare living from the land? Or do you see the farmers going back to Ox pulled plowshares?
It seems a better idea is to separate the interests of the blue areas and the red areas. The problem we run into is that there are mutually incompatible goals involved, as here are two seperate demographics with different wants and needs.
The urban areas get accused of telling the rural areas what to do, when nothing can be further from the truth. The rural areas hold more of the political power, and yet, contribute little tot the economic activity. The urban areas pay the bills, and yet, are beholden to those who live in areas that few people desire to live.
If cities and urban areas could have “rights” like state’s rights, then this tension may not be so severe. But when people in eastern kentucky tell the people of lexington that they are not allowed to raise their minimum wage, that is nothing but the rural areas imposing their will upon urban areas. When a state insists that the cities inside of its borders may not provide protections to LGBT individuals, that is the rural areas imposing their morals upon the urban areas.
So, rather than splitting up, maybe we just compartmentalize a bit. Give cities the plenary rights that states have. Allow cities to pass their own laws that their residents want. Allow cities to not only enforce their own laws, but also enforce non-enforcement of state laws the city has voted to rescind.
We may end up getting along a bit better if the rural areas are no longer able to dictate to the urban areas how they are to live.
Again, cities are pretty far from homogeneous and the same forces that exist now with regards to people wanting to do their own thing would continue to exist. Best thing to do is what we are doing now. The really petulant can live up to their promise and leave. There are 200 or so other countries one can live undocumented in. Why stay in a land where one despises the other 1/2?
I don’t know about the families not intermingling thing. Children do not always follow in the footsteps of their parents. My parents are crazy ultra conservative. I am not so much.
I suppose maybe parents having children that differ from them politically won’t really change them much, I don’t think I’ve swayed my parents or siblings very far, but, we do live in the same community.
The county I live in went for trump 52 to 43. Not really a city, definitely not very urban.
And this “love it or leave it” crap does not make your argument any more persuasive. I do love my country, and I do not see any reason that I should have to leave it. There are other countries out there (I have no idea what you mean by “200 or so other countries one can live undocumented in”, I’ll just chalk that up as a typo. [there are fewer than 200 countries in the world, and quite a few of the 195 do require documentation to live in]), but the countries that are more like a liberal ideal generally have fairly high requirements to get in. Myself with no college degree and few financial assets gets a bit of a suspicious eye just visiting Canada, I don’t think that I am high on their list of people they want. So, yeah, though there exist other countries that are doing things more the way that liberals would like, abandoning this country to go there isn’t really practical.
OTOH, countries that are closer to republican’s ideal of small govt, low taxes, and few regulations are easy to move to without any sort of college or assets. Somalia would be easy to go to, and would have everything you want in a country.
It is that people seem to want to have all the benefits of a liberal country, but none of the obligations that causes issues and more than a small amount of resentment towards those who wish to push our country in the direction of Somalia, rather than in the direction of 1st world countries.
And this idea is this can be done while maintaining good relations between this new ‘archipelago of a thousand liberal cities’ and the rural conservative ocean that surrounds them? When the entire conflict is based on the conservatives and liberals having so great a divide in their morals that they can’t get along?
I think not. At the very least the conservatives would block or interfere with any land shipments of resources from one city to another. In the best (and sanest) case trucks entering or leaving rural areas would be taxed heavily, providing Ruralstan their farm subsidy money and more, and worst case they’d be blocked entirely, forcing the cities to airlift everything to an from any city without a port. (Okay, worst case the rurals hijack the trucks, shoot down the planes, and pillage the ships running through their contested waters, but let’s not get crazy.)
Seriously, we have a model of what happens when a city is entirely surrounded by a country with a conflicting moral and political outlook. It was called West Berlin. Remembering how that played out, how would an entire country in that situation fare?
Splitting by state color would solve one huge problem, which is that it would end the tug of war between the sides, and in the process end the balkanization of our government(s). Libertania would no longer have the republican party focusing all its efforts on its lunatic-wing base - lunatic conservative parties would inevitably become fringe and to survive the main conservative party would recreate itself as trying to capture the conservative half of the moderates. Similarly in Conservania the liberal fringe would become an afterthough and what representation liberal positions still had would be extremely toned down. And of course each country’s government can dispense with the endless stonewalling and get down to the business of establishing welfare, health care, and human rights on the one side, and cheerfully dismantling the same on the other.
Now, obviously, this would all happen if you somehow managed to implement the archipelago idea too, but as noted it seems inevitable that Ruralstan would notice and exploit the massive vulnerability of Urbania’s borders, either with punitive trade interference, embargos, or outright war. When splitting on state borders at least the respective countries wouldn’t be entirely surrounding one another (particularly if East and West Libertania accepted geographical reality and became separate countries rather than a divided one).
Splitting it along urban and rural would create an unsustainable situation which would collapse in short order - even if the break somehow miraculously started peacefully, you’d have the country with all the money completely surrounded by the country with all the guns. I’m not thinking that would last long.
Or explaining what you mean, it seems.
EVERY hypothesis in this thread is ridiculous. Most of them are ignoring a major player here: the US government. The US Government is going to violently oppose every separation plan we’ve discussed, and by “violent” I mean “with troops” - either marshals if everything stays low-key, or drone strikes if they don’t. The only way to chop this country up is to do it in a way the US Government approves of, or at least accepts, that it’s happening - or with a major war against the strongest military power on the planet.
The US letting any subset of itself leave is ludicrously unlikely, for the simple reason that even if you forget about the people in them, states have assets. Land has value. Coastlines have value. Forests have value. Mineral deposits have value. Military bases have value. Cities have value. The US isn’t going to let any of this value go lightly.
And yet, this is the discussion we’re having. So, let’s look at some possible scenarios and what the US government might think about them.
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All the cities secede, leaving the US with all the rural areas. This loses the US three quarters of its population, every major port, and most of its income. The US retains most of its military and gains a large number of soft targets to hit with it.
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All rural areas secede, leaving the US a disjointed mess with no chance of supplying any of its deeply landlocked bits. Surrounded by a hostile military power.
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The liberal states secede. The US loses every western port, half the eastern ports, over half of its population, most of its income, and Washinton D.C. (so they’d have to move).
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The conservative states secede. The US is broken into three major sections: the northeast (actually two parts, divided by Indiana), the west coast, and Colorado/New Mexico. They lose a fair amount of natural resources and food production.
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Just California leaves. The US loses a chunk of its coastline, a fair amount of income, and enough liberals that conservatives will control the government for the foreseeable future.
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Just Texas leaves. The US loses a small chunk of its coastline, and enough conservatives that liberals will control the government for the foreseeable future.
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Just Alaska leaves. Nobody notices.
Obviously none of these are going to happen, but if one did I think 5,6, and 7 are WAY more likely than 1-4. And as a liberal I think the country would actually benefit from 6. I mean, it would suck to be a liberal (or black) in Texas, but maybe we could fool them into letting us help them deport all the ‘undesirables’ before they notice what they’re losing.
Yes, this. I’d support giving cities more rights, but again it is zero sum.
Several red states are trying to limit the abilities of blue cities within those states from enacting their own policies regarding things like minimum wage hikes, or early voting efforts.
Meanwhile in the 60s the federal government was trying to tell states in the south that they couldn’t oppress minorities the way they used to.
Its still zero sum. I’m in favor of more city rights, but the tension between federal, state and city governments will still be there. You can have a blue federal government, red state government, blue city government and there will be tensions. The federal tries to force the state, the state tries to force the city.
The fun thing about either of these two scenarios is that it is likely that Ohio would end up sticking with the conservative states.
If a new nation is to be formed, then Ohio becomes the big fish in the conservative country. Biggest single city, probably be the second largest state, and access to the great lakes and to the Mississippi via the Ohio river.
Conservatopia Land would be much poorer, I believe, than Liberatopia, and either would be far poorer than if we can work together, but for the more selfish ideals, it would be interesting to go from living in flyover country to living in the seat of power.
Doesn’t Conservatopia still have Houston (and the Dallas - Fort Worth metro area)? Or are we imagining Texas joining Liberalandia?
Wasn’t taking the idea seriously enough, read too quickly.
Saw
and missed the words “state capital”.
Still, getting rid of New York, California, and Illinois raises Ohio’s rankings quite a bit.
Regardless of all that, the amount of people who seriously think secession will occur and peacefully at that is less than the amount of people who believe in Bigfoot or Batboy. So I suppose threads like this or the wacky calexit are fun diversions.
And aside from a few nutty anarchists on the left who wants a lawless nation like Somalia? Wanting reasonable regulations, reasonable taxes, and reasonable social services is not equivalent to wanting anarchy.
Two years ago people on this board (and elsewhere) were literally writing the epitaph of the GOP. Now they have a “stranglehold” on federal power. Zombie political parties are tough.
Parties being mutable coalitions of many disparate factions escapes many.
Note I am not really taking the idea of secession of anyone too seriously. We are talking about how it would work out if it happened, not whether it would.
I don’t think the people who are for less regulations, taxes, and social services are on the left, so that swipe missed the mark by a long shot.
Our country has less regulations, lower taxes, and fewer social services than any of the other 1st world nations. And the people on the right want to remove regulations, lower taxes further, and decrease social services. (add to that we have some of the poorest education, highest infant mortality, and lowest life expectancy of the 1st world.)
If a righty wants to go to a country that has less government intrusion into their lives than the US, they do not have any choices in 1st world nations. If a lefty wants to go to a country that has more government, they do have many choices amongst the developed nations.
That the countries that follow your ideals of government are all places that you don’t want to live should tell you more about the outcome of your ideals, rather than encourage you to try to implement those ideals here. That the countries that follow my ideals of government are all fairly prosperous and have better education, health, and other services tells me that if my ideals were implemented, we would become more prosperous, not less.
Last throes, and all that. Gerrymandering the congressional districts means that it requires more than just a majority of the population in order to change the makeup of the house, and the gerrymandering that was done at the founding of the nation with the design of the senate also tips the balance in favor of serving the minority at the expense of the majority of voters.
A) you don’t know what my ideals are.
B) cause and effect is important
.
Are you a hippie? I bet you’re a hippie.
So it’s not that conforming to liberal ideas make a country good and conforming to conservative ideals makes a country suck; it’s that inherently good countries can’t resist becoming more liberal and inherently sucky countries inherently become more conservative?
I can actually see some germs of merit to this line of thinking, but what makes countries inherently good or sucky?
Where are these 200 countries you can live undocumented in? Mars?
It’s any country - you just have to avoid being caught.
Can I play in this crazy game too? Maybe the blue states with its evil god hating scientists will engineer a virus that kills/sterilizes those with conservative leanings/thought patterns. Boy this is fun.