I think it’s time to split the country due to irreconcilable differences. The red states and blue states are so fundamentally different, there’s no way to compromise. When a country can’t even agree to wear masks during a pandemic, or that a cop shooting unarmed people is bad, it’s time to accept that the United States is a failed experiment. Why should two parts of the country force themselves to stay with someone they so obviously can’t stand?
If it was a simple geographic split, that might be at least theoretically feasible. But, not only are the “red states” and “blue states” not geographically contiguous with one another, but even within many “red states,” you have blue areas, and vice versa.
Because all states are shades of purple.
I know it’s not going to be as simple as a geographic split, but I say let’s do it. I’m sick of supporting MAGAt idiots with my tax dollars, listening to their alternate-reality bullshit and living with the consequences of their actions.
A nation governed solely by what currently qualifies as Republican leadership would implode within a few short years.
Let’s make this divorce happen so the process can begin.
I’ve often said that it’s time to turn this over to divorce lawyers. It’s a complicated mess, and that’s their specialty.
But yes, we certainly do seem to have some irreconcilable differences. It’s not working out, we need to acknowledge that fact, and start moving forward.
Name me a state, any state, that you think is “red” or “blue”.
Wanna try New York, maybe? I live here, and I can sure as hell tell you that there’s a lot of red in New York – and that it’s interspersed geographically with the blue.
You’d have to split county by county; and the result would be a patchwork in which nearly everyone would be crossing national lines every time they went anywhere – as well as one in which many of the counties would be fighting over which side they were supposed to be in.
To really be accurate, you’d have to split residence by residence, and some of those residences would have to be split again.
It’s not doable. And it’s not worth doing. If the USA is anything at all, it’s the place where wildly differing people decided to try living together without killing each other. If we can’t do that any longer, then we’re all doomed.
I’m seeing it like the India / Pakistan split. Thousands of people walking past each other to get to the correct territory.
That was, and still is, a disaster. It ruined millions, not thousands, of lives. And it hasn’t solved the problems.
Not a chance. I want to live to see the US have a White minority. I want to live to see the years, and the future, that follow.
Nor did the partition of Mandate Palestine. “Exchanging” populations is rarely peaceful.
And the US tried separation once before, I seem to recall.
The only successful recent break-up I can think of is Czechoslovakia.
I hope you’re very young. The electoral structure in this country is set up to leave power in White people’s hands regardless of actual demographics, so just because we’re 51% minority at some point in the future doesn’t mean things will be very different. We could be 60% or higher minority and still have 75 White senators.
That is a situation that can not, and will not last. Patience, unfortunately, is required.
Right. I’m 56 and won’t live to see it.
I think the timeframe is speeding up. I know that Chicago isn’t representative of the country as a whole, but I’m pretty sure that as of the last census, Chi-town is almost exactly 30/30/30 White/Black/Latino. It’s coming, America! Better days are ahead!
But that’s just demographics – and the Chicago area already has strong minority representation both locally and nationally. Chicago becoming even 80% minority wouldn’t change our area’s representation very much.
But if the growth of minority populations continues to be focused in urban areas, there will still be an overwhelming number of mostly White districts, not to mention states. So many statehouses, along with the US House and Senate, will continue to be White-dominated long after the overall population tips into minority-majority.
We’re probably doomed. We have half the country that has an absolute hatred of the other half, and a half of the country that is getting frustrated with having to carry the half that hates them.
It’s been aptly demonstrated that we cannot continue to live together without them becoming violent whenever they don’t get their way.
So yeah, splitting up is complicated, no doubt about that. But staying together is no longer viable.
Because that has been such a rousing success of regional stability and security?
It is illuminating that another poster explicitly referenced turning over the matter to “divorce lawyers”, because what divorce lawyers do isn’t facilitate an equitable split but advocate for the maximum their particular client can get, often to the detriment of the plaintiffs as a whole. As I’ve often said, in a divorce the lawyers win regardless of which side they are on because they get paid regardless, and the affected parties endure various degrees of losing.
As others have pointed out there are no clear geographic lines of demarcation along which a severance could be adjudicated, nor would it be feasible to relocate masses of people to identified geographic regions according to defined polities. Nor would this be either a feasible or desirable outcome by many other measures, either. As an example, the United States has both the worlds’ largest active nuclear arsenal, the largest naval force, air and ground services with a vast amount of hardware, and of course a massive military industrial complex that supports it. Setting aside the issues of geography, what proposal for apportioning it would not be inherently destabilizing and a potential threat to both resulting nations? Similarly, the massive debt that the country holds (largely in service of military adventurism that almost nobody now seems to agree with or take responsibility for) would have to be divided in some way, but is in fact only sustainable to begin with because it is backed by the “full faith and credit” of the United States. Divide the country up and who is going to accept the debt or may any effort to service the interest upon it?
I suspect the o.p. is not making a serious proposal and is simply exercising hyperbole in frustration for the current state of affairs within our politics and social divisions, but this has been coming for a long time and while it is certainly being inflamed by the rhetorical excesses of the Republican Party as ostensibly having been “taken over by” Trump although truth be told the party has largely submitted to demagoguery it has been engendering ever since Gingrich’s nonsensical “Contract with America” and Trump was just craven enough to jump in with both bone-spurred feet. In fact the current situation is a result of actions by both of the major parties in ignoring the needs of “working class” citizens (e.g. the people who built everything before we started shipping those jobs overseas to places with cheap labor and no oversight) and their insistence that the electoral process is a innately a “two party system” (it isn’t) that reflects two increasingly narrow spectrums of political, economic, and social thought that are close enough that they are essentially overlapping in all but the extreme, and in efforts to distinguish themselves have skewed toward those “extremes”. That the “extreme” of the left is barely less conservative than a moderate Republican circa 1960 is conveniently ignored by political analysts eager to blame all problems on our wide ‘divisions’.
The “MAGAt idiots” as one poster referred to them, actually have legitimate complaints, albeit not about the issues they are focused on, which are predominately either things that don’t actually have much impact on their lives (abortion, Hillary Clinton’s emails, toilet bowl sizes, generic ‘freedoms’, et cetera) or are completely manufactured fears (mass rape and violent crime by immigrants, the government collecting all their guns, a supposed fraudulent election for which nobody can actually identify or produce evidence of significant electoral misconduct). That they are so misdirected isn’t incidental; in fact, it is a result of deliberate effort to keep the population from amplifying “the crisis of democracy” by asking difficult questions and demanding answers of their representatives.
The real issues are, of course, economic instability due to the concentration of wealth in the pockets of a minority of extremely wealthy, the political power wielded by corporate ‘persons’ who have far more influence on elected officials (Republican or Democrat) than their actual constituents, the rife corruption that even when publicized by major media outlets is simply waived away and dismissed as “how things are done today”, and the general manipulation intended to give people few options for a more stable future. For two generations we’ve told high school students that the only path to vocational success is college, and that it is worth it to accept tens of thousands of dollars of unforgivable debt in student loans, an exercise that has benefitted colleges and universities, private creditors, loan collectors, and the massive secondary credit ‘repair’ industry which is basically just selling more loans, and placed a burden as large as a wartime debt for a major military power on those generations.
Meanwhile, we’ve undercut labor, demeaned trade vocations, and then wonder why it is impossible to find competent contractors to do construction work. We’ve deregulated banks to the point that they were allowed to leverage themselves out wildly ‘speculating’—although ‘compulsively gambling’ would be a better term for it—on futures to a degree that would collapse the system should the bubble pop, and then when the proverbial ‘margin call’ on mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations came due, bailed them out at taxpayer expense with virtually no one being held accountable, in finance or government, creating the perverse incentive to just do it all over again.
This flows down to individuals who are also encouraged by example and impetus to take on large amounts of unnecessary debt for discretionary spending. It all feels like a big scam and everybody is getting their part, so when someone like Donald Trump—a transparent and venal scamster who isn’t even a little bit embarrassed about being caught with his hand on the till, and who can manage to turn an apology about freely advocating sexual assault into an attack on his political opponent—comes along and promises to show you how to get your piece of the action, of course people reflect his entitlement, adopt his scapegoats as their own (even if they didn’t give a good whore’s fuck about the “immigration problem” prior to 2016), and band together into a collective will of belief that the system is rigged against them, because it literally is. They’re wrong about the reasons for it because they’ve been expertly misdirected, and they are fatally wrong about the solution, which if enabled would destroy this country as ably as it did Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Spain, and the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, but they aren’t wrong to be angry.
The solution is not division—which even if feasible would simply result in more division and the dissolution of the United States as a significant global economic power, which is basically the only thing supporting the fiat of the American dollar at this point—but to actually deal with the fundamental problems, and in particular the power of corporate interests, the dominance of the “two party system” that constrains what is considered to represent viable economic and political thought, and rebuild both the physical and social infrastructure of the United States, hopefully in a way that doesn’t both figuratively and literally divide neighborhoods. That we have such a long history of divisions embedded in the core of the history of the country certainly doesn’t help, but it isn’t as if twenty years ago you saw mass demonstrations of people flying the Confederate battle flag or the Gadsden flag outside of the Deep South (even though it was displayed in official government buildings or embedded in the flag of Southern states); the massive open racial and social divides we see today are the result of a deliberate effort to use the fears of the population and the misdirection applied to them to benefit a particular political movement which is actually antithetical to the aims of Corporate America, which after all just wants a nice, passive population to buy their products and mindlessly repeat their slogans.
All of that doesn’t make me want to knock some sense into the next person I see wearing a “MAGA” hat and parroting ignorant, self-contradictory statements any less, but at least it makes for good comedic fodder on The Daily Show.
Stranger
Some of those states will get more competitive though just because Democrats have generally done better with younger white people in those states than whites over 40. Not crazy better, usually in the 3-5% range, but many of these states also have growing minority populations as well.
But you are mostly spot on that structurally, if the Democrats are the party of: educated white liberals, and all the non-whites, it’s not “a stable majoritarian electoral coalition” in terms of House seats, Senate seats, or electoral college votes. It will probably fairly reliably win “the most total votes in the country”, but that will mean little. Note that when I say “not stable” I mean such a coalition cannot just assume its static coalition is going to naturally win elections for it. There have been eras in American politics in which there were stable coalitions that would last, sometimes for a couple decades or more, that simply was going to win across the board–Senate, House, electoral college.
Note that while it seems like the Republicans have control of the rudder, I do not believe their coalition is a “stable majoritarian coalition” either. They are shifting to basically being the party of white uneducated people. Part of what makes their coalition not a stable powerbase is those two groups: whites and people without college degrees–is their coalition isn’t those TWO groups, it is the combined group of white AND no college degree. Whites alone are a majority of the country, and if you have high enough appeal to them you can either significantly block the other party, or actually take power, but the GOP is kind of on the razor’s edge there, Trump very likely maxed out the white vote for the GOP, and the fact the 29 and under white vote embraced him less than older white groups bodes poor for them expecting to dramatically increase the vote share along the white racial identifier. Those without college degrees also represent a majority of the country–but many people without college degrees are not white. While Trump did great with whites without a college degree (67%!), he did horrible with voters of color without college degrees–only around 26%. The white college educated vote was fairly close, which speaks to what is likely to be the deciding vote in most elections for the next 10-15 years: white people with college degrees.
These will ultimately predominantly be suburban voters. Note that blue collar whites likely are not going to be that decisive, were not that decisive in 2020, and the pundits who spend an excessive amount of time talking about them are wasting Democrats’ time.
Neither party has a stable winning coalition, both parties can continue to win if they hold their coalition and edge out the other party in the white suburbs. This is likely to remain true until more fundamental demographic changes have shifted the country, the timing, and nature, of those changes cannot be easily predicted and people shouldn’t hold their breath waiting for that.
A lot of this is because of how the states are arranged. The states that are likely to be relevant swing states going forward, are all going to be decided by whites in the suburbs: AZ, GA, PA, MI, WI, NC, TX. States where whites in the suburbs don’t matter are states that typically have already gone fully red or blue. The one big outlier I can point to is Florida, which is almost a separate discussion.
Good examples of States where the suburbs don’t matter are the “obvious” ones–Massachusetts for example is so blue that it isn’t just the suburbs that matter, it’s the entire state being so blue that matters. West Virginia and Idaho are the same way for the reds. Ohio is an example of a state that used to matter, but no longer does. Why? Because Ohio is barely growing, and it has experienced some level of “leveling off” in its educated population as some of the negative economic opportunities in the Rust Belt don’t keep as many college graduates in state as you see in other states.
Ohio was also only competitive historically because Appalachian Ohio was Democrat. Appalachian Ohio + black Ohioans in the major cities + splitting or slightly winning the suburbs was just about enough to outvote all the small town and rural white Republicans. The collapse of the Appalachian Democrat as a conception ended that possibility. Ohio unlike some coastal purpling states is predominantly not defined by its large cities, but by its many communities that range in size from small towns to medium sized cities. While Ohio has three decently large metro areas, they are less dominant as a percentage of the population than say, the NoVA area is in Virginia or Pittsburgh and Philly are in Pennsylvania. For the reason Ohio is no longer a state where the suburban vote can sway the results unless it was to go massively for one side over the other, which is unlikely. So Ohio is no longer a swing state.
Swing states are states where suburban voters determine who wins, and neither party has a stable coalition guaranteed to win the suburbs, at present.
I wish we could somehow run some sort of magic 100% accurate alternate history mode where we let the south go during the Civil War and everyone could see what a theocratic, backwards, economically depressed, miserable shithole it would be without the rest of the country propping it up and moderating their policies.
I would support some sort of split - divide it as best we can and then allow people a few years to freely move to pick their side, even though an inconceivably large logistical mess and would basically cripple the US in terms of a world power. Things are bad enough that I’m seriously considering moving out of the country just not to be with the monsters here, so some sort of split plan that would at least give a chance for the non-shitty part of America to continue to exist is appealing to me even though I realize it is not at all a realistic plan.
Despite being a minority, the monsters are winning because everyone else is so desperate to believe that things are within the norms and we’re not in the middle of a fascist takeover that the rest of us aren’t fighting their takeover. Things are going to get a lot worse than they are now, and they’re pretty bad now. We’re going to see a dystopian-level regression in the next decades as the impacts of climate change hit and the US government falls to monsters whose entire existence is motivated by making things worse for people who aren’t in their in-group.
I have no patience with this attitude. “We can’t win because people are stupid, so let’s give up.” And as if any of this is really new. People thought the country was doomed any number of times before. “But this is different!” No, it isn’t.
Also folks haven’t thought this through. Do you really want to live next to a theocratic militarized single-party country? Sure, they would have economic and social problems, so what is the 100% solution to that? War with the hated “other,” and that’s us. No thanks, if you have such fear and loathing of this country as it is, I recommend you find yourself a better place to live.