Might the US break up before this is over?

Politics & Elections
61

It took me decades to stop dismissing this idea, but it’s been a long slide downhill. I kept saying that we’ll hit bottom, wise up and get back to a reasonable facsimile of a working government like we had for about 200 years. Things kept getting worse, then I thought, well, something bad will happen, and that will shock us all back to living in the same world, and we can go about making decisions that, while we might not all agree are right, will at least be based on the same facts everyone else based theirs on.

Then, Donald Trump was elected. I thought, well, surely this will be the rock bottom. He is an obvious idiot, liar, buffoon, liar, panderer, liar, philanderer, liar, flag-and-woman molester, liar, and narcissistic empty suit that walks (and lies) like a man. He will fuck something up, everyone will see it and agree, and we’ll get that sinus rhythm we’ve been seeking for decades now.

And lastly, we have a literal plague. This virus has got to be one of the worst things I might have imagined, but I see no reason to believe that anything it or our president does will make us forget our differences and bring back a passing normality. I hope I’m wrong. Fox News, social media that allow ppl to read only what they want to believe, and foreign countries fomenting discord are all facilitating this divide, preventing us from healing.

There are irreconcilable differences. The government is broken, and it is set up such that is is near impossible to fix without large-scale agreement, which is the one thing we are lacking now. California, of course, is the leading candidate to separate. They have the size, the economy, and while as others point out, they aren’t homogeneous, they do have the largest democratic/liberal constituency. Others may try, but I don’t think they will have success, not at first. It’s one thing to let the left coast moonbats go, it’s another to give up, for example, New York. One of the original 13 states, and way too close to Washington for comfort and optics.

I don’t know how soon it will happen. You can’t predict these things with any accuracy except in hindsight. Maybe it will happen in 2021 or 2025 if the elections go really sideways, but probably not in the short-term. To leave the union requires something which one cannot bear to live under. Something willing to risk dying or killing over. A slowly boiling pot is not a good catalyst for revolution. Times of great and abrupt stress are what usually force change.

Or, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it will be a peaceful revolution, one where California gradually ceases to strictly obey the federal government. Maybe a slow boil of its own, gradually pulling away, until at last the deed is done.

I’m just a guy on a message board, but I despair at finding common ground, when we can no longer even find common facts.

Hope this is coherent. My eyes are starting to cross. . .

62

I wouldn’t be so glib about “separation of church and state” given what occurred yesterday in the Rose Garden. Moreover, the British didn’t “break [British India] into its component states” - that was accomplished by the Indians themselves, as mediated by their local and regional leaders.

At any rate, my larger point stands - you (the solitary American citizen) may have little to no say into which successor state your local or regional entity adheres, should a dissolution of the US occur. This has been shown by both American and world history, which also indicates that for those unhappy with the resulting situation, migration is often an end result. In other words, the presence of regional homogeneity is not a necessary prerequisite for state dissolution.

63

Not everyone with money is motivated purely by the desire to make more money.

[QUOTE=Face Intentionally Left Blank;22221180There are irreconcilable differences. The government is broken, and it is set up such that is is near impossible to fix without large-scale agreement, which is the one thing we are lacking now. California, of course, is the leading candidate to separate. They have the size, the economy, and while as others point out, they aren’t homogeneous, they do have the largest democratic/liberal constituency. Others may try, but I don’t think they will have success, not at first. It’s one thing to let the left coast moonbats go, it’s another to give up, for example, New York. One of the original 13 states, and way too close to Washington for comfort and optics.

I don’t know how soon it will happen. You can’t predict these things with any accuracy except in hindsight. Maybe it will happen in 2021 or 2025 if the elections go really sideways, but probably not in the short-term. To leave the union requires something which one cannot bear to live under. Something willing to risk dying or killing over. A slowly boiling pot is not a good catalyst for revolution. Times of great and abrupt stress are what usually force change.

Or, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it will be a peaceful revolution, one where California gradually ceases to strictly obey the federal government. Maybe a slow boil of its own, gradually pulling away, until at last the deed is done.[/QUOTE]

When 60% of the population gets tired of having the other 40% make the rules that affect all of them, something’s gotta give.

64

I think that it’s inevitable. I’ve said before that we red and blue America are not countrymen. In the 90s, Gingrich lead a movement to create a rift; people in blue states were called traitors. He made it clear that his America was the real America. He made it clear that they were the true hard working salt of the earth.

Then Bush stole the election and rather than try to heal the nation’s wounds he decided to invade Iraq and destabilize the Middle East. Then a black man was elected president and the Republicans made it clear that they would rather see the nation face economic collapse than let a black man be a leader of the nation. Then the red staters elected an overtly corrupt white nationalist who publicly encourages foreign nations to undermine our democracy and who clearly rules as president of red state America; he is withholding federal resources from blue states an act of open bioterrorism, an act of civil war.
A lot of us blue staters are realizing that “you know what, we hate you back red state America” and we’re pretty tired of carrying you. We’re tired of trying to keep you alive, we’re tired of subsidizing your ignorance, we’re tired of you taking our tax dollars and teaching your kids that Jesus rode a dinosaur to work. We’re tired of you thinking that Sarah Palin and Donald Trump are great thinkers, we’re tired of pretending we respect you. We’re tired of you and we can get along fine without you. You need us, we don’t need you. To quote your president, without us, red state America is just another “third world shithole.”

65

To take what’s generally considered the Bluest state as an example, what do you plan to do about the 1/3 of California’s voting population who voted for Trump last election in this scenario? The ones who are in the majority in most of the law enforcement agencies, land area, and agriculture in the state? It seems like it’s going to be a bit hard to angrily break off from people you ‘don’t need’ when they’re the ones with the firepower and legal authority, land area, and food.

66

I disagree with this. I’ve lived in Texas, Oregon, Washington, Maryland, and Utah… and honestly, while there were some differences, they were all pretty similar. Language regionalisms (“soda”, “pop”, or “coke”?) were the biggest difference I ever ran into.

I now live in Canada, and I finally feel like I’m living someplace where things are different… but honestly, it’s Canada, so it’s not like the differences even *here *are all that huge.

67

I think that you are falsely assuming that I am saying that this is going to be an orderly, planned event. I think that it is all just falling apart. As for the fact that they have the food, we import food from all over, we can import it from them just like we do Mexico and Canada. The fact that they are so well armed, racist and violent is alarming, but we clearly aren’t doing anything about that.

The tensions that created Trump are nothing to the tensions that are coming. As the impact of climate change accelerates (thanks for being hard anti-science red staters) we will not be able to keep rebuilding and we will not be able to effectively mitigate the impact. We clearly are already losing our ability to respond to crises like the current one. That will continue.

The bottom line is that you can’t have a democracy when 40% of your population don’t value it and you can’t maintain a modern state when that same population is hostile to science. They’ll come a point when they’re just too heavy of load to carry and we won’t be able to go on. What comes next is anyone’s guess.

68

No, I was wondering if you had given any thought to the fact that the majority of the land, food producers, and law enforcement personnel even in a decidedly ‘blue’ state like California are part of the 40% ‘red’ voting people that you’re trying to split from. You don’t appear to have actually thought about how trying to split off from the ‘red’ voters within a blue state would function in practice, especially the tricky part where they’re the ones making up the bulk of the LEOs within your state right now.

69

This is not unusual in revolutions at all, historically speaking. The French peasants supported the king - didn’t matter. The Russian peasants supported the Czar - didn’t matter.

What matters is who controls the levers of power, primarily the military. And the military follows its leaders, typically, until they don’t. Historically these things have often been triggered by the military being used to put down large uprising in the cities, some violent event being triggered, and the military refusing to kill their countrymen. Then the political leadership has some tough decisions to make.

I think this is all very far-fetched at this point, but the idea that the rural population being conservative makes political revolution impossible is just not backed up by history.

70

Kulak’s were conservative farmers who opposed the Bolshevik takeover of Russia. Things did not turn out as well as they had hoped.

71

Once again, I am not saying that the dissolution will be a planned, managed event, but rather the disintegration of the state. Nor am I claiming that I will have any role in the planning and management of the dissolution. The thing about unplanned, unmanaged dissolution of states (what I’m talking about) is that they are inherently messy and will also probably be violent.

I didn’t say anything about “trying to split off,” I said that it’s happening. Got it?

72

You do realize that the attitudes and opinions you quote are only represented by about 10-15% of Americans, pretty much evenly divided along party lines. The majority of Americans don’t really give a shit about politics. The are more concerned about making a living, taking care of their kids, putting food on the table, finding ways to increase the standard of living, planning for that next vacation, hoping their kids are better off then they are, etc. These are common traits among most Americans regardless of which party they identify with.

The media, all sides of it, spends the majority of its time focusing on the political zealots, like yourself, and creating divisiveness.

No, we as a country are not headed towards a revolution or dismantling of the Federal government as we know it.

73

Not sure what kings and czars have to do with the US, as we literally don’t have either. Or peasants for that matter, I certainly wasn’t talking about the people equivalent to peasants, but rather the people in and in charge of law enforcement, and who OWN (like nobles, unlike peasants) the majority of the lang and agricultural business.

Good thing that’s not the idea that I posted then. The idea I’m bringing up is that if you base a revolution off of “A lot of us blue staters are realizing that ‘you know what, we hate you back red state America’” without taking into account that around 1/3 of your 'blue’state are people who have and vote the same viewpoints as the ‘red state america’ that you hate, and they’re a much higher proportion of the law enforcement, large land owners, and agricultural owners (again, not the workers) than the general population in your blue state, you’re not likely to get a successful ‘blue state’ revolution. Throw in ‘military’ with LEOs if you’re expecting the national guard and/or federal military to join in, they are (again) populated with people sympathetic to the red staters that it’s postulated the revolution hates and wishes to split from.

74

You explicitly said “A lot of us blue staters are realizing that ‘you know what, we hate you back red state America’” and that that would be the prompt for the dissolution. I’m pointing out that people who sympathise with those hated ‘red state’ Americans make up a large portion of your blue state, and are over represented in the people who deal out state violence (LEOs), own most land, and control the food supply. (And are also a large portion of the Federal and state military too. And the vast majortiy of armed paramilitary groups, for that matter.)

The idea that ‘blue states’ and ‘red states’ are monolithic entities who want to split from each other is not realistic, neither is the idea of ‘blue states’ casually going their own way when ‘red state sympathisers’ are the ones currently in control of an awful lot of important things like state violence, land, and food.

75

Nope, you are factually incorrect. We are more divided than ever. Polarization is very real and much more pronounced than at any other time in America since the civil war. https://news.usc.edu/110124/political-polarization-at-its-worst-since-the-civil-war-2/

Also, red state America’s rejection of science is having real world impacts. Not just in climate change (which once again, thanks red staters for not listening to the scientists and then taking an aggressive pro-pollution stance), but also with this current crisis:

It’s not that red staters are uneducated, they have been actively de-educated, a process by which basic facts like climate change, slavery in America and the functioning of government have been rejected as being a tool of the left. As a result, red state America is in a permanent state of enfeeblement dependent on the tax dollars of blue state Americans they hate so much. All of this works as long as blue staters always take the higher road, as long as we keep shrugging off their hate and ignorance and keep supporting them. But when you have a president who is actively diverting federal resources away from blue states where the need is greater then it becomes more difficult to ignore. Here is the red state president actively trying destabilize blue states and in the process cause the deaths of Americans.

While red staters get worked up about gay marriage, which bathroom people use, or whatever the new line of hate that is rolled out by their oligarchs, blue staters are going to start to question why they keep putting up with this. Why should we keep supporting a segment of society that shows no interest in paying their fair share, who are increasingly incapable of caring for themselves and who are aggressively belligerent towards attempts to improve their lives and who use the levers of power to push radical and undemocratic agendas.

Once blue state Americans start asking themselves what we’re getting out of all of this red state America is in trouble. New York with out Mississippi is still New York; Mississippi without New York is fucked.

76

Cool. I left Radford in 1990, but have been back to visit many times. Are you on the “You are over 40 and remember Radford” FB group?

77

You seem to be implying that these are societal traits unique to 21st century Americans, and not representative of the vast bulk of mankind in all times and places. If so, you are mistaken - most people everywhere and at all times have been primarily concerned about only their own immediate circle. And yet - innumerable states have dissolved into constituent polities in spite of this circumstance.

The long track record of history does not indicate that widespread political apathy in a society renders it immune to the dangers of governmental fragmentation.

78

I’m over 40 (graduated RHS in '88) but I’m not on FB.

79

Your cite doesn’t talk about the population in general. It refers to people that are party hardliners.

Do some research, instead of hitting on the first article in google about polarization that pops up.

80

While the parties are more polarized the public is not: