This piece is just wishful thinking, it points to a number of alarming stats that show Americans are divided and pessimistic and then simply ends with “we’re all Americans” tripe. Are all your cites this weak?
New York and New Jersey are more than just New York City. And both get fairly conservative even an hour or so away from Manhattan. Also keep in mind that most “New Yorkers” are from somewhere else.
Also, one thing that hasn’t been mentioned I think is that, if anything, most states are seeing MORE of a need for a Federal response, not less. I don’t think any state is saying “oh I’d be better off if I handled this Coronavirus stuff on my own”.
The big question in my mind is what happens in November. Even if Trump weren’t president, having the entire country on lockdown leading up to an election is problematic.
Absolutely miss my point. Of course we need a federal response, my point is we’re not getting it and in fact blue state America puts more in federal tax dollars than it gets out, while red state America takes in more in federal tax dollars than it gives. For blue state America, the federal government is a net loss, especially if the president is diverting resources away from blue state America to punish people who don’t vote for him. I’m saying that the whole system is collapsing, not that it’s ideal for it to collapse.
The United States will eventually break up because the country was founded on a flawed value system, and those flaws still linger and shape our politics today. It is clear that some states, and territories within these states, have radically different views about how to define their America. And these divides have hardened, and moreover, these differences are being exploited.
When the president of the United States can actually get away with threatening to withhold supplies during a time of existential emergency (and boasting about it on live TV), that’s not a sound byte or viral video moment; that’s a prelude to a national political crisis. It’s an 1850s moment. You can deny that and bury your heads in the sand all you want, but this is what we’re dealing with.
And here’s where I’m going with this: this pandemic, as bad as it is, is not the worst danger that’s lurking behind us. That danger is climate change, and it’s going to fuck us up badly. How the US, how the world, deals with this pandemic is telling. It’s a test, a small test, to see how we deal with the much larger threat of climate change. We’re failing this test miserably, and what comes in the next decade or so is going to be hell on earth. I’m honestly glad I don’t have kids.
Exactly. We not only have different values, our values are diametrically opposed: support for, or opposition to gay marriage, for example. Red staters are for denying civil rights for some citizens, just like they were opposed to the civil rights movement. These are not small differences, these are foundational attitudes to what kind of country we live in.
And I read your post knowing that you’ve spent considerable time in Afghanistan and have seen a thing or two about political divisions, so I respect your input on this.
People think it can’t happen here “Well shit, we’re not Afghanistan, dude.” Fine, we can keep thinking that if we want. We’re not Afghanistan, but we’re a lot closer to some other failed democracies and states than we’d like to believe. Our Dear Leader is behaving a hell of a lot like Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin, Recep Erdogan, and hell, I’d even compare his theatrics to Hugo Chavez and Benito Mussolini even if their ideology is different. But Trump gets his energy from somewhere, and that somewhere is from people scattered across ‘Merikuh’ who insist that America be defined on their terms, and theirs only. The political divide isn’t just at the top; it’s deep into the soil and roots of this country.
James Carville said it quite aptly on election night: this country doesn’t want to be united. And he’s right: it doesn’t.
This incident is our Chernobyl. It is the moment when it is clear that the entire system is corrupt and that it is not serving huge swathes of the nation. Just like in the Soviet Union then, there is a large chunk of the country that simply doesn’t want to believe it’s true, so they keep saying it’s not true.
In the military blue represents your side and red the enemy. From what I see of US politics, it’s an appropriate choice for the parties, although calling the Dems the friendlies is pushing it a bit.
Very likely, but this pandemic won’t do it, it will be an economic crash that does.
Like the one coming out of this pandemic?
Do you have cites for these? Although the initial impetus for the French Revolution came from the middle class (Tiers État), I thought the lower classes soon took sides against the King.
New York on it’s own is still over 1/3 Red State, it’s not monolithically blue - over 1/3 of New York State’s voters (36%) voted for Trump in 2016 even though it was obviously not a swing state. The idea that the ‘Blue State’ of New York can cleanly separate from all those ‘Red State’ voters when their own ‘blue’ state has a lot of ‘red’ in it doesn’t stand up to reality. And, again, that Red State support tends to be in law enforcement, military, agricultural producers, and large land owners, which makes any sort of split really messy, since the ‘reds’ have the advantage in violence, food, and land.
I don’t think it’s impossible for the US to break up, but the ‘blue state’ ‘red state’ split doesn’t actually work like people seem to think it does.
You’re right. All of the lower classes did revolt, including the landless peasantry in the farmlands burning down manor houses (I believe this happened in both countries actually).
I should have been more precise in my analogy - rural land-owners (landed gentry in France, and Kulaks in Russia) were generally opposed to the revolutions there. The fact that they owned the land (and in theory the production of food) didn’t really matter.
I’m trying to come up with an analogue for modern-day poor conservative rural voters and the best I can think of is the peasants of the Vendee taking up arms in a counter-revolutionary effort. Their reasons were largely cultural and religious, not economic, which I think maps pretty well to heavily conservative rural regions.
The thrust of my point is this: who owns the land doesn’t really matter. What matters is bodies and who controls the levers of power (largely city centers, banks, and the military). I do suppose it is possible that conservative rural land-owners could raise an army or support an invading army, a la Vendee.
Blue state America without red state America is western Europe. Red state America without blue state America is a third world shithole.
There’s no one trigger that would do it; it’s a gradual slow burn that eventually results in an eruption. But you’re right in suggesting that economic turmoil could be one of those triggers. A pandemic that results in an economic collapse is likely to be a very unsettling event that will shake many people to their core, and it’s the sort of thing that could intensify factions.
But even if this isn’t the event, climate change is going to introduce successive waves of catastrophic trauma. I don’t look at the current pandemic is necessarily the event that does it; it’s rather the assessment tool that we can use to determine how we handle the inevitable triggers that will come later.
Let’s just remember: The US is a country that denies climate change, just like it denied the seriousness of the COVID crisis. And when it finally reckons with reality, it’s going to end up in full-on panic, and it’s going to be brutally ugly. And it will cause a fracturing because rather than seeing ourselves as a “united” country; it will be in the interests of the plutocrats to divide. It will be the inevitable reaction among the peasants to say “Fuck you, I don’t accept this” and that’s when America’s centuries old demons will be unleashed yet again.
“Blue States” are 1/3 or more composed of people who support “Red State” beliefs. As I keep pointing out and you keep going into denial of, even bastions of ‘Blueness’ like CA and NY had more than 1/3 of voters vote for Trump. Is there something magical where 40% of the country being ‘red state’ is unworkable, but over 30% is? Because that’s all that your split actually gets you.
Global significance isn’t a very important issue wrt the health, wealth and happiness of a nation’s citizens.
Switching gears to a point made earlier by someone else, there appears to be a growing frustration from those on the left at the country’s inability to deal with 21st century problems because so much of the electorate is opposed to science and determined to uphold an anachronistic election process that prevents the progress we increasingly need.
My state of Washington is mostly red with blue polka dots, with a blue blob in the Seattle metropolitan area. I think that isn’t very different from the country as a whole.
I think the idea that the US will break up any time soon are paranoid ramblings by people with extreme political views who think many more people share their fringe beliefs. The US won’t break up because there is no clean divide to cause that; the country has no clear geographical line(s) to split from. There’s also no real incentive to split up. There are too many economic advantages to staying united. Too many people aren’t going to abandon the comforts they have.
It’s like a group of people in a house in a blizzard, and they don’t always get along, and a few of them are really bitter and expect everyone to leave the house to get away from each other. It’s too cold out for that to happen.
I agree with your basic point, but will still offer a Nitpick. 
Five of the 51 “states” gave Trump less than 33.3% of the 2016 vote:
Dist_Columbia 4.1%
Hawaii 30.0%
Vermont 30.3%
California 31.6%
Massachusetts 32.8%
You can rephrase “more than 1/3 … voted for Trump” to be “more than 1/3 of those who didn’t vote for Johnson or Stein … voted for Trump.” Then, only Dist_Columbia and Hawaii would be exceptions.
Agreed, and you have also provided the best answer for MadMonk28. The pandemic is really going to mess up the economies of the world and cause a great deal of indiviidual hardship (I, for one, have no income coming in, and won’t until the lockdown relaxes), but it will take another crisis on top of that, Maybe another failed war, but one that spiraled out of control and came home to roost? At any rate the pandemic will exacerbate matters.