Those fools don’t believe in taxes so they’d have nothing. I’d warn them that if any hint of slavery shows up in that new “nation” that we’d nuke it to the stone age or at least put huge bounties on the heads of all their elected representatives.
I think the Internet has changed perceptions, but not realities. People don’t need to know their physical neighbors, because they can learn everything and order everything off the Internet. So they feel more connected to some Facebook friend states away who hates the same things they hate.
A 1/6 event is much easier because of the Internet. Rich cosplayers can jet into Washington DC and have their day. That is different from a sustained movement. In that way, 1/6 is no different than 9/11. A big one-off. What’s the follow up?
If the red states really want these things, “Christian Sharia law”, true 1930s style discrimination, they are going to need territory and cities. ALL of the cities have people who are going to be dislocated at best, killed at worst, by the red state advocate’s actions. A lot of people are going to be killed who aren’t even fighting, just collateral damage.
Is there really a discontiguous group of Facebook friends that’s going to go through all that? It’s going to be a lot more work that CSA, or Brexit, or Quebecois, because the geography doesn’t support it.
This. I had this in mind but forgot to write it.
The airports will be the first assets seized. Drop a Ranger battalion on it, follow on with armor and mechanized infantry. Done deal, won’t be contested.
There are enough federal units stationed in Georgia to destroy any militia, organized or not. That includes armor, infantry, aviation, logistics. That’s why I took a little trouble to name a few of those. And the feds don’t need to content themselves with what’s in Georgia; they can effectively mobilize anywhere where they can land a C-130 (or get it a few hundred feet over a nice flat area).
Any attempt at secession would end pretty quickly by a bunch of angry rednecks with small arms meeting their fate at the pointy end of the Apache attack helicopters they like to joke about.
If a bunch of red states seceded, then I don’t see a civil war between red states and blue states, I see a civil war in the new red country.
Well it depends on how it’s done and how it’s perceived. I think people in this thread are presuming a hostile secession, ala the CSA. But the more realistic way - to the extent that any of this is realistic altogether - this comes about is that enough Red State people and leaders make clear enough that they are serious about this and the rest of the country - which is itself sick of constant fighting over this and that, and which has seen situations where they themselves chaffed under the rule of conservative leaders - agreed to a split as the best solution.
In that scenario, it would be more like a negotiated divorce, and neither side would have exclusive claim to assets (financial or strategic) or debt.
There are enough federal units in Georgia alone to secure and guard any kind of shipments at all. Anybody ambushing a train would eat a hellfire missile, if they didn’t get popped from the rear by loyalist partisans first.
There’s simply no way a state could effectively secede unless a large majority of its population is behind it, and probably a foreign actor supplying weapons, lots of weapons that the average civilian won’t have training to even guess how to operate.
Question: how much of this imbalance is individuals and small businesses whose economic activity is local, and how much is simply assigning all the economic activity of big national/international companies headquartered in Blue states to those states? Because if that’s how it’s done, and this is what produced a large percentage of the imbalance, then it’s sort of artificial and could change in a hurry, especially if businesses perceive that the Red State Nation is a more favorable climate.
Under a Democratic administration, if states with predominant Republican majorities chose to leave the union, I think that we would probably let them do so. It wouldn’t be without consequence, there would certainly be a number of concessions that were negotiated for, and it would be likely that the purportive new nation would not wish to concede to those.
One very important concession that the new nation would have to agree to is that of free emigration. If someone wants to leave that nation, they should be able to claim asylum in the Union, or other country of their choosing. That doesn’t mean that it would be granted by the nation that is asked, but the new country would be required to allow them to make that application. This would need to include prisoners or others accused or convicted of violating the laws in that country.
In the end I think the new red country ends up with a whole bunch of land, and a small population living a barely subsistence level of existence, squabbling and fighting among themselves. The US, OTOH, ends up doing better, now that it has shed itself of those who want to hold the whole country back.
You can find the definitions here: https://www.bea.gov/system/files/2020-04/qgdpstate0420.pdf
It says:
So, by my reading, local offices of multi-state or multi-national corporations would be assigned to the state where the work was actually done.
Whether “Red State Nation” would be more favorable economically would depend almost entirely on the terms of the separation and the following displacements (assuming there would be some sort of free-movement period like there was when India and Pakistan partitioned).
Politically these things typically come down to leverage. I struggle to see what kind of leverage those 20 states would have over a Federal US government that was led by “Unionists” (for lack of a better term) that would compel the US to provide generous terms.
I could almost squint and see some sort of devolution/home-rule movement after 20 years of Democratic control of the federal government, possibly. But I just can’t see what issue would be so static and intractable that it would be worth separation (taxes? abortion? UHC? I don’t see it for any of those).
That’s a reasonable point.
There probably would be some businesses that relocated to the new areas, where there wouldn’t be laws protecting worker’s rights or safety, or the environment, and they could avoid paying taxes.
But, it would continue to be that the businesses located in areas where people actually live, where the conditions are amenable to growth, would continue to thrive, just as they do currently.
When I say “the troops that want to leave,” I mean any servicemembers in the current armed forces that want to leave, presumably so they can join the red state’s armed forces. The weapons belong to the “blue government” and will stay that way. Technically, the land does as well, but if the red states are leaving with the blue states’ blessing, they will work out a deal; remember that the government did not have much of a problem giving the portion of Washington, DC on the south/west side of the Potomac back to Virginia (and never asked for it back) in 1861.
Why not? Have you seen the runways at Naval Air Station Alameda (former home of the “nuclear wessels” as seen in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home) after it was closed?
That’s really the answer here; Texas is for the most part a “purple” state, in that population-wise, it’s not nearly as Republican-centric as the election results would indicate. There’s been a tremendous amount of gerrymandering in the GOP’s favor over the past couple of decades, and it makes things in Congress, etc… look more popular than they really are.
But even Texas is a state of very blue islands surrounded by a (sparsely populated) sea of red. Texas has something like 29 million people, but nearly 20 million of them live in a handful of metro areas - Houston, Dallas/Ft Worth, Austin, San Antonio and El Paso, all of which are predominantly blue areas with some red suburbs. The rest of the state is highly red, but much more thinly populated.
So if there was some sort of insurrection/rebellion, it would likely take place WITHIN states themselves, not between the various states I believe. Even there, I’m not sure how that would shake out; part of me thinks that trying to gain/maintain dominance over major railways and highways would be how it might take place, but that’s also very Mad Max-ish.
Not only are cities, city blocks, and individual apartment complexes not homogeneous in ideology the military and law enforcement aren’t either. We’d have sectarian violence similar to what we see in Syria.
For perspective, how many pro-North people were there in the South in the Civil War, and vice versa? 20 percent apiece?
There was significantly less mixing of populations back then. Most people died within a few miles of where they were born. They didn’t know or communicate with anyone that wasn’t within earshot.
Well, it’s somewhat hard to say because Lincoln was not on the ballot in the deep south, and even where he was (VA) he only got a small percentage. But the “unionist” candidates (Douglas, Bell) won majorities in most border states and even in the “Deep South” the pro-Union candidates got 43% of the vote (v. 57% for Breckenridge).
By 1864 there was clearly a pretty large population in the North that were willing to negotiate a peace to let the South leave. But military victories changed attitudes in time for Lincoln to win handily.
So I would say maybe 30-40% of the South were not secessionist prior to 1860 and a good 30-40% of the North were probably ready to let the South go by 1864 (possibly more).
There’s a huge difference between “pro-union” and “pro-North”. E.g. Robert E. Lee was pro-union but he was not pro-North. Pro-union just means that you didn’t want to break apart the union over whatever issues you had with the other states. Pro-North would mean that you identified with the North vs the South.
I would think the percentage of people in the Southern states who were “pro-North” was miniscule. It’s not at all comparable to the situation today where a big percentage of people in every state identify with the very values and ideology which would be represented by the other federal government in the event of a split.
Yeah, that’s probably right. I wasn’t quite sure what “pro-North” meant. If it meant supporting Lincoln, then yes you’re talking about less than 1%. Quite different than today. If it meant opposing secession (which I think is more germane to the OP) then quite a lot of folks were drug along by a pretty small majority that wanted to leave the Union.
You can be 100% confident that the US would assert an exclusive claim to every bit of military property in the red states. They likely would refuse to cede the land they’re stationed on. This is not necessarily a death-knell to the idea of the secession; the US will just start with military bases already in place in the new country. In theory this could all be done amicably.
Regarding the debt, it seems likely to me that the US would make the red states pay for their freedom by shouldering some amount of the debt. The decent US might be tired of the red US, but they won’t be tired enough to let them skip out on the check. The red states would have little choice but to accept if they want to keep the split amicable.
And while the split may be amicable, I wouldn’t expect the relations between the countries to be; it seems nigh-certain that the new country will rapidly earn censure for perpetrating human rights violations. You can reasonably assume that there will impediments to trade and shipments - how many ports would this presumed new country have?