Whether the remaining USA gives part of its military to the new Red America or not, the new Red America would be plenty capable of building up a substantial military on its own within years anyway. The know-how is there. Many defense engineers are conservative or hail from red states. The southern states, especially Georgia, always had a military-enlistment culture to begin with. The new Red America military might not be as strong as Blue’s, but it would soon pose a very serious threat indeed. It’s not as if they would remain permanently fang-less due to not having been given a military. The Pantex nuclear-weapon plant is in Texas. Uranium can be found in Texas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah and Arizona. A Red America could and would amass a nuclear arsenal.
Presuming the US allows this to go on unchecked, sure. But if the US isn’t completely moronic they would require Neocon to agree to operate without an army in return for tolerating their continued existence.
Eh, they could have an armed force, similar to what Japan had during our occupation. Something that they can use to deal with defense or internal issues. But no offensive or projected forces.
I certainly wouldn’t want them to have nukes, and not because I am afraid that they would use them against us in a war. I figure it’s less than a decade before the Red State country fails, and I wouldn’t want the oligarchs to start selling off nukes to the highest bidder.
I’ve actually been picturing the Japanese self-defense force and the limits upon it for most of this conversation, so absolutely.
How do you imagine that would work. Forcing states to stay in the union. If the 7 state difference between your list and mine didn’t want to stay and didn’t want to be a political permanent minority they would vote against your constitutional amendment they would only need 5 more states (WV and UT would easily be two of them) to scuttle the amendment. The only way this works peacefully is if there are close to half of the states in the leave group.
There are lots of ways for the red states to be noxious monsters that could make blue states want to get rid of them. They could cause only 1 law to be passed per year and only through reconciliation while the dems are in control and they could pack the courts so the few democrats laws that do pass are struck down by the courts.
If the offer is give us a proportionate amount of the military and you can pass whatever laws you want or we can go to war and kill millions of Americans and you still won’t get any progressive laws. If there is a peacefull dissolution of the union there is no reason to think the RSA would want to invade the OUSA for fun.
The filibuster is much easier to do away with than changing the constitution to allow you to leave the union.
Have to disagree with this rather strenuously. Look at the people who would be running the RSA. Hell, Texas would invade New Mexico just for shits & giggles after football season is over. Since there is no enemy on their border other than the OUSA, I see no reason to give them any ability to wage war. Not even internal security forces. Let their “militias” do it.
My apologies to Hawai’i for leaving them out of the West Coast [del]Avengers[/del] America.
Lol. The hypotheticals are getting pretty outlandish. The full US doesn’t have the stomach to fight wars to win. Somehow the more pacifist portion of the population is going to militarily subjugate, perpetually, the more militant portion.
I think it would work by the US saying “Oh, so your departure amendment failed. Feel free to try again. We still would like to let you leave, but we’re not going to be goddamn morons about it.”
If the right wing states try to pull a Civil War 2 to leave they will discover that the US military is just a tad better now than it was in 1861, which is to say that they’ll get their asses kicked so hard that when they wake up they’ll find that they have neither an economy nor government representation.
And you just seriously said “If you don’t let us have everything we want we’ll start an unprovoked war with you, killing millions. But if you give us your army you can trust us to never think of doing what I literally just said we’re totally willing to do.”
It’s why we keep an army around, so we don’t have to do it ourselves.
I get that it’s a pervasive myth that the hicks with thousands of guns in their barns can beat the US military via the power of their massive manly testosterone size, but in realityland that’s just an outlandish hypothetical.
As is the hypothetical that the US would cower and grovel before the mighty red states’ manly testosterone size and hand over any and everything the red states want.
Let’s all be clear here - the “Red states get everything, woot woot” position is requires concessions from the US which would represent an existential threat. There is no chance whatsoever that the US would take actions leading directly to its dissolution or violent takeover just to cater to the red states. That’s the province of very bad fiction.
I definitely agree, its not small change by any means and certainly doesn’t give them a free ticket to the Third World [although they may get a few invites to their US=Satan supper clubs]. It was more the disparity that surprised me.
Um, who makes up the military? People from predominantly conservative areas. You folks got to think this weird fantasy through. But let’s assume everything went the way you think it would. You’d end up being a totalitarian nation just out of paranoia. You’d become the thing you claim to hate.
Well, I think that this would never happen. But let’s supposed it did happen, and that it happened according to the rules of the OP - that some substantial number of red states are allowed to peacefully leave the union via legislative action. (Which I suspect would not actually require an amendment, any more than it required an amendment to induct states, but who knows.)
Under that scenario, any potential traitorous losers in the military would have little reason to be faithless oathbreakers, since nothing bad is happening to their states - at least, not thanks to the federal government.
On the other hand, if the states decide to go all confederacy 2.0 and try to start a military insurrection, I’m quite confident that the traitorous losers in the military who commit treason will find themselves shot, even as the neocon army/militias/rabble will discover that the US military can do targeted drone strikes now.
That doesn’t mean that the military itself is significantly more conservative than the US population as a whole. For example, support for Trump among members of the military ended up lower than in the general population shortly before the November election:
Remember, the US military is significantly less white than the US general population. And that tends to temper conservatism even among people “from predominantly conservative areas”.
I will say this - there is nothing that lays bare the naked contempt of both sides for each other than these secession threads, which we have periodically year after year. Whether it’s blue states seceding or red ones, both sides are convinced that 1) the other side is the freeloader that represents a burden to be cut loose, and 2) their own side will easily roll the other side in a shooting war.
The red state blue state divide is an illusion created by the electoral college. It’s more of a rural/urban conflict, and even that is an oversimplification. You can find hard rightists in San Francisco and leftists in rural Idaho. But taking the town v. country view, a civil war is impossible. Where would the boundaries be? Not to mention, what happens to all the federal land. And the federal money.
There won’t be a civil war. The far more probable danger is terrorist violence from far right groups.
The only reason the US would win the shooting war is because they have the US army. (And the US army appears not to be a weak-willed toy to be stolen by the first Trump to yell for it.) If you lined up the actual populace by sides and had them shoot it out, the liberals would only win because we’d smother the conservatives with our corpses.
And I think the objective facts show that the conservative regions have been suffering economically these last several decades. It’s hard to say whose fault this is, but facts are facts.
Sure, but how effective do you believe the US military would be if 38% of them walked away. I used 50% earlier thinking they would be closer to the US population. It would still be a major disruption even 10% casualty rate can destroy the effectiveness of military units.
This is probably true but it would still take 50% of the remain contingent to be ok with the separation so that the new OUSA congress didn’t just declare a war for reunification. Either way we’re looking at 2/3rds of the population or 35ish states so it’s pretty close to an amendment.
Again if 38% of the active duty military left and went back to their home states it would be almost impossible for the military to also fight the RSA even assuming no sabotage on the way out the door.
The smartest way would be the demand I made earlier followed by the RSA just saying “we are no longer part of the USA remove your troops from our boarders”. They could withhold federal taxes while telling people to come home to support their state. The smart solution would be not firing any shots for a year or so and just forcing the OUS to airlift all supplies to their bases in the RUSA or be the one to start a shooting war. That alone might be enough to cause the rest of the country to go “fine go your own way”.
This presumes that 38% of the military are such bad soldiers that they would go AWOL simply because their home state suddenly stopped being a state. Keep in mind this is the scenario where the split is peaceful. I personally think that many of the soldiers would be troubled, but most would not go AWOL just over this.
And for the split to be peaceful, Neocon needs to not be trying to piss off the US by interfering with their ability to feed their troops/shuttle troops and equipment back within the new borders. Honestly, if they do manage to execute a peaceful exit, it’s probably in their best interest not to piss the US off. They’ll be way more free to commit hate crimes and such on their populace if the US isn’t glaring at them at the time. The US has a history of being cool with foreign dictators - so Neocon’s best shot to do what it wants is to just stay under the radar.