This is pretty much the real impediment to the idea of a Left-Right partition. There might be regionalist movements that have reasons for secession. Hawaii & Alaska are distinct enough, perhaps. But that’s not really about the left-right, metropolis-countryside, progress-regress splits.
And it’s secede/secession, not succeed/succession.
Well, perhaps not stronger, but better off doesn’t have to mean stronger.
Might there be merit in a constitutional change allowing unilateral secession under defined circumstances?
How on earth is that possible? Putting aside that I don’t think the US would exist in 2011 if secession had happened in 1861, you know that today, more than a third of the population lives in the area that tried to secede, and that the south is one of the fastest growing and most economically vibrant parts of the country, right?
Questionable if that would be the case absent the civil war, though. How much would the continuation of slavery have retarded economic development in the South? How much would sanctions have crippled the Confederacy a la South Africa?
Actually, 31.6% of the population, per last year’s Census, but close enough.
The 11 states of the former Confederacy, despite having 31.6% of the population, have only 29% of the GDP broken down by state. So describing it as “one of the…most economically vibrant parts of the country” is wrong.
Your claim that it’s one of the fastest growing regions is a bit more ambiguous. Between 2007 and 2010, the former Confederacy’s GDP shrank by 0.15%, compared to 0.34% for the nation as a whole, so that’s better than average, even if it’s not growth. But given that the Northeast’s economy actually grew by 1.2% during that period, it’s hardly in the top rank.
Probably some, but the Confederacy had about a third of the population back then too. And, not talking about how much economic development would have been retarded in the south, but how much would it have been retarded in the US without the South? You don’t think that the South and transplants from the South contributed to the US being an economic and military powerhouse? Or that the cultural and technological contributions of the South didn’t contribute to making the US what it is today?
You’d still have transplants from the South. We have immigrants from ten thousand miles away, after all. Certainly the US would look different without the South- especially in terms of culture- but it’s my impression that the South was been a drain on the country as a whole since the middle of the nineteenth century. Obviously, (most of) it isn’t anymore, but I don’t know where the shift occurred.
ETA: I guess this depends in large part on whether most of the states created since the Civil War joined the US or the Confederacy. Obviously, contributions of states like California annot be overstated, especially in terms of technological advances.
Sure, they contributed. But just as the South was a backwater with respect to development in the antebellum period (I recommend Joyce Appleby’s Inheriting the Revolution on this topic), it continued to be so through the century or so following the Civil War; we’d have done fine without it, thanks.
And in the past 40 years or so, a good portion of the South’s economic growth has been based on enticing employers southward from the Rust Belt with the promise of low wages, but part of that selling point has been that they’re part of the same country. Assuming a successful Confederate secession, IMHO those jobs would have either stayed put in the U.S. proper, or gone directly to the Third World without a stop in the CSA.
A Constitutional amendment couldn’t be passed to expel a state, since that falls afoul of one of the two restrictions on what amendments can do (and the only one that’s still relevant). Article V (the one describing the process for amendment) ends with
Since expelling a state would surely remove its Senatorial representation, it can’t be done via amendment.
California joined the Union in 1850, actually. Washington state, which has played a big role in our economic growth over the past two decades, didn’t join the Union until well after the Civil War, but it would have surely been part of the Union even if the Confederate secession had succeeded.
In fact, it’s hard to see that the CSA would have expanded greatly after the war, given that its military successes during the war were almost exclusively in defending its home ground, while its efforts to extend its military reach into the North largely failed. Maybe it could have annexed Oklahoma.
Plus 2.2% for Arizona and New Mexico, but I acknowledge your broader point. But still, a potential America that loses 31% of its GDP is in no way a stronger one.
Well, it theoretically could, but since a necessary preliminary would be a Constitutional amendment abolishing the Senate*, it’s not gonna happen in any future I can envision.
*Such an amendment (which would have approximately zero chance of getting the votes of 2/3 of the Senate, needless to say, let alone passing 38 state legislatures loaded with people who hope to be U.S. Senators someday) wouldn’t run afoul of Article V since every state would retain equal suffrage (of zero) in the Senate. And once there was no Senate, an expelled state would continue to retain equal suffrage (still zero!) in the Senate. So it can in theory be done.
Arizona and New Mexico didn’t try to secede. All you can say is that parts of those two states briefly tried to do so. (Albequerque and Santa Fe would have been in the Union, Phoenix and Tucson in the Confederacy, if the Arizona Territory had also successfully seceded. But the Union would have hung onto the whole Arizona-NM territory even if the Confederacy had won its independence.)
I’m not seeing that as being the ultimate result, as my previous posts in this thread indicate. The Union would have been every bit the industrial powerhouse it is now - and more so, I’d expect, because the measures that have wound up increasing income inequality and reducing the extent to which a large part of our citizenry has been able to contribute to the nation’s economic vitality over the past few decades absolutely depended on Southern votes to pass.
Meanwhile, it’s hard to see the South by itself being anything but a largely agricultural backwater with an entrenched aristocracy choking off potential rivals in the crib.
It is doubtful that secession could be considered legal any more, absent an amendment providing a mechanism for it. The citizens of Texas (to pick a state that has recently made secessionary noises) are also citizens of the United States, and are entitled to maintain that citizenship without interference from Texas.
On behalf of the Great White North, we’d be happy to discuss the entry of northern border states, especially Maine and Vermont (a.k.a. Baja Quebec), as well as Alask. Most particularly we’d like to discuss toasty li’l Hawai’i. We would appreciate Hawai’i more than CONUS does, trust me.
Not to bring all that birther nonsense up again, but what about Hawaii? It was a kingdom at one time, and once in a while I read about rumblings of secession. It’s never very serious.
Say a movement got some traction for whatever reason, and Hawaii wanted to secede? Would they have that right? I suppose we would just declare martial law over there, but would we look bad?
Ignoring the claim of realism (in the sense you stated about majority of residents), there are large portions of the US that conceivably could form an economically viable country, or at least join a currently economically viable one (Canada). Montana, for example, could join Canada as a new province, with a bit of railroad building to shift it’s trade northward, or at least be a separate nation-state that allies with Canada, as long as it shifts it’s trade movement north in the same way.
New York, west of I-87, and north of I-84 (using really crude dividing lines that could easily be improved upon, but would be hard to define) would be a valuable addition to Canada’s economy, even if a separate nation (Hail NewYorkada! Flag is a Maple leaf in the shape of someone flipping the bird!), allied with Canada. For that one, you would need to allow portions of states to secede (sp. sux) separately from their state, unlike the amendments or other methods proposed in this thread.
No, there are no shortage of “chunks of the currently existing US” that would NOT be automatically doomed if they seceded. There is NO limit that says we have to stick together TODAY. There is only tradition that keeps us together. And that tradition is dying. I give it maybe 2 or 3 decades.
Just my 2 cents, which ain’t much anymore given what a US penny is worth.