Aww, come on, Northerners aren’t that bad! We don’t need to wall them off.
The desire to implement a more progressive, effective system of governance might ultimately be at the root of a “majority secession.” The next century may find parliamentary systems, for example, or maybe something entirely new surpassing the U.S. in achievement and efficiency. Our system allows a sizable minority to block any major changes like that; so the only alternative would be for the majority to leave.
I don’t think that’s the real problem. I like the protection of minority rights and I think the Constitutional system works well.
The whole idea was that our many interests would continually cross-cut each other. On one issue urban would be fighting rural. Then secular would be fighting theocratic. Then ownership would be fighting labor. We would wear so many hats that we would each spend a lot of time on both the minority and majority side, and we would forge political alliances (and enmities) within constantly changing networks.
Our biggest problem is that the majority/minority rift has become ossified and is strongly geographically and culturally reinforced. The west is still up for grabs, but the northeast and the southeast are forever fixed at bayonet point. As recently as the 1950’s the political parties still crosscut geography so the fundamental division between the Confederacy and the rest of the nation was somewhat hidden. But as the parties realigned that temporary veil was removed, and we are faced with a map that is basically the same old battle. The electoral maps even look the same.
200+ years is probably long enough to call the experimental data decisive. We are really two countries. I would think the south would be overjoyed to finally be able to enact the kind of laws (or lack thereof) they want, and I know we’re tried of lugging them around. So let’s do a Czechs and Slovaks and decide to “just be friends.”
Heck, it doesn’t need to be concertina wire. It could be a fantastic public works project. We would use newly-legalized immigrants and you guys would use, I dunno, prisoners from the reeducation camps you send the science teachers who didn’t escape. 
And, again, you are perpetuating that fallacy. The maps you are looking at are misleading you.
Let me just clarify one point – I am all for protecting minority rights as well and I would wish it to be an inviolate part of any new system.
I’m talking about large systemic changes. Posters have discussed the threat posed by secession to the democratic concept but the current system pretty much curtails any talk of systemic changes as long as a sizable minority wishes it to be so. Granted, I’m a little off my rocker by nature, but the thought of changing the whole structure is not something intelligent citizens should be afraid of discussing.
Well, I must be perpetuating the fallacy for the first time since I haven’t mentioned it before. Perhaps you are fighting with somebody else? 
The south has voted as a bloc fairly dependably, as one would expect a region with *fairly * similar economic interests in the context of national politics. So has the northeast. These blocs have generally opposed one another. None of those statements are fallacious, so I’m not sure what your gripe is.
Consult. That aint random variance, that’s close binding of interests and culture, persistent over a long, long period of time.
And I doubt it’s changing any time soon.
It wasn’t a problem until it made governance impossible, with a *slowly *shrinking minority ideologically wed to the concept of sabotaging the federal government for self-protection, but that is where we have been inexorably moving since the 1960’s, and at a certain point both sides ought to cut their losses.
We should not be afraid of discussing it. We should heed Jefferson’s words:
The question is, has that time finally come, after two centuries of two fundamentally different ways of looking at liberty and the social contract? I think it is worth having a national discussion, especially since the idea is out there anyway.
It will not happen, but it might even by being broached sew a stronger national narrative. For ages we have had to listen to the tedious litany of self-absorbed, self-interested grievances from the Victimized South. Bringing it all out into the light might remind people of what America means as a cross-cultural experiment.
Or if not, then so be it.
It’s being done again in this thread. That doesn’t mean I’m accusing you of doin git more than one.
Did you actually read any of this thread before posting in it? Because otherwise I don’t know whether I should repeat all the points made in the conversation.
To put it simply, “The South” is not voting as a bloc. Certain demographic groups are exhibiting certain voting patterns in both the south and the north. And the west. When you reduce the complex reality of this to the shorthand of this, you fool yourself into believing that this is a regional or sectional division. It isn’t.
Amending the Constitution requires a supermajority in Congress and 3/4 of the states, and yet we’ve done it 27 times. Change is not impossible.
I don’t think anyone’s afraid of discussing it, but the U.S. and its Constitution have had a pretty remarkable run of success, so skepticism to radical change is understandable and prudent.
To Acsenray’s point, those different ways of looking at goverment (and there’s more than two, you know) do not correspond to the states in any kind of uniform way. Thinking they do is a result of the US political system, with two parties and a winner-take-all approach. If we had proportional electoral votes for every state, the map would look very, very different than the blue/red one we see so often.
Heck, just look at the 2012 Presidential election results by state. Even a place as solidly Republican as my own Kentucky had 37.8% vote for Obama. Just because Kentucky went “red” doesn’t mean those people don’t matter or don’t exist.
Bearing in mind that reducing things down to a Democrat or a Republican has distortive, simplifying effects all its own.
ETA: This Atlantic piece is a nice overview of the urban/rural political divide.
This is obvious, but misses the point. Although virtually every state, let alone region, is heterogeneous, a 60/40 split still produces the same statewide representation in election after election. The politicians produced by those areas, and then put into the position to shape federal legislation, speak to the same ideological rump. Even in the House, which was designed to be immune, gerrymandering has created a situation where pols have to tack even farther into their base, since they have a higher chance of being primaried than losing the general.
The result is that even a place with a relatively even split winds up represented by radical clowns. The south especially has wound up with a cartoonish collection of buffoons gibbering the latest far right talking points and pushing an extremist agenda *despite *the fact that its people are not monolithic. That’s the travesty.
I think if we swap the party ID here it will become more clear to you. The US is moving towards a situation where the current GOP constituency is always around 45% but never gets to 50%. This will likely result in the Dems swinging most national elections – they have now won the popular vote 5 times out of the last 6 – despite a very close split. I don’t think the right will consider it all that useful that the US is a “highly diverse” nation politically if they are continually shut out of the WH. Winner take all has consequences.
Imagine a future where a political philosophy with a sizeable majority in the south literally *never *wins the WH. That seems like a problem.
Given all this, it seems odd that you’d leap to ejecting the South from the Union, or the rest of the country forming a new nation, rather than, say, a proportional rather than winner-take-all system. Secession seems like throwing out the baby with the bathwater, “fixing” the country by destroying it.
I’m not “advocating” it (except jokingly – I would as deeply regret the loss of southern accented women as I would applaud the loss of southern accented men ). I am a believer in this too shall pass, and in large part regard our current national issues as First World Problems; self-inflicted affluenza.
I do think if we had an honest debate on secession it would improve our public discourse, since then Rick Perry and his ilk couldn’t get away with their herpa-derp shtick without having to put up or shut up.
And also I have never been too happy with the “indivisibility” of the Union – it’s really hard for me to see how the Confederacy was wrong. Children should not be held in bondage for the debts of their parents. Even the Founders (at least some of them) envisioned a social contract that would be continually, actively renewed. The active choice of maintaining the union is what makes the union meaningful; the dead hand of the past just breeds resentment. That’s why stuff like the presumptive right of states to nullify federal law (something that truly *would *destroy the country) gets started – sure, most of it is tub-thumping by demagogues, but some of it is the legitimate frustration of intelligent and well-meaning dissenters who have no path either to reform or freedom.
Finally, if the US is undergoing a true cultural mitosis anyway it is far better to actually allow it to split then to hold people together in a more and more uncomfortable and coercive environment. At the end of the day, a country is an agreement that exists to further the interests of the people and fetishizing it is sacrificing freedom on an idol to freedom.
Here’s one of the maps that our All Red Versus All Blue folks keep ignoring. It shows population density as well as party affiliation.
Will any of the New Secessionists return with comments after reviewing it? What do they have to say about:
[ul]
[li]The Blue Cities–in Texas & elsewhere[/li][li]The Black Belt through the heart of the Deep South[/li][li]The Latino voters along the Border[/li][/ul]
Really, I went to school in Texas & I can read the thing!
Ok, if it’s a joking suggestion, than nevermind.
Reasonable minds can disagree, but since secession is such a tiny minority view, I don’t think public discourse on it would move the needle much. Opposition to secession is something almost every American can agree on.
There’s a fundamental disagreement right there, then. Even if the issue were tariffs or railway gauges rather than something as (to modern folks) monstrously evil as slavery, I find that the Confederacy was indeed in the wrong. Democracy coupled with free speech and a free press leads to a marketplace of ideas, and no guarantee that your ideas will be the ‘winners’ and be given the force of law. To quit the system through secession is thus to subvert democracy, to engage in a tyranny of the minority.
We have that; compare the political landscape and issues of even 100 years ago to those of today. The social contract is continuously redefined. What hasn’t been, for the most part (amendments nothwithstanding), is the basic structure of government, as spelled out in the federal and state constitutions. I submit that this is because their essential features: separation of powers, due process, democracy, federalism - are highly conducive to a successful, humane government.
Counterpoint: everyone has a path to reform or freedom under our system, but this is checked by the democratic process. This is a good thing.
That’s a pretty tremendous if. While our two-party, winner-take-all approach can create the appearance of two entrenched, intractable sides, an appearance is all it is. The pressing issues of today are quite different from the pressing issues of days past, which were also filtered through a two-party, winner-take-all system. And yet, many of those issues were resolved, with no massive systemic change needed. For instance, I suspect that the average person of the year 1950, when asked if whites in parts of the Deep South, Boston, or Cincinnati might ever send their children to school with black children, would answer in the negative. Yet how many today advocate for segregated schools? It’s gone from an issue that a governor or two could stake his political life on, to something we all take for granted, in the space of a few decades. People and societies do change, there are no unsolveable issues that so fundamentally divide the American people as to justify breaking up the Union.
I’ll close with the 1956 Democratic Party platform. Consider the pressing, divisive political issues of the day, and how they were won or lost by one side, or simply made irrelevant:
On the face of it, that is pretty absurd. With the exception of the 50th state, every state in the US has runs of surveyed borders (straight-ish lines that have no particular geographic basis), how you can say that that is not an affect of federal establishment is beyond me.
More importantly, very few states are unified. My state, for instance, has a distinct red/blue shift from one side to the other, if the majority side were to subdue the minority side over secession, where does that leave the minority? I should think the secession process would have to include county polls to establish which parts of the state really do want to leave, and work out some kind of deal for the parts that want to stay. If the resulting independent state would not likely be economically viable (e.g., mostly urban, not enough farmland), the congress, which originally admitted the state, would end up withholding permission to leave.
Then, of course, there would be a case like, say, South Dakota: the Jefferson administration paid good money for that land, how would they propose to pay that back?
I think the point is that states are semi-sovereign entities even today. Many people deny it or try to gloss over that fact but it very much true. Towns and cities are subdivisions of the state they are in. States are NOT a subdivision of the federal government. The federal government derives its powers from the states and not the other way around.
See this good thread for a more nuanced explanation: Just how sovereign ARE U.S. states?
Florence King once pointed out that Americans commonly take the lessons of history, turn them upside down, and find words to live by.
E.g., “Mussolini made the trains run on time,” now means that late is good.
Secession is associated with Slavery like keeping a tight train schedule is with Fascism. It’s probably as simple as that.
As states. The semantilogical difficulty we run into here is that they own, wield and enjoy that semi-sovereign authority by dint of their very statehood. Once a secession process is carried to completion, meaning the rest of the nation has nominally assented to it, the secessor is no longer a “state”, it is some undefined entity that must establish itself on its own. During this period, it is not entirely clear how the remaining states/nation should deal with this new entity, unless terms are clearly established in a treaty of some sort.
For instance, if North Dakota seceded under uncertain terms, and then a region comprising what are 15 western counties try to attach to Montana and/or South Dakota, how should those persisting states act? Would the US back martial action on behalf of those citizens who want to remain Americans?
It is all vividly murky.