Why do some malcontents in a state get to decide? Presumably there are some who moved to or were born in that state that would be shocked to discover one day they were no longer in the US.
I’d like to hear who his running mate is, but yeah, I’m onboard.
There is also the fact that the malcontents AREN’T marching out on their own - they’re taking the citizens of the large society with them. When people talk about getting 51% on a referendum for Calexit or Texexit, that still means that there are millions of American citizens in the area who do not want to be in a foreign country, and who have a reasonable expectation that the country they’re citizens of will do something to protect them from suddenly being in a foreign country.
Exactly.
My point about costs and unwillingness vs unable to bear is just that.
e.g. If I’m living in Texas and Texas votes to secede, then NewTexas needs to pay to relocate and reemploy me and also every single current Texas resident who’s not happy being removed from the USA.
If they’re not willing to fully indemnify the rest of society against the costs they wish to impose, then they’re not going to be allowed to impose those costs.
And who’s going to stop them?
So you do think the US would use military means to prevent such a scenario?
What scenario, specifically? Most secession scenarios will bog down in practical concerns or legal issues (solved with courts and LEOs) long before there’s any reason to bring the military into it. In the Calexit discussions, the Calexiters couldn’t even come up with a ‘talking points’ idea of how to address citizenship, social security, the water supply, and federal land in CA.
I was referring to the scenario you put forward about the “they” in “If they’re not willing indemnify…” Suppose some radical group did get enough votes to declare independence, and started deporting naysayers who would not swear loyalty to the new government without indemnifying them. What would be the US’s response?
If there were overwhelming support for independence, it would not be a matter of “some malcontents”. But, as long as I mentioned the real example of New Caledonia (a couple of hundred thousand people, not California or Scotland or Catalunia) just had a referendum, it may be interesting to examine how that went down.
First of all, the malcontents and the loyalists had to sit down and sign an agreement under the aegis of France. This was approved (by 80%) in a referendum for “self-detrermination”. They got a ten-year development period. Then came another referendum (72% approved), which resulted in autonomy, a 20-year transition period, and only then the actual independence vote (rejected in 2018 and 2020, with one more to go). So nobody suddenly found themselves in a foreign country without so much as a by-your-leave. In a place like Texas, negotiations could be proportionally more complicated.
My history of the specifics leading up to the Civil War is admittedly fuzzy, but my general impression and recollection is that the South entered hostilities assuming (maybe ‘hoping’ is a better word) that the North’s heart wasn’t in it and wouldn’t commit itself to a prolonged war. From the South’s point of view, it was fighting for the survival of everything that defined its culture.
It’s a misnomer to say that the Civil War wasn’t fought over slavery - it absolutely was fought over slavery, but what we mean is that the war was fought over what slavery truly meant in terms of economy and cultural identity, particularly as it related to the Southern states. At the same time, there were people - a fair number of them, in fact - who lived north of the Mason Dixon line who were sympathetic to white supremacy and who weren’t particularly concerned with indefinite slavery in the South.
Sentiments changed in the North as the war continued and young Union soldiers were either killed or came back home disfigured. There was a gradual escalation of hatred toward the South and the feeling that they weren’t fighting to defend their culture, economy, or states’ rights, but were in fact, traitors to the country that beget them as part of a sovereign nation, independent of the Old World.
You (@Two_Many_Cats2) may have gotten my comments mixed up with @Pantastic’s
As to the snip I quoted …
Suppose some radical group did get enough votes (in what jurisdiction?) to declare independence (of what from what?) and started deporting (under whose authority to where?)
Any such vote in the USA would be taken under the aegis of the government of a US state. An entity that has no independent legal existence outside of the USA. They did pre-Constitution, but that was 250 years, and an awful lot of law and precedent ago.
So the governor of the state says we’re renaming ourselves to not be a state, and I’m now the President of NewCountry. The Feds reply “That’s nice. And what did you do with OldState? And the withholding taxes you owe us for last week’s payroll?”
A crisis will ensue. The Feds will prevail if they so choose
No need for the military; simply freeze all money and credit to every entity inside OldState since they have no legal right to use US dollars, erect blockades on the other side of each border crossing since they have no right to import or export to/from the US, nor any right to enter/exit, switch off any utilities crossing the border into OldState since they have no way to pay for those things.
Then wait a week for the OldState public to get hungry. They’ll be lynching the rebels long before the week is up.
I didn’t put forward any scenario, and what LSL Guy put forward isn’t really detailed enough. If in some weird scenario a state declares itself independent of the US and starts trying to deport more than half of its residents, that is millions or at least hundreds of thousands of residents, for refusing to commit treason against the US, it’s not hard for the US to deal with. The state can’t forcibly deport anyone without using force against a US citizen, at which point federal courts and LEOs can step in. Courts will declare the actions invalid (it’s unconstitutional to banish someone from a state even as punishment for a crime), and they will start arresting state LEOs as necessary. They will also seize the assets of anyone acting in open rebellion against the US, which will make it hard to continue. The president can activate the national guard if they need more boots on the ground to maintain order, which is not generally considered military action, which is going to utterly wreck whatever whackjob group has initiated this batshit scenario, but it is pretty unlikely that it would get to that point. Also, all of the US citizens who are on US military bases will probably not be willing to commit treason and desertion, but attempting to deport active-duty military forces from a base would result in the military defending themselves, like they would if the ‘raid area 51’ thing had actually happened.
I don’t think the US would or should allow secession outside of a new constitutional convention that led to a dissolution into 50 separate states.
The big, divisive, “Let’s go to war over this” issue wasn’t solely slavery, it was slavery in the western territories. This was the Republican party’s defining issue when it was founded. The Republicans were a combination of Whigs (anti-Jacksonian and everything he stood for) and Free Soil (i.e. no new slave states in the west) parties. It is by no means certain that the southwest would have remained in Union hands, or that California–cut off from the east by the Rockies and the lack of a transcontinental railroad–would have remained with the Union indefinitely.
That’s a dangerous game. It might work - or it may harden the citizenry against you. First, you’re assuming they don’t immediately charter their own bank and have New Country Thalers or whatever; if they do, and they roll it out, you’ve made yourself look weak and ineffectual, as well as implicitly treated them as a separate state entity. In addition, if it backfires you will have turned the New Country of Whatever much strongly against you.
It might work; but it’s definitely not an action to take without serious thought about the realities of the situation. Doing things like this was, for example, part of the run-up to the American Revolution and one reason that the British got into the war and suddenly realized their support was almost completely eroded. And proceeding on the assumption that the support for the radical position was shallow and would collapse they caused much more damage.
In response to the OP, it does seem that a thoroughly dedicated group could indeed split from the United States, but - and this is key - they have to be dedicated enough for peaceful, patient work over the course of years while effectively keeping control over a state government. That will require significant hardship, but in this case the American political system more or less allows for the speech and actions necessary. The trick is, however, that they have to outlast the national political will to avoid giving away what this seperatist party wants.
So your (the generic “you”, not an individual) faction has to consistently win over the long term while never allowing anything to wholly distract you from our primary goal. This requires a very strong local or regional identity, and also never allowing other concessions to be substituted.
And once the precedent for secession occurred it would continue. And then there’d be fights.