Hold on a sec. Isn’t Trump a fascist tyrant AND the next Hitler according to the left? The logical conclusion of that is Trump views America has his personal Empire. If that’s true, do you think he’s gonna let blue states go *anywhere *without crushing them into submission with an iron fist? Would Hitler let ANY of his territory go willingly?
There REALLY is no simple answer to this, it depends on all of those pesky details of secession that no one in favor of secession actually wants to address. For example, if seceding states keep US citizenship, then they still owe US income tax. Since the seceding states are now separate countries, the US can now impose import/export duties on them as well as road use fees and duties. Most payments from the US directly to the states would stop, but individuals would probably still be drawing social security although the whole situation is complex. The states would probably be required to take part of the US’s debt with them as part of the price of leaving, and might also need to pay to buy US federal government property (like 45% of California’s land). Taxes on individuals moving between states or working in and out of the US suddenly get quite complicated.
For a narrower look: people like to harp on California being a ‘donor state’, but a really large chunk of the ‘donor’ money is because people tend to work in California when younger with a high cost of living and high income, then retire to other states when older where cost of living is lower and they’re now on a fixed income. The expenditure isn’t so lopsided when you factor out social security and medicaid. And either this trend would remain despite California leaving (if Calexitfornians stayed on SS and kept US citizenship) or would change radically if Calexitfornians needed to go through immigration to move to the US to retire and/or Calexitfornia took over the role of social security and medicaid.
I don’t see how there would ever be a “peaceful secession”. There are no “blue states”.
Are you asking about Trump, or the US in general (there will be life after Trump)?
That’s fine, I’m not the one with moral objections. The only requirement I see is the ability to become an autonomous entity.
States are recognized as sovereign entities with plenary powers. County and other local entities are subordinate to the states.
That is not to say I disagree with how people will act, but there is a distinction.
Maybe it used to be. Looks like the combination of the Hispanic majority and the massive influx of newcomers with no roots in the agriculture industry, have changed the demographics considerably over the past decade or two. Even the few counties with any sizable population that went for Trump did so by rather modest margins.
https://www.politico.com/2016-election/results/map/president/california/
Only under US law; other countries don’t recognize US states as sovereign entities in their own right, and the fact that they didn’t was a significant point in the Civil War. If you accept that US law is valid, then neither states nor counties have any inherent right to secede. If you don’t, then there’s nothing that you accept as valid that recognizes states as sovereign . I don’t see any justification for saying “I accept the part of the law that says that counties are subordinate to the states, but not the part that says that states are subordinate to the federal government”, you’re just arbitrarily picking and choosing what law to look at. Justifying a moral argument with legal technicalities is pretty shaky too.
If you want to explicitly throw out US law, you don’t get to turn right around and appeal to US law when someone does exactly the same thing to you that you just did to the rest of the US.
Then you run into the practical problem that you can’t maintain a functioning government, as every time your central government tries to do something that annoys part of the population (like gun laws, abortion laws, civil rights laws, taxes, marriage, etc.) then whoever disagrees can just split off to form their own little kingdom to avoid the new law. And then all of the little countries eventually annoy someone who doesn’t believe in secession and get conquered and end up much worse off than when they started.
You said:
I gave an argument. States are not just the same as counties or cities, and it’s factually incorrect to say so. That does not mean that states have a right to secede, and once secession starts, I don’t expect people to calmly accept that a county isn’t a state and just because a state can secede, that doesn’t mean a county can. But there is a legal argument to be made that a state is a different type of entity than a county or a city.
In general we have mind-your-own-business gun laws and abortion laws, and if either bothers you, you already don’t live here. It’s not a hotbed of civil unrest. This would be about trade.
A lot of this process has been explored already by conservatives when they were expecting Obama’s jackbooted thugs, and it will be fine, using those arguments and their own actions to justify the process. If, in fact, it has to be justified. It might just be an exercise in self-determination, to which a state has an inherent right. Who knows?
Hopefully the military realizes that the Balkanization of the US would, in time, be such a strategic error and danger that preventing the Balkanization would justify Shermanesque tactics.
You gave a bad argument that doesn’t actually work on a fundamental level and that completely ignores the first part of the sentence that you partially quoted. Also I never made the claim that states are the same as counties or cities, so arguing as though I did is making a strawman argument.
And you seriously don’t think that any of the people who like the current mind-your-own business gun laws would rather live in the US than join Canada, which has federal gun laws which are distinctly not mind-your-own business?
Eh. You said what you said, and I quoted it. I quoted the whole paragraph the first time. If you want to change what you said, that’s fine. But states are not the same as counties. Counties are administrative sub-units of states. The states are not administrative subunits of the country. There is a good reason why you can’t say: If a state can do X, then a city or county can do X. Our legal system doesn’t work that way.
Of course, but there are other choices to make. Picture a blue wave in 2018, and a Republican resurgence in 2020, and we have little to look forward to but more gridlock with escalating aggression. The firebrands rule the day. Meanwhile, we common folk can bond over trade, drug imports, immigration reform* and fiscal responsibility all day long, and there are compromises to be found on more personal matters, as has been the custom here for ages.
When the choice is that governance from the common ground, or this absolute circus, this heading meekly into modern civil war, it’s not a difficult one.
*Immigration Reform = fixing a system that is capricious, disorganized, and unaccountable.
Or in other words … who in Congress currently can you envision objecting to California leaving? I’m sure they’d make tut-tut remarks about preserving the Union, but the prospect of those 55 reliably blue electoral votes not being involved in the presidential elections must make their head swim.
I actually expect that the most fierce opposition would come from Democrats in other states, who wouldn’t want to be relegated to near-permanent minority status. (a bit like the stories about crabs pulling each other back down when one tries to escape)
Umm. Bolding mine.
You think the current administration has morals?
And if you look at what I said, even the out-of-context fragment that you quoted, I didn’t actually make the claim that states are the same as counties that you keep pretending I did. It’s not changing what I said to point out that you’re making a blatantly false claim about what I said.
This.
The Civil War happened because the South was filled with enough people in positions of leadership who were convinced that secession was a right states had, and willing to precipitate a fight over it if need be, and the North was filled with enough people in positions of leadership who were convinced that secession was not a right states had, and were willing to precipitate a fight over the effort if need be. Asking if we have the second half of that equation without questioning if we have the first half is very much begging the question.