Wouldn’t work out. World’s too complicated for simple answers like that.
Leaving, even if it would produce a viable nation, would involve leaving a lot of people in the lurch. There’s people in conservative states who need the counter balance of blue states to slow down their government’s trend to self destruction and fascism.
Even though it’s increasingly frustrating with how feeble that resistance is, it does keep things like banning gay marriage in the “difficult to pass” territory and not the “a few compromises” one.
Counterpoint, that’s actually not the blues states jobs, our job is to take care of our state(s) just like others states job is to take care of themselves.
As a Washingtonian I would be thrilled if the west coast became independent but there’s no movement towards it and of course the road getting there is unknowable, but as an abstract concept it’s lovely.
Red states have done nothing but hold places like where I live back, they’re actively dragging us down with them and it’s wildly unfair to ask me and my people to subsidize states that relish in our destruction and aim to drown us along side themselves. Red states don’t deserve to be subsidized, let them live with the consequences of their actions without the comfort blue states afford them and see how long those red state governments last.
…so what about the minorities in those red states who are stuck there because of their financial or familial situations, and who lack the power to influence politics?
Fuck it why not. This country is proving to be a global liability due to its structure, size, and lack of codified protections for its own handling.
This throws under the bus the many many non republicans in places gerrymandered such that the minority can continue it’s rule. My life would probably get better, but only at their expense as more and more solvent states leave the union. I’m not willing to ‘punish’ those people for the crime of being born in a impossibly corrupt district.
Why did democrats not stop the gerrymandering? Why are there so many laws that should not exist still there?
Democrats do gerrymandering too. Basically without gerrymandering, the power would shift about 4% in Democrats favor. Enough to shift power in the House, but not as much as people think.
(That statistic comes from a video I watched a while ago, and could be wrong, so take it with a grain of salt. I’m not an authority on this matter.)
I suspect politics would actually shift a huge minority amount towards “no, don’t kill the planet, my grandchildren live here”.
The billionaire planet killers can afford to buy up and lock down two parties. I doubt they can afford to buy out everyone.
And that outdated electoral college, smells like the fourth republic in france IMO.
Because democrats have found a way to benefit from their own misuses of the law as well, so you can see how this leaves the people trying to change this with impossible choices they have to suffer consequences of even if they make the best one. It takes a lot of fight to stand up and keep pushing through that, and those are exactly the folk I’m proud to call my country-kin
I’m not so sure. Once the Republicans no longer have the democrats to fight against, they will fight against each other. This might happen as well in the leaving blue states, but I feel like the democrates don’t hold as big of a majority in most of them. So they are already used to it. And they aren’t so much the party of fire and brimstone. So more likely they would try to do all the social reforms and just fall on thier faces.
Gotta break a few eggs, etc.
Might be cruel but kinda my thought. We can’t save everyone.
I wholeheartedly agree.
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Yeah, it’s a little too late for that.
Agreed, that ship has sailed.
I would absolutely prefer to be something else
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Can’t believe you’re not downvoted. How dare you say you want to change the nation for the better and not just secede
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Only as a last resort and everything else has been tried.
CA should be split into two.
I don’t think the population is as hopelessly divided as the social media spaces make it out to be, but at the same time, the federal government looks more and more unrecoverable from corporate interests and back to the people every single day. It’s probably past the point of return, excepting major societal shakeup.
It feels like there may come a point where the states that are large enough to be countries on their own start looking into any mechanisms that would allow them separation, just to be able to run themselves without federal interference and incompetence.
No, because it would lead to civil war. Do I wish it could happen? Yes. But is it realistic? No.
Ah, but Trump does not have the balls, brains, or moral integrity of Abraham Lincoln.
So, we got that going for us.
He doesn’t need to imo, these things have plenty of inertia right now. It wouldn’t take a lot to get Americans fighting even harder against eachother than we are now even.
Not “fighting against each other”…just “trying to repel a Nazi invasion”.
I like the idea of it, but California is a cash cow and the US would never let that cash cow get away.
Personally, absolutely. California subsidizes so many of the red states in this country, and it sucks, because we don’t get the representation we should. We have 10% of the population, but only get 2% of the representation in the Senate.
That being said, I am completely aware that this is Putin’s goal, and that is why there is a lot of discussion online from Russian bot accounts about this.
It sucks when your goals align with Putin’s, because he is such a monster.
I am not a bot, not a Russian asset.
I think.
What you are proposing would start a North American war deadlier than any that has ever been seen. Everyone thought Texas was dumb for talking about secession, but now that other states don’t want to be part of the union, people act like it is a serious idea. It isn’t. Never has been.
In the words of Ben Franklin, “we must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
I’m not American, and I think you should all secede. Just like EU is a shit and quebec should be free.
You would have more than half the population of the country plunged into abject poverty. West Virginia would look like an apocalyptic hillbilly hellscape.
Everyone knew Texas talking about it was dumb because they’re not self sufficient
California actually is, and if we’re hated by the rest of the country anyway, we’ll just go ahead and leave. Let the rest states have fun paying for shit without us
Define self sufficient.
California is not self sufficient in my opinion. They may have a lot of money, but they rely heavily on interstate commerce and trade routes for their prosperity. Taxes and cost of living are already high, and those things would explode if cut off from trade. The federal government won’t hesitate to use their leverage to keep other countries from supporting the newly declared independence of California.
Texas is not self sufficient either, but I’m not advocating for their secession.
Put simply, we need fewer borders, not more of them. Any state that thinks they can take their money and run will find themselves brutalized by the federal government, taxed to oblivion by neighboring states, and experiencing an exodus of companies who are based there. It is the path to destruction, not liberation.
California could pull this off, given its industry, agriculture, and Pacific seaports. New York, where I live, has lost too much industry and agriculture to be self-sufficient. Joining Canada, though, could help assuage some of those deficits.
New York has quite a bit going for it. I think we can stand up for ourselves. I think Jersey, Connecticut, and Vermont would join us right out of the gate. I’d certainly support secession.
Additionally, NY plus CA seceding would put way too much pressure on the remainder for the rest of the states to manage the federal government. If Texas secedes for the opposite reasons, that’s the end of it.
I speak for all NJ and say “sure fuck it let’s go ny” and then I get into the concerns of “who is now in control of the port authority”
We have a lot of fucking idiots though
There’s one big fatal flaw to that though. Water. California doesn’t have enough.
Sorry but Cali is rich as fuck, they’d figure out water if need be.
Eh, California is mostly water independent. Most of the water that is “imported” comes from the Colorado River and is used for the least productive and least necessary agriculture in the state. Yeah, figuring out how to handle however much water would be lost if California were to secede would be an issue, but it wouldn’t be an impossible situation.
It really does come down to this. They would be outright screwed.
I live in Oregon, I’d prefer it if Oregon joined Canada as a province, or like Washington and Oregon together. I don’t think it’s realistic. There’s a lot of unanswered questions of how things would work but I have daydreamed about it.
I’m at the point where I think we should peacefully dissolve the Union entirely. Just grant all 50 states full independence. Let the states come back together in whatever new nation or combination of nations they want.
Look at the current state of our politics. Step back and really look at it. Every political system relies ultimately not on a constitution, but on the good faith of the people actually governing. Look at how the current president is wiping his ass with every check and balance built into the system. Words and laws don’t matter, there’s always a bad faith interpretation that can allow the president to seize more and more power. And the Supreme Court is openly giving broad sweeping authority to Republican presidents while severely curtailing the power of Democratic presidents. Bribery is legal, and both parties are completely captured by the wealthy. Oh, and every last scrap of freedom, privacy, and autonomy are being torn down in the path of an ever-expanding surveillance panopticon.
I’m sorry. But by the time your political culture decays so far to allow this level of dysfunction, there’s no saving it. Our constitution is a woefully out-of-date obsolete document that should have been scrapped generations ago. And it was made difficult to amend by people who had no idea how important amending it would later be. It was built for the compromises of the 1780s, not the compromises of the 2020s. We need to go through a new process of Constitution creation, potentially multiple such processes, and come back together based on new compromises that reflect the reality of the 21st century.
This nation cannot be saved. We need a peaceful national divorce. The alternative is likely something far worse, as we hurdle inexorably towards a second civil war.
Note: obviously there are practical difficulties with dissolving a nation. When this comes up, people love to hand wring about the national debt or how military assets will be dissolved in this kind of scenario. These are important but obvious concerns. But national myopia blinds us here. Nations have peacefully divided countless times through history. These matters are always handled through some negotiation process. American exceptionalism blinds us to our possible futures, simply because we are unwilling to look beyond our own borders for inspiration.
I actually read this, unusual for me. I appreciate your take, and while your reasons are real concerns, I’m not in agreement with your solution.
I think the only reason states have not truly waged war on each other is that we are part of a union. That’s just my opinion, but many states would simply begin to fail without the feds redistributing wages from states that have good industry and gdp.
Once they don’t get, they will start to try to take, and that fire would spread faster than it could be put out. Again all imo. But us Americans are “a bit shit” to eachother already, to borrow a British phrase.
Californian here, bye Felicia. I’m fucking done with my hard earned money going towards ungrateful backwoods idiots that actively hate me, my state, and my neighbors because they’re told to by thuh teevee, yet don’t realize it. I’m done subsiding hatred for the sake of it, because “it’s the right thing to do.” I’m done being at the political whim of people that can’t spell potato. I have a lot of heart for my countrymen, but considering far too many of them hate us for reasons they don’t even understand, I don’t see the point anymore.
I just hope they automatically give former residents citizenship. I’m stranded out in the badlands for now.
You should have a US Passport and all your documents needed to get it on hand and in a fire safe.
So, explicitly maintain the societal shadow-rung of illegal immigrants…? Can’t say I love continuing to underwrite that idea.
A US Passport implies you were a US Citizen once
Personally I would respect all US citizens as Pacficians automatically unless you were an accessory to the Trump Admin or ICE (Whatever the fuck you did is Treason, you don’t get to keep citizenship, you don’t get to join our new cool country and if you try to stay, we will respond with capital punishment).
If honestly be curious how that would work out. CA tends to know the value of immigration, and i couldn’t really see them holding a policy of closed borders, at least not in the long run.
Any American balkanization would likely go very similarly to the partition of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The liberals would be given a period of permission to move to the coasts, and the conservatives to the red states, and in this process communities would shatter and a lot of people would die, but it’s better than a civil war and/or white terror.
