The USA will inevitably break up, how will it look?

Alistair Cookie wrote:

May want to check presidential election map by county and precinct. Quite a different picture.

Yea, it's an urban-rural divide more than anything at this point.

If Brigham Young and the Mormons had not stopped in Utah area and made it to the coast, they would already have become another country.

In 2012, petitions in these states indicated a desire to secede from the Union

Louisiana, Alaska, Utah, Wyoming, California, Delaware, Nevada, Kansas, Ohio, South Dakota, West Virginia, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Oklahoma, Arkansas, South Carolina, Georgia, Missouri, Tennessee, Michigan, New York, Colorado, Oregon, New Jersey, North Dakota, Montana, Indiana, Mississippi, Kentucky, Florida, North Carolina, Alabama and Texas

Read more at

http://www.wnd.com/2012/11/now-many-states-want-to-secede-from-u-s/#tmdiD5VpgQ0S6fWX.99

2012 was when Obama was elected to a second term.

This list may be very different today.

Remember that the deadliest conflict in US history (Civil War) erupted the last time part of the US wanted to break up.

Many in the South still harbor desires to leave the Union. The above list contains many of the original Confederate States (all but Virginia).

The problem with your hypothesis is that the division between red and blue states are microcosms of the larger cultural differences, which are urban vs rural. Texas is mostly red, but it has blue counties in its urban districts (Dallas, Austin, Houston, San Antonio:

). It's a red state because it has a very large rural population. This isn't a problem that splitting the country by states is going to fix. The country is simply going to shift towards blue as it continues to become more highly urbanized, which the exception of a few low-population states.

irunfastXC wrote:

They'd have food. That's about it.

No federal aid to help with wildfires and earthquakes.

No energy resources (Hoover Dam can't power everything), no coal mines. I guess they do have tons of uranium underground, but no nuclear power stations to utilize it.

And Cali's insane debt would sink them pretty quick.

Out of all the areas to turn into a third world country the quickest, this would be it.

.

California wouldn't have water. Without the diversion of the Colorado River, California would cease to exist.

North of Sacramento, CA, they could make do sans Colorado River. Only southern Cal needs the Colorado River. So many wealthy people in southern CA, they would boil ocean salt water if necessary. CA highly subsidized agriculture industry uses a significant portion of water. CA may choose in future years to buy grapes and nuts from other states or other nations instead of subsidizing multi-millionaire bourgeois CA farmers.

The British Empire crumbled but they gave up overseas territories (some of them at least). The USSR in 1991 was extremely different from the current US or anything the US is likely to morph into. And again, it lost its bloc not its mainland.

The US has been politically divided for a very long time, ie the tumult of 1968, the literal civil war a hundred years before that.

The dichotomy is between country bumpkins and city slickers, as demonstrated already. Not something a state-by-state split will remedy. Any seccesionist state would likely crumble economically for want of taxes, and be helpless militarily, especially against their new neighbor, the US.

If we’re all gonna live here, I would way rather do it in a stable nation with global impact and a vast tax base than a miniscule, but autonomous attempt at political hegemony with my neighbors.

That being said, an all white n Trumped-out Idaho/Utah that is their own isolated nation wouldn’t be something I’d lose sleep over. Hell they could build that wall to keep us all out. They’d have to put some steep tariffs on those taters if they wanna stay in business though.

I swore I would avoid all non-running threads for life, but the history major in me couldn’t resist giving my 2 cents. Hope everyone else had a good morning run too!

Good points raised about red vs. blue at the county level, not state level and urban vs. rural. I don't think we will ever break up. Whether you fear big government or big corporations, someone big will always be there to keep the status quo. I don't even think the Feds would let Texas go if they exercised their "stroke of the pen" secession that the Austin tour guides believe exists.

It is more likely that we would annex Mexico than that we would break up. It is more likely that China would annex us than that we would break up.

I read a good opinion piece on the prospect of US civil war. The jist of the article was that we are too lazy to actually break apart. We like to scream at each on the internet, but we won't actually do anything that will get in the way of our netfix bing-watching.

My own two cents is that since there is no legal path for a State to leave the union, any State that attempts to leave will have to ignore the law, and resort to actual war to do so. But neither side of the divide wants to start real war. The conservatives who have the guns, don't actually want to start killing their liberal counterparts on the coast (they have this wacky idea of the God given sovereignty of human life), and the liberals who don't have any guns are generally too inept to actually know how to start fighting a shooting war. Evan Texas, which theoretically has a legal right to leave, is filled with people who love waving the American flag. When push comes to shove, even Texans are Unionists.

Additionally, the US military and State run National Guards are still filled with reasonable people that will not start killing their fellow Americans.

Civil war isn't happening anytime soon. Maybe in 50 years, if Democrats can get keep playing their destructive games.

Red States will immediately be eligible for IMF relief, which the oligarchs will plunder, leaving everyone else to scratch ?

Most of south/rustbelt/Appalachia survive largely on federal handouts, and are already enveloped in poverty, addiction, and social deterioration, and will decay even worse when they separate.

California will be entirely dependent on upstream states for water.

There has always been political discord in this country. States compete for mama fed's resources constantly like siblings. But just look what has happened in the past every time an outside country threatens. As long as there are external dangers the USA will hold together just fine.

When Trump kills Obama's evil Network Neutrality (!), California is really going to laugh at the rest of you. Have fun with that metered internet.

CA

OR

WA

and Baja California

You can have the rest of it.

It would be great if the South seceded again. What a cesspool. To think, there was a war to keep that backwards trash in the union.

Back in the USSR, oops. wrote:

sbeefyk2 wrote:

The USA is not breaking up.

Ever heard of the USSR?

It could never happen to the USA, the people are more united than any people in history, we may squabble on politics and other things, but we are all one big happy family, when Pearl Harbor happened, the next day there was lines at the military stations that were miles long, of people wanting to come to the aid and fight for the USA, and we are FAR MORE UNITED in 2018 than we were in 1941.

California is the 5th Largest Economy in the World and should become a sovereign nation 100% separate from Washington, D.C. and the unfortunate people stuck in the sorry 49 loser states.

#5 Economy in the World wrote:

California is the 5th Largest Economy in the World and should become a sovereign nation 100% separate from Washington, D.C. and the unfortunate people stuck in the sorry 49 loser states.

Even if it does happen (of course it won't) you're biggest challenge will be convincing the EU and China to do business with you. My guess is the US would lead a massive embargo (assuming no military force) and California would have literally no one to do business with. I'd give it a week before they decide to come back to the Union.

China has already indicated a willingness to do business with an independent California, as have other countries.

Racket wrote:

#5 Economy in the World wrote:

California is the 5th Largest Economy in the World and should become a sovereign nation 100% separate from Washington, D.C. and the unfortunate people stuck in the sorry 49 loser states.

Even if it does happen (of course it won't) you're biggest challenge will be convincing the EU and China to do business with you. My guess is the US would lead a massive embargo (assuming no military force) and California would have literally no one to do business with. I'd give it a week before they decide to come back to the Union.

In case you don't like reading, California is one of just 14 states that gives more to the fed than it takes. Literally every single Southern state takes more, a lot more. For example, Florida receives 4x as much aid as it gives.

"The south would be fine" Not quite, California and Washington would begrudingly take in Oregon and immediately be a world power. The Southern and flyover states would desperately need aid.

There will never be state succession because the US armed forces are nationalized. If you live in Nevada and join the army, you could end up at Ft. Benning in Georgia. There are no state militias that would be capable of fighting the US armed forces. Any sort of state militia that would form would be a bunch of rednecks with AR-15s.

The above post about Texas is also instructive. Even in very rural states, the metro areas are very progressive. In Nebraska, a DSA candidate defeated a centrist DCCC supported candidate in a house primary. Omaha is actually a pretty progressive city. Same for places like Bozeman and Des Moines. Very progressive small cities with universities in otherwise very red states.