Political Memes

It's the cold sober realism that comes with looking at where we have been, where we are, and where we're headed. You're just in denial.

Something like that might actually work. There's a reason the oldest nations on Earth tend to be smaller geographically. Very large countries with vast regional differences in politics, needs, and desires tend to not be stable long term. Countries as big as the US tend to either break up or only maintain their integrity by collapsing into authoritarianism. You can force a dysfunctional union together with enough violence. But government is meant to serve the needs of the people, not the people the needs of the government. The federal government was created by human beings to serve our needs. Remember of the people, by the people, for the people? If our existing nation is no longer serving our needs, it's OK to let it go. We don't have to keep propping up this corpse of a nation just for the sake of tradition. Americans, as a people, aren't going anywhere. We'll still be Americans whether we share one state or many.

Part of the agreement to let all states have their independence would be some basic requirements. One of those requirements would likely be that the new states have to allow freedom of movement and migration from the other US states, at the very least for several years after the national divorce. Ideally the president orchestrating this would negotiate some sort of basic EU-style customs and trade union. So the states can set their own laws and national policies, but people can move freely between the various new nations. Hell, most states would likely want this anyway. Does Mississippi really want to trap blue voters in its borders without giving them any relief valve? I would think they would be far happier just maintaining open border deals with the other new states, thus allowing people to simply vote with their feet if they don't want to stay in Mississippi. The alternative is that you end up having a mini civil war inside the borders of just one state.

Such a hypothetical president could add some basic terms to their dissolution plan. They would be in a position to organize a treaty between the new nations. And part of the agreement to let states have their independence is that freedom of travel must be preserved between the states, similar to how the EU operates. So people can always vote with their feet and leave.

But if you're asking if we can preserve the nation just to help blue voters in red states, I'm sorry. Ultimately the people of each state are going to have to be responsible for their own fate. I would owe nothing more to the citizens of Alabama than I do the citizens of Azerbaijan. It's your country, not mine. You're responsible for it. If your countrymen want to turn their nation into the seventh circle of Hell, well those are their sins, not ours.

I know it sucks, and it's not fair to a lot of good people. But the likely alternative is that the city you cherish so much will be burned to ashes in the civil war we are inexorably marching towards. Realize, I do not champion as radical a solution as complete national dissolution lightly. If I didn't think the alternative was a horrific and bloody war, I wouldn't think to recommend it.

A second civil war would be so, so much worse than the first one. The destructive technology is so much greater. And we wouldn't even be divided between two nice clear blocks of North and South. We would have fighting between states and within states. And foreign adversaries will be happy to contribute to help fan the flames even more. At least with the first civil war foreign powers were mostly content to ignore the US; it was a remote backwater at the time. But now? The US is a global hegemon, and we have no shortage of adversaries that would love to see us burn. China and Russia will probably be arming both sides of the conflict, just happy to see us tear each other to pieces. I'm worried about millions of people being killed, tens of millions displaced, most of our greatest cities turned into bombed-out wrecks, and our entire society seeing a massive and permanent decline in our quality of life and standard of living. Look at the images of the leveled cities of Syria. That is our future on the path we are currently on.

We could walk that road, or we could have some maturity and wisdom and say, "look, this nation clearly isn't working anymore. It was assembled based on compromises for the world of 1780, and it's no longer working for us." Instead of tearing ourselves apart violently, let's just go for a peaceful national divorce. No one needs to die. We don't have tens of millions made homeless. We don't have to watch as all the great cities and infrastructure we've spent generations building are reduced to bombed-out craters. We can simply walk away with all of our lives, infrastructure, and national wealth intact. Even if the national divorce was a difficult and expensive process, it's a drop in the bucket compared to what we will lose in the civil war that awaits us.