Not to mention rural parts of many states that reliably vote blue.
You’re totally right that any effort would lead to prolonged violence and misery. The idea of splitting the country up into neat packages is the left version of the rights civil war. Hopefully, only seriously considered by certain fringe members.
You realize that is their exact rationale for wanting a border wall.
It’s been done before and even has its own special name - Balkanization. The word is not usually spoken with a wistful, nostalgic tone.
I seem to recall reading some defense/geopolitics wonks who mulled it over not too long ago. Long and short of it was political divisions, as bad as the sound now, would have to be an order of magnitude worse for conditions to be right. I think that the level of political violence on the eve of the US Civil War would equate to ~400 politically-motivated murders per day in 2019; thankfully we’re nowhere near that level yet.
If a conflict were to break out, it wouldn’t resemble the 1861-1865 conflict really at all. Modern Americans don’t really politically self-identify along state boundaries like in 1861; like you said, the divide is more urban vs rural. There wouldn’t be any neat blue and grey uniforms, no neat front lines; it would be a bloody balkanization at best. Localized ethnic and political cleansings, attacks and retaliations on civilians of all stripe. The finely tuned Just-In-Time infrastructure that keep the grocery stores full and hospitals stocked would become strained and collapse, resulting in famines and epidemics. Countless displaced by violence. Long term economic devastation.
The historical consensus is that the Union did the right thing by fighting back against the Confederacy instead of cutting their losses and wishing the slaves good luck.
This was discussed on another blog I frequent, and the conclusion was that it was because otherwise how could they be “the good guys”? Unless they can convince themselves that the ‘other’ side are planning to behave in a far more heinous fashion. (Insert obligatory reference to Mitchell & Webb sketch here.)
Also, I’m willing to bet we have a hell of a lot more people who can build, program, and operate drones, spy satellites, communications networks, and other sorts of things they might not have thought of.
There is a far more devious and seditious act at hand.
They are normalizing horrible, horrible things by accusing the left of doing them and convincing their idiotic, non-reality minded viewers that the left is doing; socializing it for weeks, months, or years, then when they do them, it’s been normalized because it’s something that “the left” did long before the right did it. (Except the left never did it, it was all a hoax.)
And the sick thing is, between that and tribalism, it’s working. Think about all the things that the right is doing now, and think about how outraged the Republicans were when “the left” was supposedly doing them years ago, and yet now the Republicans don’t even seem to care.
Which means it is a good idea to pay attention to what they are saying… because they telegraph like crazy.
How is Ilhan Omar being criticized while this chucklehead is still a member of Congress? How is he still a member of the Republican Party in good standing?
There’s your answer.
For sure. In that case, they are cordially invited to STFU about Omar until they clean up their own mess.
I find myself wondering if a civil war is already begun. Not really limited to the US, but more a Western cultural thing. There is a line to connect the abortion clinic bombers and snipers with the pathetic loser at Christchurch last week, not to mention all the others that have done their stupid bloody thing over the last few years, beginning roughly with McVeigh.
A spiral of heightening violence and reprisals, militarization of police because they have no notion what else to do, and eventually things get ‘out of hand’ into something bigger.
Whatever their fantasies, the hard right militias don’t stand a chance against the US military, or any organized military, in a direct fight. But organized military are notoriously bad at keeping the peace without the support of the people (see Iraq, Vietnam, every other occupation ever aside from after WW2). So I can see an increasingly frustrating terrorist fight with increasing degrees of repression.
I am not optimistic about the future of the US as it is currently structured. Living just a few miles away from the US has me wondering how much it will overflow into my life as well.
I agree.
Of course, they would largely cease to exist at that point, but many would say that’s a feature, not a bug.
So projection, justification for their obsessive fantasies, and to create feelings of moral superiority. And presumably they’re not even pointing to anything anyone on the left is saying (and taking out of context), they’re just inventing, out of whole cloth, the idea that the left is talking about civil war.
I wonder how much is deliberate is how much of that is a side effect/fringe benefit.
This also makes me think of election/voter fraud. So far election fraud by Republicans hasn’t been justified by conspiracy theories of the left (or illegal immigrants) doing it, but all the Republican-perpetrated voter fraud in the last presidential election was justified that way. They had to “balance out” the voter fraud they imagined the other side doing. This all gets tangled up with projection, too.
I find myself increasingly convinced that our first civil war never ended. It just went “cold.” Certainly in the South, slavery didn’t end, it just changed form slightly. (And in some cases, not at all, even into the 1960s.) A century later, it sorted the Democrats and Republicans into pro- and anti- civil rights parties, respectively. The racist right, the religious right and modern Confederates all ended up the same group (which is why confederate monuments got erected in the 20th century in non-Southern states). For me, Trump’s election has lifted the rock up and shined some light on how much all of that is still true and how that’s been the “culture war” all along.
The United States of America would win. Again.
A culture war is raging unabated.
@Shuck Just saw your ref to the same idea. Ditto.
Nope. Those states belong to the Union - a minority group of pathetic, dissatisfied malcontents don’t get to steal what belongs to all of us. The non-treasonous American citizens who live in those areas fall under the rights and protections of the U.S. Constitution. Those fuckers who don’t like the U.S. are free to leave as they please, but they don’t get to take part of the country with them, and they goddamn sure don’t get to take hostages.
The closest thing to a supply chain the Y’ll Kayda folks have managed to assemble is when they had folks sending them sex toys and drums of lube to the park office they captured.
Steve King is just following the Leader:
The left plays a tougher game, it’s very funny. I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they don’t play it tougher. Okay? I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad. But the left plays it cuter and tougher. Like with all the nonsense that they do in Congress … with all this invest[igations]—that’s all they want to do is –you know, they do things that are nasty. Republicans never played this.
Donald J Trump 3/15/2019
Steve King 3/20/2019
Hypocrisy, islamophobia, misogyny, pandering to the racist assholes. But mostly hypocrisy.
