I have some very unpopular opinions about how to split up the country.
But that’s kind of the crux of the issue. If you’re going to exclude someone, you need to provide them a reasonable place to go. The alternatives are killing them off, forcing them to comply, or educating and acclimating them against their will- All of which I find more morally objectionable than just, for example, walling off Oklahoma.
Fuck that. You don’t get to abandon millions of people fascists because it’s “easier” for you. That is precisely what will happen if we “split” the country. People will die. It’s a simple as that. And they are not interested in “spliting” the country. They are interested in ethnic cleansing from sea to shining sea, and ensuring that the people left are beaten into submission. We know, because that’s what they’ve been saying to us for a long time now. There is no peace with fascists, and if you believe you’ll be safe once they “take their land” because you’re living in a blue state, then think again. They are coming for ALL of it.
They are the ones insisting on exclusion to the point of genocide. They can believe whatever they wish and live their lives however they wish. They DO NOT get to impose that on the rest of us. They don’t have to leave, but they don’t get to massacre everyone they dislike so they can have their stupid little white ethnostate.
And Oklahoma is full of Native Americans, but hey… they’ve already been genocided and ethnically cleansed, so who cares what happens to them at the hands of violent white supremacists, right? /s
I’d imagine those opinions would be very unpopular for anyone looking to preserve the Union and liberal democracy. The main, and very real and active tasks at hand right now are: 1) preventing a fascist takeover of the central government; and 2) preventing a Syrian-style civil war. Musing about a supposedly clean and orderly way to split up the country* that will somehow magically not involve displacing millions of people and leaving millions of others in immediate physical danger is not helpful.
ETA: I’m not denying there is a strong possibility of a split (e.g. between a fascist-dominated central government and more liberal places) or of civil war. I just don’t think we should be pushing actively in that direction. Trying to split things up in advance will only hasten a bad outcome, not prevent it.
[* who’ll be doing this pre-emptive splitting, by the way? Where in the territory of the current lower 48 do you propose that they go? What happens to the people who are already there and can’t or don’t want to move? Once one starts asking these questions one is left with a mean-spirited fantasy.]
FFS, people, read a fucking history book…
Or at least pay some attention to Laibach in 1989…
We have seen many family members, including children, coming out publicly against their relative’s political platform.
Are you arguing that we break up families, based on where each person is at that moment on the political spectrum, and permanently move them away from each other?
What about the guy who was raised by a leader in the white supremacy movement and groomed to be the next generation’s leader, who finally in his adulthood learned how wrong it was and has been active in teaching others not to go down that same rabbit hole?
Who decides? How much collateral damage is acceptable?
For some people, as long as it’s not happening to them they don’t care about anyone else. Individualism is a major ideological underpinning of the modern capitalist system that easily makes way for this kind of thinking, as Karl Polyani argued. Once you make the markets sacrosanct, it’s just a quick step to the kind of violence we saw in WW2, the Yugoslav Wars, Rwanda, Cambodia, etc… That kind of individualism can easily be shifted into the kind of social darwinist rhetoric that animated many of the genocides of the modern era.
None of it SHOULD be acceptable to anyone, of course, but we live in a society that makes it acceptable and far too many people are willing to fall for it.
… wait, I can’t remember if we’re supposed to be for or against the “Syrian civil war” now 
Oh, nonsense. They can believe whatever they want - but that right only extends so far as it bumps into others’ rights. No one has the right to harm others over who they are. That’s what the fascists want, and it cannot be tolerated in a civilized society.
So it’s only forcing compliance much in the same way we force compliance to laws against murder, rape, assault, etc. And there’s nothing morally wrong with that.
A big beautiful wall, no doubt, that the people of Oklahoma will pay for. And once we are on our side and the fascists are in full command of theirs, we can trust they will be satisfied and there will be peace in our time.
Just no. It’s a tempting thought when you look at a map made of red and blue states. But the reality is that people of all sorts of different social/political/religious/racial backgrounds live in all those places. Just because they might be in minorities and not politically represented doesn’t mean they don’t exist and can be disregarded. Maybe now more than ever the divide in political beliefs is not so easily separated. You have places like California and New York that are super liberal on a state level but you go outside the major cities and see trump signs. You have deep red states with cities and college town that are heavily democratic. And in all those places individuals and neighborhoods can vary widely. It’s just not as simple as those red and blue political maps make it look.
We are talking about fascists here, this is not a hippy commune. Fascists cannot tolerate anyone who disagrees with them existing, let alone living peacefully right next door. Accommodation and appeasement has never worked with them, only encouraged more violence and genocide. This smacks very much of Candace Williams “Hitler would have been fine if he had just stuck to Germany” sort of comment. I am not willing to consign minority populations in, in your example, Oklahoma to the sort of final solution that they are already pushing for the country as a whole. How many exterminated trans, gay, Black or Hispanic folks is an an acceptable number for your scenario?
Exactly. Too many people focus on the small groups in control of these states and start stereotyping who actually lives in them. Not all southerners are white supremacists and fascists and not all people in Massachusetts are icons of racial tolerance and liberal democracy.
Go up to Shasta County in California and you’re in “State of Jefferson” territory. Those guns-n-god death cultists aren’t moving anywhere, but the county’s sane residents (who also aren’t going anywhere) have pushed back against their Qanon and anti-vaxx nonsense.
The last thing we need is to have the U.S. peppered with a bunch of little Ameristans trying to expand their territories and ideologies to their neighbours.
Let’s have a little thought experiment.
The country splits up peacefully. Magically, no one dies and once the fascist states have split off, they don’t make war on the non-fascist states. Everyone somehow gets a choice to move into the fascist states or out of the fascist states with guaranteed jobs either way.
What happens to the children? What happens to the gay children of the fascists? What happens to the trans children of the fascists? What happens to the abused women stuck in relationships with violent men? What happens to the children born with severe autism or some other disability that makes them reliant upon their state governments?
We are not trying to protect democracy just for ourselves, just for our own well-being. We are trying to protect democracy for every vulnerable person who will be hurt if we do not have civil rights. The vulnerable people, many of them children who will be hurt in a fascist regime.
By saying that you are okay with splitting up the country with allowing the fascist to go off into the sunset and have their own little fascist paradise, you are abandoning the vulnerable. Abandoning the people and the children who need us most.
It is a very odious position to take.
ETA: I don’t actually care very much for the well-being of the fascists. I care about the well-being of their victims. Allowing the fascist to make their own country will not stop them from victimizing other people. It will just make it easier for the people outside that country to ignore. We need strong democracy. We need strong civil rights. Then the fascist can just go on believing what they want to believe but be prevented from harming others.
Fascism is not a matter of geography. Fascism anywhere is a threat to humanity everywhere. Building walls is not going to stop the spread of the cancer.
There is good news, though. The fascists are a minority. The bad news is that the apathetic make up the majority. We need to get the apathetic to wake up and give a shit to save democracy while we still can. Otherwise, when the walls go up, they will be going up around us.
The Partition of India may be instructive. 10-20 million people displaced, up to 2 million killed and, 75 years later, two nuclear powers glaring at each other over a still-disputed border.
There are more people who vote for Republican party in California than there are in Texas. There are more people who vote for the Democratic party in Texas than there are in New York. These inconvenient facts are ignored when people call for a peaceful split.
What happens to families where one member votes R and another member votes D (often secretly, for the reasons mentioned above)? Do we have forced divorces? Who gets the children?
The questions that have no good answers will keep coming.
This post helps me center myself and practice the “Assume good faith” part of our guidelines. I don’t know that you have fully thought out this line of reasoning.
ETA:
Foreshadowing, that.
