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.
This was also a violent shitshow of forcibly removing people from their homes to be in the “right” place. It did not work in either of these cases and it will not work here. Partian is a recipe for mass violence and ethnic cleansing on a massive scale.
Honestly, the only case I can think of in the modern era of a peaceful split that has held is Czechoslovakia at the end of the Cold War. The vast majority of partitions in the modern era has led to violence and deaths. That is apparently okay with some people.
I’m thinking more about the Soviet dissolution. Estonia, Latvia, Kazakhstan, and Lithuania are all doing better since balkanization. Georgia had a successful peaceful revolution in 2003. And Ukraine has had a rocky few decades, but still seems happier being independent, if recent events are any indication. A few states have had it bad, but at least they have the right of self-determination.
New England, the Southwest, the deep South, and lower Florida have radically different cultures- I’ve lived in all four. An EU style federation of independent states makes more sense than forcing compromise on irreconcilable values and pretending we’re not already a dozen different countries in a trenchcoat.
… but you’d put all of us though what they went through for the decades where they were “doing worse” than we have in the states in the past 200 years…
Meh… Hard pass. Some ideas are unpopular because they’re bad ideas. For the people living in the US there’s no reason to want to suffer and decline like that.
The countries you mention were former imperial possessions. Their not wanting to be part of the Soviet/Russian empire wasn’t simply about partisan political or ideological differences or superficial cultural ones. It’s a fundamentally flawed comparison even before you get to the practical questions you’ve strenuously avoided answering.
Is not going to happen when some of those independent states are run by fascists, racists, and/or Xtianists who believe that America is theirs and won’t accept even the basic standards and norms of the federation (like, for example, Orban’s Hungary does with the EU).
Well that idea and line of thinking certainly worked out well for Neville Chamberlain.
Even if it did work out well at the start, those fashy maniacs will not be satisfied in the long run and then will try to push everyone around just like the days before as history has shown how often that trend repeats.
Can you image how whiney those folks will be??? The Texas, Arkansas & Oklahoma joint union raising a stink at the UN about indian separatists and accusing Cascadia and the Great Lakes republic for funding and sending arms to them. If the country did split up into 5 to 7 parts, it will be a messy split with 2 of those new nations holding all of the economic power and water rights alongside Canada and Mexico on the continent.
This is the Deep South, home of people like Martin Luther King Jr., or the Deep South, home of gerrymandering politicians who despise him? Because those are already radically different, despite the lack of border between them.
