And when they win office, they often do so through cheating and disenfranchisement and gaming a broken-by-design system. They have their Know-Nothing 27% base but that’s it in terms of dedication to illiberalism, bigotry, sexism, Xtianism, etc. The rest of the GOP electorate are for the most part real and temporarily embarrassed millionaires who want tax cuts.
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Then I guess you haven’t had as much interaction with them as I have. Ultimately, it’s all a con. The wealthy and powerful use the insecure and gullible as pawns to build and retain their power and wealth. It always comes down to that. I don’t expect that group to change. I know that most of the bigots can, even if it’s just enough to bring them into compliance with law and societal norms.
Even punching a Nazi is an effort to convert them.
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Maine is a reasonable scale model of the rest of the country. There’s a strip along the southern coast, maybe 15% of the state, which is home to half the population and most of the industry, wealth, colleges, services, and ports. It generates most of the tax revenue and is solidly blue. Most of our cultural and ethnic diversity is there.
The rest of the state is extremely rural and solid red, aside from a few small dots on the map. They get far more in state and federal support than they contribute in taxes, and by and large are very conservative.
They are the reason we had LePage and keep reelecting Susan Collins, despite the fact that we’ve also managed to institute ranked choice voting and elect a number of Green Party candidates. We have legal weed, a surprisingly good healthcare system, and a veritable ocean of Trump flags as soon as you’re 45 minutes from the coast.
I work in a solidly blue area, but I live right on the line of demarcation. I deal with these people Every. Goddamned. Day. I’m related to a couple of them. I don’t think you all realize just how deep that shit goes.
Maine is about 95% white. It’s about as far from a scale model of the country as you can get.
Lovely area though.
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Statewide, yes. At work, the overwhelming majority of our employees are PoC, though not necessarily American.
I understand that we are an outlier in that regard, but most of that 5% is within 30 miles of me.
I do concede your point, though.
Even so - Portland is still about 85% white. And is as large as a neighborhood in many large cities.
Edit:
If Portland were large enough to be on this list - it would be #6.
“The ten whitest cities in the United States, including white Hispanics, are:
- Hialeah, FL (92.6%)
- Lincoln, NE (88%)
- Boise, ID (87.9%)
- Gilbert, AZ (87.9%)
- Laredo, TX (87.7%)
- Spokane, WA (85.3%)
- Corpus Christi, TX (80.9%)
- El Paso, TX (80.8%)
- Scottsdale, AZ (80.1%)
- Madison, WI (78.8%)”
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OK, let’s pretend Maine is in fact a scale model for the rest of the country. (It’s not even close, but we’ll go along for the sake of the thought experiment).
You yourself note that Maine isn’t ideologically homogenous, it’s divided into urban areas that lean left and rural areas that lean right. So if we went with your “let’s divide the country into a series of micronations based on political ideology” plan then even the state of Maine (the 12th-smallest by state by area and the 9th-smallest by population) would have to get subdivided into red and blue chunks.
What’s the plan there, exactly? Do you evict all the city-dwellers and send them to New York and California? Do you carve out all the cities into independent city-states? Do you restrict travel to prevent people from moving to places where they might vote differently than the other people who live there? Just how many pieces would you divide the nation into in an attempt to make sure no one had to live under a government run by people who had differing political ideologies?
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Sure, cherry picking always gives you the answers you’re looking for.
The break up of the soviet union, a country made up of countries that existed prior to the formation of the SU. That’s not the case here.
And of course, there is no singular culture in ANY of the places you mention.
Just own the fact that you find it easier to just give up and let millions of us be fucked over rather than do the work of opposing a fascist take over of this country.
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And where are you going to put that nuclear sub? That base is in a distinctly blue part of the state.
And good luck getting your huge ships built, Navy, without BIW (also a blue area). Or would US military contract with fascist fiefdoms to build our destroyers? Do we really want to put all the fascists in a place with the labor and facilities to build naval destroyers???
Seems easier to just pass voting rights legislation, imho.
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Defeatist! 
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What if we broke it all the way down to individual households, and said each person had the right to live however they want. 
And I know the point is the fascists don’t want that…but then why would anyone imagine that would change on the scale of counties or states? All fascism offers is enemies to blame and hurt and fight. It can’t go without them, it needs to come find them. It’s not an ideology that can be appeased.
Frankly, it amazes me anyone can hear people like Trump and his partisans talk and imagine otherwise. It took how many days to go from states deciding abortion to pushing for a national ban? Why wouldn’t their every crusade keep going like that, the way fascists always have when people let them?
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Well said. If the fascists could be appeased by having their own “safe spaces” then Truth Social would be booming and Twitter would be a lot nicer by now.
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The idea that the divisions would stop if we just split up the country by political affiliation is pretty ridiculous—there’s always going to be something to disagree about. It’s like the old Emo Philips joke:
Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, “Don’t do it!” He said, “Nobody loves me.” I said, “God loves you. Do you believe in God?” He said, “Yes.”
I said, “Are you a Christian or a Jew?” He said, “A Christian.” I said, “Me, too!”
“Protestant or Catholic?” He said, “Protestant.” I said, “Me, too!”
“What franchise?” He said, “Baptist.” I said, “Me, too!”
“Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?” He said, “Northern Baptist.” I said, “Me, too!”
“Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?” He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist.” I said, “Me, too!”
“Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?” He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region.” I said, “Me, too!”
“Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?” He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.”
I said, “Die, heretic!” And I pushed him over.
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Just for a sense of perspective, we need to remind ourselves that we are all living on stolen land.
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Waving ‘hi’ from rural Indiana.
Maybe you don’t realize how diverse the posters are at this BBS?
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https://twitter.com/Esqueer_/status/1577351091989028864?s=20&t=IbCaYcThFNkLaLnloKzEFQ
Shocked.
Well. Not really.
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Yep.
There’s an apocryphal story from the late 1930s about a Japanese government official who visited their ally Germany to see how things were run there. His report was words to the effect of “It’s brilliant, but would never work in Japan - we’re too culturally homogenous and have no equivalent of the Jews.”
Fascism doesn’t work without an enemy. Pretty much tells you everything you need to know, really.
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Quite the opposite, actually. Consolidating Maine with NH, VT, and MA gives the redneck north less power, not more. And as much as we love to shit on Mass, their values are way closer to ours than say, W Virginia’s.
Putting the Northern part of Ohio and Indiana with the Midwest and the southern half with Appalachia makes a hell of a lot more sense than the current state borders, according to pretty much every county-by-county comparison.
The idea is a dozen or so mostly independent states, not 300.
I’d happily return a sizable chunk if I could.
Also make good on that 40 acres and a mule. Way I figure it, African Americans should be entitled to pretty much everything east of Arkansas.
Why would any of those states want to go along with such a proposition? What problems, large and small, would it actually solve?
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True. A new genocide by current white people will help that tho.
AH! So you really want to empower fascists to kill their neighbors… got it!
It’s easy, we just force the people who disagree off their lands. That always ends well! /s
It would cause far more problems that it would solve - primarily, it would lead to an incredibly high death rate from people being forced to leave their homes.
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