Of course we all know this isn’t really a red-state/blue-state conflict, it’s an urban-suburban/rural-ex-urban divide. So any separation is not really at all geographically feasible, although as somebody who would wind up in the blue section, it’s a little amusing to think about every Republican area in the country turning into rural Mississippi in terms of flailing economy, infrastructure, education, etc. Nice Federal safety net you’ve got there….shame if anything happened to it.
I personally wonder if the Civil War blather is just misdirection and cover for the fact they are trying to steal all future elections so they can rule over all of us. What they really slaver over is bending the REST OF US to their will – owning the Libs, indeed.
"Well, sure, I gots a cupple good 'uns in th' back – been keepin' 'em dissatisfied fer ya...they're so enraged at the state o' stuff right now they're mighty close to fascist-curious anyway...should be easily trainable, and I'd be willin' to take 'em back if they don't pan out..."
Huzzah! In these here parts, I've heard hoary old racists moan "we need another Civil War" all my life. That this particular area was doubtful territory for the Confederates, and often actually hostile to it granularly has been plastered over with over a century of "Southern Heritage" at odds with the actual history. (It wasn't that they were less racist in aggregate, just didn't have a slave economy and were often at odds, politically, with the Plantation elite who ran the South under "the Aristocratic Principle"..)
It is of course madness, and the threat of the folks who are being lead by the party of Fear snapping is real, but again granular: the militias are the same sort of scared creeps they always have been (just with more meth, it seems...)
An actual national divorce would dwarf the disaster that the partition of India was, with more guns: a shitshow that would not end cleanly.
The thirty percent of non MAGA voters here are as armed as everyone else...
I forget where I read it – maybe New Republic – but the author speculated that any “civil war” would likely be localized in the way you’re talking about: an attempt by rightwing militias to take over local governments in pockets around the country. I think they realize if they tried to storm Washington DC again they would get their asses handed to them, to put it mildly.
Well, they've already taken over the state of Texas and declared it a womens-rights-free zone. That's the secession I expect to see, right-wing state governments declaring certain constitutional rights null and void, and a right-wing supreme court letting them do it.
One doesn't need to speculate much: these things happened often after the Civil War -- the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, the massacre of Black Wall Street in Tulsa in 1922, on & on, over & over again. To which the Federal government shrugged -- it was only Black people after all.
The CW talk always makes me laugh. At election time, all the Trump signs are in front of $300k suburban McMansions with Trump flags stuck in their $80k F-150s in the driveway. Yeah, these jokers will be down for a civil war right up until someone dings their truck or sets a foot wrong on their manicured lawn.
Hah! You just outted the bagged cat re: the real economic powerhouse of the enraged well-to-do: LANDSCAPERS! That's where all the money goes in all those stronghold communities. Why, if'n I still had my old push mower, and a real truck (not the "Manly" kind but an honest-to-Buddha, dented, rusty workin'man's rig, I'd be makin' a fortune my friend!
I’m anti- any kind of war, but I would welcome more civility from the white supremacist faction of our national discourse. Hell, I’d settle for less obscene lying. But why don’t these disgruntled citizens move to where they’d be happy? Texas is on track to be the dystopia they dream of and there’s lots of room for more homes on the range. Austinites can come north in exchange.
Thank you Roy! The New Civil War is just some cosplay click at drama point.
I wonder who pays these new Confederate Warriors . I guess they plan on overthrowing the government so there's no checks there .
I figure Clint gets 10 days off a year from the parts department down at the John Deere dealer. Now half those days go for the Week at Myrtle Beach. They've already rented the house . Then there's three more days for the trip to Dollywood. The missus likes to talk about how that's their yearly "honeymoon" which really means the old lady spends the goddamn Fortune at the outlet malls and Clint gets a blowjob for his trouble. Then there's a long weekend deer hunting. This leaves Clint maybe two days for being a civil warrior. After that somebody needs to be coming up off a check. Title loan place don't mess around - three days late and the Ram truck is down at the impound yard. waiting on the auctioneer. Plus somebody needs to come up off of some ammo. That shits expensive!
I only recently (on a BBC "History Extra" podcast) that I heard of the South's brilliant tactic of (if I'm understanding correctly) burning all the cotton on the docks of New Orleans at the start of the war to make the rest of the world depend on the next few years' crops, and so be compelled to back the South. It didn't work, thanks to unanticipated Ec.101-style, Market-driven, substitution (Indian sea cotton) and innovation (less cloth in clothes)—remember, the South were _deeply_ anti-capitalist and likely thought economics the province of spiritual tradesmen—and the resolve of the workers of Manchester and the rest of the North not to back slave power, which they rightly sussed would long-term undermine _them_ as well as being un-British.
("Our Man in Charleston", Christopher Dickey: about the British consul at Charleston, who married into the slavocracy but still was generally unsympathetic. His job before the War was mostly freeing black[ish] British sailors who'd been locked-up and threatened with enslavement after S.C. basically outlawed freedmanship and dealing with relatives of men who'd been arrested by the British Navy trying to smuggle slaves in from Cuba or Africa; during the War he mostly just had to hem and haw and say that the True Americans just had to wait to see what London would say. The book had more than I had ever seen before about some Confederates' plans for reviving the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which a.) turned Britain off and b.) irritated Virginians, who were making more money selling slaves than from the crops the slaves harvested—the Virginians didn't join-up until the Confederate Constitution retained the ban, but that didn't stop some the boys from talking big.)
So back to my dotard, outlier theories (h/t to the Afghanistan retreat for the inspiration): War isn't or shouldn't be limited to military actions only. Clearly, we've been at war with -- excuse me: against -- Afghanistan since 1978-79. Crippling the economy, using proxies and cut outs to destabilize both government and nation, etc., continuing to this very minute.
So this civil war stuff. The South and its symps have been opposing everything good about this nation and holding back everything that we do or could do to live up to its ideals since at least the 1870s, and arguably decades earlier. The military angle was a brief four years, but the war... So we've been having a non-military civil war forever. (Which gets to my beef against Lincoln: By 1861 or so, the nation could afford the south seceding and given the tension of a nation of some slave states and some non-slave states, a division was good, right and economically affordable.)
But secession is actually not viable. Many if not most of the states seeking to secede are net parasites taking more from the feds than they pay in. That won't stop them, maybe, but it would be a Pyrrhic victory.
That said, nothing -- well, little -- would make me happier than seeing them gone.
The fuckers are literally toxic. Not healthy to retain poison.
"Unless you’re the kind of person who really likes the idea of killing a lot of people you don’t agree with."
i have to admit that given the opportunity to press a magic button that would eliminate all trump voters, i would do a lot of chin stroking before i made my choice.
That's a real reason to hate Donald Trump: he inspires that kind of barbarity in me. See also: doubting democracy, as I don't think his wins are all cheating and voter-suppression, though his likely win in 2024 would largely be so…but still backed by enough people voting shit-headedly that it won't be 100%-obvious.
Ugh... again & fucking again. It's not the South or Red States, it's the toxic pols that have gerrymandered & redlined & disenfranchised their way to seeming hegemony.
That's the cancer, not every living human being in these states, & it's that exact same toxic snobbery that encourged the Feds to abandon Reconstruction & give up. You allow a Rexit for "reasons" and you condemn Atlanta, one of the most thriving Black communities in the US, to be genocided. Just so Northern Liberals can keep pumping obscene gobs of money into their police depts so they can pretend they're not as white supremacist.
Roy rightly notes "there are more of us than them" -- and this is true. But only is true because those states have plenty of Blue voters, plenty of people of color, plenty of working-class people who are not fascists. People who the MSNBC-types are cool with dying for your apathy & poltical clownery.
But no, fuck them, because y'all can't be arsed to find a real solution.
At the end of the day, majorities of voters elect let’s say patently unfit leaders. But those leaders, thanks in large part to a constitution that enables minority control, have been doing real harm to the nation. So acknowledging that it’s no all the people in the states at issue is an irrelevancy — a target for empathy but that’s it.
As for your Atlanta example, I’m sure secession would require plebiscites so I’d like to think between states being a little purplish — Georgia, say — and the huge economic cost, odds of secession or people voting to secede are pretty low.
So it’s pretty much a fantasy and leave us our fantasies dammit. The imminent (and long term) future’s going to be shitty enough as it is.
This is much like saying "There's a 99% survival rate, and only old people & the disabled will die" - Okay that's a few million human souls. That society has deemed expendable.
But you know me: crazy Leftist, everybody gets a pony & a sustainable dignifed life...
The *very* Blue-voting residents of Indian Reservations would probably not be surprised at being thrown under the bus yet again. Let me guess: the savvy Blue Staters will opine that they shouldn’t have moved to Oklahoma in the first place?
"As for your Atlanta example, I’m sure secession would require plebiscites so I’d like to think between states being a little purplish — Georgia, say — and the huge economic cost, odds of secession or people voting to secede are pretty low."
Periodic reminder--the state of Georgia is, *right now*, trying to disenfranchise its voters of color. (Of which I am one.) There won't even *be* a plebiscite on that. It will just happen.
Easy things: No filbuster, unfuck the Senate, Supreme Court reform, cripple the lobbying pipeline, federalize elections (with a new heavily-fanged Voting Rights Act), abolish prison slavery & its disenfranchising efforts. Heavy progressive taxation on corporations & the 1%
I say easy because they're obvious, the political will to do anything is small.
As a Blue progressive who has been cursed to live in a red state (mostly SD, but various) for 96% of his life, thank you. It’s pretty gross to be hand-waved away as an acceptable loss, while everyone in NY and CA is worthier than me despite the presence of, say, Staten Island and Fresno in their not-so-uniformly Blue states.
Which gets to my beef against Lincoln: By 1861 or so, the nation could afford the south seceding and given the tension of a nation of some slave states and some non-slave states, a division was good, right and economically affordable
and the 4-8 million black people still in bondage? Acceptable losses? Also, the Confederacy believed they must expand slavery, they would have been destabilizing central America and the Union to help their slavery expansion ideas, so there would have been a war possibly at a time less favorable to the Union
"By God, they keep forcin' us to take these $300 a month child tax credit payments and payin' for Junior's free community college and NOW they want to give Meemaw free dental and a hearing aid! Next thing you know they'll be pavin' our streets and filtrin' the pig shit out of our water! Where's mah rifle? I can take this librul oppression NO MORE"
Manchin's the guy who designed the life boats on the Titanic. "Look, I'm no monster, I'm not saying NO life boats, but I'm not one of those radical socialist 'lifeboats for all' guys either, I say the moderate, reasonable course is lifeboats for half. It must be right, it's halfway between the two extremes!"
Whenever people on my side fantasize about secession (or, more to the point, expulsion of the red states), I always ask them how they would like the sudden appearance of a heavily armed enemy country right on our borders. Even setting aside all of the other reasons against, that never fails to shut them up.
The Civil War pimping is no different from everything else they have to say--it has literally no meaning. It's just a performance to keep the rubes riled and unthinking.
Agree. And the rubes themselves love the cosplay, with their camo-and-rifles getup to obtain a Slurpee (TM) at the 7-11. They think fondly of "civil war" because they believe (probably accurately) that they have all the guns. And, well, yes, as civilians they do. Unfort., we have all the armed forces. It's beyond stupid, but what else is new?
"...but since there are more of us than there are of them, we don’t need a civil war to accomplish it."
I've been looking at a lot of county red/blue maps, and while "land doesn't vote", it's still a granular way to see the urban/rural divide. EVERY, and I mean every state, red or blue, consists of islands of high-density population urban blue surrounded by a sea of low-density population rural red. There are more of us, AND we hold the infrastructure dense "high" ground.
I'd be perfectly happy coexisting, all I'd need is a political system that treats 35% as an actual minority, rather than as a sometimes-majority that has veto power over the majority.
And this is why the "land doesn't vote" mentality needs to be promoted at the national level by reformation/elimination of the EC, and possibly making Senate representation tied to population. And, kill the filibuster. The minority's rights might be important, but not when it consists solely of obstruction.
A civil war is highly unlikely for the simple reason that in any state, even including Wyoming there are at least some liberal, non-red voters and, in red states like FL, TX, GA and NC there are tens of millions of them. Likewise CA, IL, NY, PA, etc. have plenty of red voters and MAGAts.
So civil war simply wouldn't be practical and it would destroy the economies of virtually every state. Two other outcomes are more likely: One, the hard right will take over the federal government through voter suppression and disenfranchisement into the indefinite future. With the consolidation of the Supremes in the hands of the hard right, the right would take the opportunity to finish dismantling the federal government - what Bannon calls the administrative state - effectively returning us to the Articles of Confederation. We know how well that turned out. Essentially, the national economy would be wrecked and it would be up to the non-insane Republican voters to vote out the gangsters who are ruining their lives. The second alternative is that the hard right instead chooses to dismantle voting rights, civil rights, all remaining reproductive rights, the ACA, federal environmental protections and labor laws, Medicaid, Medicare and to hollow out Social Security, leaving the country in appalling poverty and misery. Except, the blue states don't play along and simply ignore the radicalized Congress, presidency and judiciary, daring the federal government to try to enforce their very unpopular laws by armed force. This will lead to, at best, a cold war between the states. Either alternative is a national security nightmare for the military as it faces foreign exploitation of grave US weakness.
Most of these guys with a boner for a new civil war (at least the ones I see at demonstrations, loaded down with kevlar vests, helmets, and assault rifles) appear hopelessly out of shape, fat if not obese, middle aged if not elderly, and plainly completely unsuitable for military activity. I can't see these guys handling an ingrown toenail, much less serious opposition. Plus, I still think the sane outnumber the insane in this country by about two to one, although I wish the margin was higher. If we simply pulled together, we could just say f&*k these guys and ignore them.
The other day, when Bannon bragged about his "shock troops," a meme appeared featuring "Their shock troops" (two beer-bellied fatsos holding Confederate flags) and "Our shock troops" (butch, hunky Marines in ranks, on a running exercise. "Bring it, Steve" is my view.
Also, when someone says "we need a new Civil War," I hope whoever is nearby answers, "How'd that first one work out for ya?"
The USA central government is too well organized for any separatist movements or insurgencies to succeed. In order for a civil war to come about the central government must be weak and ineffectual... something the fascist party is working on.
So no, there won't be any civil war anytime soon. But maybe sometime down the road when conditions for it are more conducive.
The Civil War talk is instructive in that it tells us what's been taken off the table: Actually winning some fucking elections by persuading a majority of voters to vote for them. They know as well as you and I do (maybe better than we do?) that's no longer an option.
Of course we all know this isn’t really a red-state/blue-state conflict, it’s an urban-suburban/rural-ex-urban divide. So any separation is not really at all geographically feasible, although as somebody who would wind up in the blue section, it’s a little amusing to think about every Republican area in the country turning into rural Mississippi in terms of flailing economy, infrastructure, education, etc. Nice Federal safety net you’ve got there….shame if anything happened to it.
I personally wonder if the Civil War blather is just misdirection and cover for the fact they are trying to steal all future elections so they can rule over all of us. What they really slaver over is bending the REST OF US to their will – owning the Libs, indeed.
"it’s an urban-suburban/rural-ex-urban divide"
i think of it as more a moral/immoral divide, though it falls largely along urban/rural lines.
Asshole/Non-asshole
Monetarist/non-monetarist (them what chases the money, gets money – them what don't...well, anyway, seems to be a pattern...)
> owning the Libs
Don't paint them as more radical than they really are!
(I'm sure most of them would be content to long-term–lease us.)
Lease from whom, tho?
"Well, sure, I gots a cupple good 'uns in th' back – been keepin' 'em dissatisfied fer ya...they're so enraged at the state o' stuff right now they're mighty close to fascist-curious anyway...should be easily trainable, and I'd be willin' to take 'em back if they don't pan out..."
Huzzah! In these here parts, I've heard hoary old racists moan "we need another Civil War" all my life. That this particular area was doubtful territory for the Confederates, and often actually hostile to it granularly has been plastered over with over a century of "Southern Heritage" at odds with the actual history. (It wasn't that they were less racist in aggregate, just didn't have a slave economy and were often at odds, politically, with the Plantation elite who ran the South under "the Aristocratic Principle"..)
It is of course madness, and the threat of the folks who are being lead by the party of Fear snapping is real, but again granular: the militias are the same sort of scared creeps they always have been (just with more meth, it seems...)
An actual national divorce would dwarf the disaster that the partition of India was, with more guns: a shitshow that would not end cleanly.
The thirty percent of non MAGA voters here are as armed as everyone else...
I forget where I read it – maybe New Republic – but the author speculated that any “civil war” would likely be localized in the way you’re talking about: an attempt by rightwing militias to take over local governments in pockets around the country. I think they realize if they tried to storm Washington DC again they would get their asses handed to them, to put it mildly.
Well, they've already taken over the state of Texas and declared it a womens-rights-free zone. That's the secession I expect to see, right-wing state governments declaring certain constitutional rights null and void, and a right-wing supreme court letting them do it.
One doesn't need to speculate much: these things happened often after the Civil War -- the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, the massacre of Black Wall Street in Tulsa in 1922, on & on, over & over again. To which the Federal government shrugged -- it was only Black people after all.
The CW talk always makes me laugh. At election time, all the Trump signs are in front of $300k suburban McMansions with Trump flags stuck in their $80k F-150s in the driveway. Yeah, these jokers will be down for a civil war right up until someone dings their truck or sets a foot wrong on their manicured lawn.
Just like the slaves, if the multi-billionaires revolted their assets could be seized….
Hah! You just outted the bagged cat re: the real economic powerhouse of the enraged well-to-do: LANDSCAPERS! That's where all the money goes in all those stronghold communities. Why, if'n I still had my old push mower, and a real truck (not the "Manly" kind but an honest-to-Buddha, dented, rusty workin'man's rig, I'd be makin' a fortune my friend!
I’m anti- any kind of war, but I would welcome more civility from the white supremacist faction of our national discourse. Hell, I’d settle for less obscene lying. But why don’t these disgruntled citizens move to where they’d be happy? Texas is on track to be the dystopia they dream of and there’s lots of room for more homes on the range. Austinites can come north in exchange.
Austin sucks anymore anyways -- good old capitalism has squeezed the Funk out of that place
Gentry gonna gentrify.
Thank you Roy! The New Civil War is just some cosplay click at drama point.
I wonder who pays these new Confederate Warriors . I guess they plan on overthrowing the government so there's no checks there .
I figure Clint gets 10 days off a year from the parts department down at the John Deere dealer. Now half those days go for the Week at Myrtle Beach. They've already rented the house . Then there's three more days for the trip to Dollywood. The missus likes to talk about how that's their yearly "honeymoon" which really means the old lady spends the goddamn Fortune at the outlet malls and Clint gets a blowjob for his trouble. Then there's a long weekend deer hunting. This leaves Clint maybe two days for being a civil warrior. After that somebody needs to be coming up off a check. Title loan place don't mess around - three days late and the Ram truck is down at the impound yard. waiting on the auctioneer. Plus somebody needs to come up off of some ammo. That shits expensive!
"Then a miracle happens" was the motivating factor behind the *first* Confederacy, so it sure as shit will be repeated.
I only recently (on a BBC "History Extra" podcast) that I heard of the South's brilliant tactic of (if I'm understanding correctly) burning all the cotton on the docks of New Orleans at the start of the war to make the rest of the world depend on the next few years' crops, and so be compelled to back the South. It didn't work, thanks to unanticipated Ec.101-style, Market-driven, substitution (Indian sea cotton) and innovation (less cloth in clothes)—remember, the South were _deeply_ anti-capitalist and likely thought economics the province of spiritual tradesmen—and the resolve of the workers of Manchester and the rest of the North not to back slave power, which they rightly sussed would long-term undermine _them_ as well as being un-British.
("Our Man in Charleston", Christopher Dickey: about the British consul at Charleston, who married into the slavocracy but still was generally unsympathetic. His job before the War was mostly freeing black[ish] British sailors who'd been locked-up and threatened with enslavement after S.C. basically outlawed freedmanship and dealing with relatives of men who'd been arrested by the British Navy trying to smuggle slaves in from Cuba or Africa; during the War he mostly just had to hem and haw and say that the True Americans just had to wait to see what London would say. The book had more than I had ever seen before about some Confederates' plans for reviving the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which a.) turned Britain off and b.) irritated Virginians, who were making more money selling slaves than from the crops the slaves harvested—the Virginians didn't join-up until the Confederate Constitution retained the ban, but that didn't stop some the boys from talking big.)
Market Replacement Theory Is A Mother*****, Indian And Egyptian Cotton Subdivision
And the fascists have hated Globalism ever since
"Why, any Southern Gentleman is worth any ten Yankees!"
…and many of his children went for ten mules at auction.
So back to my dotard, outlier theories (h/t to the Afghanistan retreat for the inspiration): War isn't or shouldn't be limited to military actions only. Clearly, we've been at war with -- excuse me: against -- Afghanistan since 1978-79. Crippling the economy, using proxies and cut outs to destabilize both government and nation, etc., continuing to this very minute.
So this civil war stuff. The South and its symps have been opposing everything good about this nation and holding back everything that we do or could do to live up to its ideals since at least the 1870s, and arguably decades earlier. The military angle was a brief four years, but the war... So we've been having a non-military civil war forever. (Which gets to my beef against Lincoln: By 1861 or so, the nation could afford the south seceding and given the tension of a nation of some slave states and some non-slave states, a division was good, right and economically affordable.)
But secession is actually not viable. Many if not most of the states seeking to secede are net parasites taking more from the feds than they pay in. That won't stop them, maybe, but it would be a Pyrrhic victory.
That said, nothing -- well, little -- would make me happier than seeing them gone.
The fuckers are literally toxic. Not healthy to retain poison.
"Unless you’re the kind of person who really likes the idea of killing a lot of people you don’t agree with."
i have to admit that given the opportunity to press a magic button that would eliminate all trump voters, i would do a lot of chin stroking before i made my choice.
Another sweet dream we need to get through the hell that’s coming.
That's a real reason to hate Donald Trump: he inspires that kind of barbarity in me. See also: doubting democracy, as I don't think his wins are all cheating and voter-suppression, though his likely win in 2024 would largely be so…but still backed by enough people voting shit-headedly that it won't be 100%-obvious.
I think we're gonna need a lot more chins...
Ugh... again & fucking again. It's not the South or Red States, it's the toxic pols that have gerrymandered & redlined & disenfranchised their way to seeming hegemony.
That's the cancer, not every living human being in these states, & it's that exact same toxic snobbery that encourged the Feds to abandon Reconstruction & give up. You allow a Rexit for "reasons" and you condemn Atlanta, one of the most thriving Black communities in the US, to be genocided. Just so Northern Liberals can keep pumping obscene gobs of money into their police depts so they can pretend they're not as white supremacist.
Roy rightly notes "there are more of us than them" -- and this is true. But only is true because those states have plenty of Blue voters, plenty of people of color, plenty of working-class people who are not fascists. People who the MSNBC-types are cool with dying for your apathy & poltical clownery.
But no, fuck them, because y'all can't be arsed to find a real solution.
At the end of the day, majorities of voters elect let’s say patently unfit leaders. But those leaders, thanks in large part to a constitution that enables minority control, have been doing real harm to the nation. So acknowledging that it’s no all the people in the states at issue is an irrelevancy — a target for empathy but that’s it.
As for your Atlanta example, I’m sure secession would require plebiscites so I’d like to think between states being a little purplish — Georgia, say — and the huge economic cost, odds of secession or people voting to secede are pretty low.
So it’s pretty much a fantasy and leave us our fantasies dammit. The imminent (and long term) future’s going to be shitty enough as it is.
A "target for empathy but that's it"? -- wow...
This is much like saying "There's a 99% survival rate, and only old people & the disabled will die" - Okay that's a few million human souls. That society has deemed expendable.
But you know me: crazy Leftist, everybody gets a pony & a sustainable dignifed life...
The *very* Blue-voting residents of Indian Reservations would probably not be surprised at being thrown under the bus yet again. Let me guess: the savvy Blue Staters will opine that they shouldn’t have moved to Oklahoma in the first place?
Give a man a pony and he'll eat for a week!
I do believe I’m sufficiently on record as being a defective human being so, like, no one should be surprised.
But to be clear, it flows from despair.
"As for your Atlanta example, I’m sure secession would require plebiscites so I’d like to think between states being a little purplish — Georgia, say — and the huge economic cost, odds of secession or people voting to secede are pretty low."
Periodic reminder--the state of Georgia is, *right now*, trying to disenfranchise its voters of color. (Of which I am one.) There won't even *be* a plebiscite on that. It will just happen.
The South will rise & the North will write it off yet again as too much trouble...
So what’s the solution to decades of the south crippling the nation — soon to be entrenched?
Personally, I think we should get rid of the filibuster. They'd be less able to cripple the nation if we didn't hand them a veto over all legislation.
Easy things: No filbuster, unfuck the Senate, Supreme Court reform, cripple the lobbying pipeline, federalize elections (with a new heavily-fanged Voting Rights Act), abolish prison slavery & its disenfranchising efforts. Heavy progressive taxation on corporations & the 1%
I say easy because they're obvious, the political will to do anything is small.
I stand corrected. Still, I think the costs would give them pause.
As a Blue progressive who has been cursed to live in a red state (mostly SD, but various) for 96% of his life, thank you. It’s pretty gross to be hand-waved away as an acceptable loss, while everyone in NY and CA is worthier than me despite the presence of, say, Staten Island and Fresno in their not-so-uniformly Blue states.
Which gets to my beef against Lincoln: By 1861 or so, the nation could afford the south seceding and given the tension of a nation of some slave states and some non-slave states, a division was good, right and economically affordable
and the 4-8 million black people still in bondage? Acceptable losses? Also, the Confederacy believed they must expand slavery, they would have been destabilizing central America and the Union to help their slavery expansion ideas, so there would have been a war possibly at a time less favorable to the Union
"destabilizing central America and the Union to help their slavery expansion ideas"
The original filibusters...
Magas are evidently flying a black flag to show their Solidarity with the New Civil War.
Henry Rollins just texted "WTF?!?" to Greg Ginn.
"Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." H.L. Mencken
Magas flying a black flag confirms in substance what was always known in theory--pirates and outlaws ready to commit murder for power and profit.
"By God, they keep forcin' us to take these $300 a month child tax credit payments and payin' for Junior's free community college and NOW they want to give Meemaw free dental and a hearing aid! Next thing you know they'll be pavin' our streets and filtrin' the pig shit out of our water! Where's mah rifle? I can take this librul oppression NO MORE"
Manchin is making sure none of those good things ever happen.
His brief now is half or he walks
Manchin's the guy who designed the life boats on the Titanic. "Look, I'm no monster, I'm not saying NO life boats, but I'm not one of those radical socialist 'lifeboats for all' guys either, I say the moderate, reasonable course is lifeboats for half. It must be right, it's halfway between the two extremes!"
Whenever people on my side fantasize about secession (or, more to the point, expulsion of the red states), I always ask them how they would like the sudden appearance of a heavily armed enemy country right on our borders. Even setting aside all of the other reasons against, that never fails to shut them up.
Not to mention the refugees from same, primarily POC.
or aging lefty college professors
Thanks to the pandemic, I've developed my remote-teaching skills, so I can teach for University of Phoenix from a cabin in Saskatchewan.
I will not abandon Austin to Texas.
The Civil War pimping is no different from everything else they have to say--it has literally no meaning. It's just a performance to keep the rubes riled and unthinking.
Agree. And the rubes themselves love the cosplay, with their camo-and-rifles getup to obtain a Slurpee (TM) at the 7-11. They think fondly of "civil war" because they believe (probably accurately) that they have all the guns. And, well, yes, as civilians they do. Unfort., we have all the armed forces. It's beyond stupid, but what else is new?
"...but since there are more of us than there are of them, we don’t need a civil war to accomplish it."
I've been looking at a lot of county red/blue maps, and while "land doesn't vote", it's still a granular way to see the urban/rural divide. EVERY, and I mean every state, red or blue, consists of islands of high-density population urban blue surrounded by a sea of low-density population rural red. There are more of us, AND we hold the infrastructure dense "high" ground.
I'd be perfectly happy coexisting, all I'd need is a political system that treats 35% as an actual minority, rather than as a sometimes-majority that has veto power over the majority.
And this is why the "land doesn't vote" mentality needs to be promoted at the national level by reformation/elimination of the EC, and possibly making Senate representation tied to population. And, kill the filibuster. The minority's rights might be important, but not when it consists solely of obstruction.
Turn the Senate into the House of Lords; it's already halfway there.
I think the only way to get there fairly quickly/easily would be to expand the House
A civil war is highly unlikely for the simple reason that in any state, even including Wyoming there are at least some liberal, non-red voters and, in red states like FL, TX, GA and NC there are tens of millions of them. Likewise CA, IL, NY, PA, etc. have plenty of red voters and MAGAts.
So civil war simply wouldn't be practical and it would destroy the economies of virtually every state. Two other outcomes are more likely: One, the hard right will take over the federal government through voter suppression and disenfranchisement into the indefinite future. With the consolidation of the Supremes in the hands of the hard right, the right would take the opportunity to finish dismantling the federal government - what Bannon calls the administrative state - effectively returning us to the Articles of Confederation. We know how well that turned out. Essentially, the national economy would be wrecked and it would be up to the non-insane Republican voters to vote out the gangsters who are ruining their lives. The second alternative is that the hard right instead chooses to dismantle voting rights, civil rights, all remaining reproductive rights, the ACA, federal environmental protections and labor laws, Medicaid, Medicare and to hollow out Social Security, leaving the country in appalling poverty and misery. Except, the blue states don't play along and simply ignore the radicalized Congress, presidency and judiciary, daring the federal government to try to enforce their very unpopular laws by armed force. This will lead to, at best, a cold war between the states. Either alternative is a national security nightmare for the military as it faces foreign exploitation of grave US weakness.
But actual 1860s style civil war? Nope.
Most of these guys with a boner for a new civil war (at least the ones I see at demonstrations, loaded down with kevlar vests, helmets, and assault rifles) appear hopelessly out of shape, fat if not obese, middle aged if not elderly, and plainly completely unsuitable for military activity. I can't see these guys handling an ingrown toenail, much less serious opposition. Plus, I still think the sane outnumber the insane in this country by about two to one, although I wish the margin was higher. If we simply pulled together, we could just say f&*k these guys and ignore them.
The other day, when Bannon bragged about his "shock troops," a meme appeared featuring "Their shock troops" (two beer-bellied fatsos holding Confederate flags) and "Our shock troops" (butch, hunky Marines in ranks, on a running exercise. "Bring it, Steve" is my view.
Also, when someone says "we need a new Civil War," I hope whoever is nearby answers, "How'd that first one work out for ya?"
They don't need to take anything but a few buildings in the State's Capitals.
The USA central government is too well organized for any separatist movements or insurgencies to succeed. In order for a civil war to come about the central government must be weak and ineffectual... something the fascist party is working on.
So no, there won't be any civil war anytime soon. But maybe sometime down the road when conditions for it are more conducive.
The Civil War talk is instructive in that it tells us what's been taken off the table: Actually winning some fucking elections by persuading a majority of voters to vote for them. They know as well as you and I do (maybe better than we do?) that's no longer an option.