No. Imagining an independent future for any state (including California and Texas) is pure cope. The states are so interdependent that attempting to secede would be ruinous for the state in question.
The only exceptions I can think of are Alaska and Hawaii, which might be able to survive if they found another country to keep them supplied and economically connected.
I like the idea of it, but California is a cash cow and the US would never let that cash cow get away.
New England. Maybe with NY, you could have New New.
Sure? Balkanization seems like a good way to speed up the process of the Empire collapsing.
plus there is the bonus of schadenfreunde, since they always want to balkanize countries that happen to stand in their path.
What you are proposing would start a North American war deadlier than any that has ever been seen. Everyone thought Texas was dumb for talking about secession, but now that other states don’t want to be part of the union, people act like it is a serious idea. It isn’t. Never has been.
In the words of Ben Franklin, “we must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
Everyone knew Texas talking about it was dumb because they’re not self sufficient
California actually is, and if we’re hated by the rest of the country anyway, we’ll just go ahead and leave. Let the rest states have fun paying for shit without us
Define self sufficient.
California is not self sufficient in my opinion. They may have a lot of money, but they rely heavily on interstate commerce and trade routes for their prosperity. Taxes and cost of living are already high, and those things would explode if cut off from trade. The federal government won’t hesitate to use their leverage to keep other countries from supporting the newly declared independence of California.
Texas is not self sufficient either, but I’m not advocating for their secession.
Put simply, we need fewer borders, not more of them. Any state that thinks they can take their money and run will find themselves brutalized by the federal government, taxed to oblivion by neighboring states, and experiencing an exodus of companies who are based there. It is the path to destruction, not liberation.
Absolutely
- Sincerely, someone from the EU
Wouldn’t Texas be at the top of the list of states most likely to exit?
Do states even have a legal way to secede?
Didn’t have a way to legally secede from Britain
But this time there would be no ocean between the two sides.
To take this in a different direction, legal or not (considering the “higher power” generally gets to define what is and isn’t legal and might do so for its own benefit rather than in the best interest of everyone, if there even is such a thing), how can it be determined if a subset of a power structure breaking away from that power structure is a good thing or bad thing? What arguments other than “we’ll use force” are there to support a region needing to remain under the thumb of a power they no longer wish to serve?
See: American civil war
Define “legal”.
Enshined in law, so that state can unilateraly decide to secede and federal govt must accept it.
Nope. The south already tried that.
If you want to gain independence, you have to fight the federal government’s monopoly on violence. At its core, that’s how all law is backed up. Two things you need to be a country. First, the ability to backup your independence with force. Second, the acknowledgement of the international community and their willingness to sign treaties with you. Sealand doesn’t have any issues defending their “independence”, but no one has signed a treaty with them for instance.
No but there’s no law against expelling a state from the union. Kind of a reverse secession if you can piss trump off enough for him to actually do it (no law saying that only Congress can expel them, so it would go to the courts).
No. A full breakdown here https://youtu.be/1dhvry6E0jA
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
The Constitution of the US of frickin A
That’s the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence. And for as much as it is a foundational document of the US, it’s also not a legal document.
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The preamble to the Constitution is NOT the same as the preamble to the declaration of Independence. They were completely separate documents written more than a decade apart.
in fact:
The Declaration was rarely mentioned during the debates about the United States Constitution, and its language was not incorporated into that document.[44]: 92 George Mason’s draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights was more influential, and its language was echoed in state constitutions and state bills of rights more often than Jefferson’s words.[44]: 90 [21]: 165–167 “In none of these documents”, wrote Pauline Maier, “is there any evidence whatsoever that the Declaration of Independence lived in men’s minds as a classic statement of American political principles.”[21]: 167
You have both corrected me well, I admit I was wrong. Sorry.
Yes
No. We’d be overrun by federal troops and decimated within a week. If we could secede peacefully? We (Wisconsin) would probably need an alliance with Minnesota and Michigan to survive.
Californian here, bye Felicia. I’m fucking done with my hard earned money going towards ungrateful backwoods idiots that actively hate me, my state, and my neighbors because they’re told to by thuh teevee, yet don’t realize it. I’m done subsiding hatred for the sake of it, because “it’s the right thing to do.” I’m done being at the political whim of people that can’t spell potato. I have a lot of heart for my countrymen, but considering far too many of them hate us for reasons they don’t even understand, I don’t see the point anymore.
I just hope they automatically give former residents citizenship. I’m stranded out in the badlands for now.
If honestly be curious how that would work out. CA tends to know the value of immigration, and i couldn’t really see them holding a policy of closed borders, at least not in the long run.
Any American balkanization would likely go very similarly to the partition of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The liberals would be given a period of permission to move to the coasts, and the conservatives to the red states, and in this process communities would shatter and a lot of people would die, but it’s better than a civil war and/or white terror.
You should have a US Passport and all your documents needed to get it on hand and in a fire safe.
So, explicitly maintain the societal shadow-rung of illegal immigrants…? Can’t say I love continuing to underwrite that idea.
A US Passport implies you were a US Citizen once
Personally I would respect all US citizens as Pacficians automatically unless you were an accessory to the Trump Admin or ICE (Whatever the fuck you did is Treason, you don’t get to keep citizenship, you don’t get to join our new cool country and if you try to stay, we will respond with capital punishment).
I would partially base it on tax records, honestly.
And yes, I’m specifically trying to exclude billionaires who declare their residency in zero income tax states; they’re specifically trying to evade societal responsibility in the form of tax avoidance, so we should avoid making them a part of our society.
Clearly there’s more nuance to be implemented, but I think addressing wealth inequality very pointedly at a foundational level would be a GREAT idea.
Washingtonian here, I’ve been saying this should happen for like 8 years now lmao
The marriage isn’t working. Let it go.
We have had a name for it for awhile, my fellow Washingtonians call the Washington/Oregon/California union ‘Cascadia’. Wouldn’t be such a bad idea.
If you don’t take AZ and NV with you, you will get your Colorado River water cut off and lose a lot of farming power. That might even require UT. Unless it’s only Northern California included, in which case you still lose that agriculture, and possible land based trade lines to Mexico. It’s not a clean and pretty separation.
That is a problem, but not an intractable one. The first easy win would be to just stop wasting so much water. CA could be a lot more careful with water than it is by just leaning on industry and ag to cut wasteful water use harder than it leans on the suburbs. Don’t get me wrong, green lawns in our Mediterranean climate are a stupid waste too, but it pencils out to less than a percent of all water use, where ag and industry are both in the double digits.
Fuck yeah! Cascadia! Let us stop funding this awful government and actually put our taxes towards improving people’s lives
Absolutely, and I’m about ready to start identifying as that over American 🫠.
I usually think of BC being part of it, too, cause we’re so similar culturally, and we hang out on each other’s side of the made up invisible line all the time.
One can dream!
It would have a hell of a lot of economic power, and natural resources.
Sounds like the kind of place the US would invade
I support balkanizing the US
It worked wonderfully for the actual Balkans and the Caucasus region
If the Union completely dissolved and each state had to function as nation, it would be a massive boom for the oligarchs. They already have more money than most states.
I imagine they’d form blocs, on centred on California obviously, one on the other coast, and a few in between
Shit’s gonna look like the Holy Roman Empire a decade from now…
