Such things are not only very rarely peaceful, thinking through the logistical shuffle to make it happen is a migraine. Where would the lines be? Actually the list of questions is endless. Speak to this if you will.
A person with charisma and determination was/is required. Trump has those qualities.
A person who is in touch with the inner feelings of voters is required. Trump definitely was that.
A person not beholden to the commercial system of backing any candidate was required. Trump is/was such a person.
Ross Pero (?sp) failed more than once due to lack of charisma, maybe also muzzled by self-inflicted acceptance of political correctness. As you said, you go to war with the army you’ve got.
One thing about Ross Perot though is that he was truly an American patriot who tried to warn us about the evil motives of multinational companies that forced NAFTA. 40+ years later we have another patriot who ended up fixing it!
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Either you didn’t watch the video or you don’t know what a meltdown is.
No, the only hope they have of gaining and maintaining power int the future is if more and more people become even more dependent on gov’t.
As minorities make it into the middle class and above they become more and more conservative just like WASPS.
Dependency is what makes people reliant on the democratic party.
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Perot was indeed a patriot but he was also nuts. I voted for him the first time around and would have voted for him again absent the melt down.
Like a lot of rich and powerful men he had some serious issues with paranoia and I think eventually they consumed him.
The model to follow would be the separation of Norway from the Kingdom of Sweden.
The difficulties can be divided into several classes:
(1) economic/financial: a new currency? who assumes what portion of the national debt? who pays pensions? But these can be settled through negotiations, with the side which wants to leave – my side – being willing to make the most concessions.
(2) military: if we have shaken off the chains of empire by then, it won’t be so difficult. If not, it will be. I would propose a super-NATO-like closely-allied defense force. Lots of problems here: I believe the ‘Blue America’ will fairly rapidly develop huge problems of its own, and not be trustworthy when it comes to maintaining the high-tech (or any other) part of defense, which is increasingly important. So there is still some thinking to be done here.
(3) Other technical: highways, electricity, telephones. Look to the US/Canada arrangements for inspiration.
Note that separation of peoples into separate states is in the spirit of the times: Scotland will break away from the UK soon, as will Northern Ireland when the Catholics become a majority [the first will be peaceful, the second, not]; Catalonia and the Basque Country want to leave; Yugoslavia came apart, as did the Soviet Union: all of them faced the problems above, and solved them. We need to study these cases in detail, and others. (The famous case of tearing a dictionary down the middle, with one half given to Pakistan and the other to India, during Partition, is a negative example.)
The real difficulty is (4): population exchange. I would expect, were the US to separate into ‘left’ and ‘right’ parts, that most people would stay put. Conservatives would just have to live under their new Progressive government, which they would have to have done anyway, as the US is going that way in any case. People have jobs and homes and will not easily up stakes and move. And non-Conservatives would have to try to adjust to living in a ‘Red’ environment. However, the ‘Red’ – separatist – side, if they are smart, will pledge to make no substantial changes to ‘social’ issues for a seriously-long period of time: no outlawing of abortion, for example. This won’t be easy to convince my side of, by the way. But unless we do something like this, we’re going to find it very difficult to be allowed to leave peacefully – the cries of the liberals who would be trapped in the new ‘Jesus-Land’ will move their counterparts in Blue America not to allow it. So, again, here is where we need to be smart and make lots of concessions.
But … some people will want to leave. So we do what Serbs and Croats did, and set up a mechanism for ‘house exchanges’. My people will be fleeing from California to Idaho, yours will be going the opposite direction. (I think, in terms of environment, your guys will be getting the better deal. How I regret the loss of California!)
Plus generous financial help for resettlers, paid for by the rest of us. At least that’s what I would propose for me side.
And boundary lines: I would take the ‘unit of separation’ to be Congressional Districts, not states or even counties. The more fine-grained the resolution the better. So look at a map of Congressional Districts sorted into R and D, and you’ll get a rough – very rough – idea of the future ‘Red America’. Contiguity is highly desirable, although it may be impossible to achieve. We may have to abandon some ‘red’ areas, although, as I see the map, not vice versa.
In an ideal world, population exchange would draw in those boundaries somewhat, for Red America, as we concentrated into the Northwest. I don’t think we will be a majority in the South much longer.
But … no one knows the future. A failing America – one, say, humiliated by a military defeat on the part of China and now forced to accept Number Two status in the world – maybe experiencing harsh economic times due to AI and the general vagaries of world capitalism – might ignite other nationalisms: the ‘Reconquista’ movement in the Southwest, aiming – unless Mexico has become a civilized country – at an independent ‘Aztlan’. The Black nationalists have long dreamed of a ‘Republic of New Afrika’ – and maybe they would want to try for that.
The problem is that we are all – the different ethnic tribes AND the different political ideolgies – interpenetrated. The history of interpenetrated peoples, when they try to achieve separation, is not reassuring. But we may be able to do better.
An alternative to peaceful separation would be to return to the original federalism we had long ago: let states decide on things like whether transgenderism should be encouraged among six-year-olds. But I fear the extreme Puritanism of the Left will make this impossible. These people have the totalitarian mindset. So separation it must be.
And believe me, I know this sounds literally insane right now. I just want to get the meme started.
That assumes that both sides would agree on all those things, agree on geographical lines, and be sufficiently at peace with one another to enter into arrangements like the US/Canada have.
There’s too many what ifs and uncertainties. As I said earlier, too many to list. The chances of two warring shithole countries, so weakened as to be vulnerable to enemy states like China, Iran and Russia is the likely result.
You are right. He has those qualities. He also lacks other qualities
which would be very desirable. I won’t go into his faults right now,
but we should not deny them – at least among ourselves. (I’m
talking about political faults, not personal ones, although there is
an overlap.)
You would be interested in a new book by one of Trump’s speechwriters,
a college professor named FH Buckley. It’s called THE REPUBLICAN
WORKERS PARTY. A very interesting read.
I could imagine a much more effective leader. But you have to play the hand you are dealt.
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FH Buckley any relation to William F Buckley jr.?
Well, no one knows the future.
My side has to hope that many Latinos and Blacks will become prosperous,
and will then become conservative, so that we at least stay ‘in play’ in American
politics. And indeed we need to make strenuous efforts to be open and welcoming
to non-whites, whether or not we win many, because the alternative is race war.
But … the American college campuses turn out young people who are going to do
very well financially, but who are also admirers of ‘socialism’. The new Progressive
movement is not just about economics. It’s not even mainly about economics.
There is very little evidence that conservatives are going to get many people from
those demographics that they don’t now already dominate.
There was a good article in the Atlantic Magazine last month on this issue, by a liberal.
He lays out the evidence for what’s happening very well:
Everyone, left or right or middle, should read this article. Along with Christopher Caldwell’s piece on ‘How to Understand Vladimir Putin’, it’s the most significant article I’ve read in the last couple of years.
I don’t think so. None that I know of.
I know William F Buckley was an institution when it came to the conservative voice and it’s values!
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Well that’s a fact, and the reason why what you’re suggesting makes for a very nice exercise, but quite futile as in reality there’s too many people, and too much to fight over.
At the moment, this is absolutely the subjectively-perceived reality.
So also was it in Yugoslavia, in Ireland, in Scotland (still is), in the Kingdom of
Sweden when Norway was a province of it, in Quebec today, etc etc.
And maybe so always it will be. But anyone who is familiar with the history of our
fractious species will know that huge turns, seismic upheavals, have been the norm
in the past. The US has already had one such. Are we immune from another? I have
no idea, because I cannot predict the social/political stressors. But I know they’re there,
and I know they will change people’s perceptions. Read that Atlantic article!
Nobody knows or can predict the future, in your own words, and yet the Atlantic knows how it ends???
Yes. He ‘excommunicated’ the John Birch Society, for example, and
drove Pat Buchanan into the wilderness for ‘anti-Semitism’. (That particular Buckley
essay, “In Search of Anti-Semitism”, was the only thing I ever read by him, and I’ve
read a lot of his stuff, books and columns in National Review, which was rambling and
confusing. I don’t think he made his case, although it’s a very tricky subject.)
How I wish he were living today!
FH Buckley is not in the same league – who is? – but he has two great virtues, in my mind:
(1) He’s willing to “think the unthinkable”, to do what Einstein did when he revolutionized physics: drop the assumptions most people don’t even know they have, and then reason from there.
(2) He’s in the Catholic tradition of conservatism. Normally, that wouldn’t recommend him to me – just the opposite, me being a secular humanist conservative. But … the Catholic Church, by necessity, considers the needs of its flock, who include lots of people who have not done particularly well in the lottery of life. Thus Catholic ‘social doctrine’. (I do NOT mean ‘liberation theology’, which was a Catholic heresy.)
He’s convinced me that too much of our thinking on the Right has been influenced by cold libertarianism – economic libertarianism, not social – and that this is both wrong, and has resulted in our not being able to fully bring on board a large section of naturally-conservative Americans: the UAW guy, for example, who is a patriot, who is socially-conservative, but who supports a minimum wage and wants his union to get a good deal for him when bargaining against his powerful employer.
This is a deep rift in the Right. Trump addressed, sort of, obscurely, some of these concerns. (In part, because Buckley was one of his speech writers.)
It’s something we’ll have to start thinking about, and arguing about.
Putting it concretely: consider the American Social Security program (old-age pensions, for any foreigners reading this). On the Right, there can be three attitudes towards it – besides acknowledging that it will go bankrupt by 2030 –
(1) It’s a good thing in principle, however mal-administered it may be in practice. The state should intervene in these problems. This is very much a minority view in the Right, at least as consciously expressed.
(2) It’s bad, but we can’t do much about it, as it’s too popular. So we’ll just have to hope that it collapses. Or something.
(3) It’s bad, and we if we could – if we had a strong majority in the House and Senate – we would abolish it – paying out to everyone who is now a member, and then letting people have the freedom to insure themselves, or not … and the ones who didn’t, could, in their old age, just starve. Hard luck. Maybe a church will help them out.
Forgive the sarcasm. And of course the main position, I think, of most conservatives, is a fourth one: not to think about it.
FH Buckley challenges that. He does it from the point of view of Catholic conservatism, but I think he’s right in his conclusions. We need to work out a form of, to put it most provocatively, ‘the conservative welfare state’. We once had a cadre of intellectuals who believed in this, by the way, around the journal The Public Interest. But they ceased publication, and I think were absorbed into the neo-cons, who also have this view, but who were mainly concerned with getting the US into wars in the Middle East to spread liberal democracy.
Enough! Read Buckley’s book. (And he has another one coming out, even more controversial, which will be of great interest to people on this discussion board.)
Let’s not play verbal games. The author spells out, very convincingly,
a powerful social trend, of which most conservatives are either unaware,
or don’t want to believe. What effects this trend will have, how the American
Right will react to approaching political oblivion, is yet to be seen.
And, of course, this trend is not the only one. Other things may happen as well,
which will affect political reality. An increasingly-dominant Left – utterly guilt-ridden
about ‘race’ – will not be able to resist the demand to open the borders even wider,
even if they calculate they no longer need these new voters to win. This will
have effects on the polity.
But anyone who is not aware of the trend spelled out in the article is flying
blind. They’re likely to experience what aviators call “controlled flight into terrain”.
Wait a minute Doug! How’s that a verbal game? Every time I offer up an alternative scenario to yours, your retort is that nobody knows or can predict the future. Then you post an article by the Atlantic (whom most here would categorize as fake news) which is going to tell us how things end in America.
I don’t know what most here would think of The Atlantic. It used to be center-right, roughly, now is center-left, roughly, but always has interesting and thoughtful articles, and also has some regular contributors who are right of center.
Parenthetically, I should say that conservatives should not confine themselves to purely conservative sources. This is a terrible idea, like not exposing your child to the bacilli of normal life by keeping him safely indoors for his first six years. I’ve learned a lot from reading non-conservative, even far Leftist authors. (For instance, if I need to reinforce my beliefs that white western imperialism did some good things in the Third World countries it conquered, I turn to the writings of Karl Marx.)
All I can do here is to repeat myself: there is a strong, secular trend in the US with respect to political demographics, and it favors the Left. Every conservative should be aware of this. Not to be is like closing your eyes when walking along a narrow mountain path on a ledge, for fear of seeing the scary depths below.
But … exactly what will happen in the US in the future is not predictable, because we do not know what other events may take place. The US is going to have a non white majority in another couple of decades. But … maybe the Southwest will want to separate, and become a Spanish-speaking state of its own, ‘Aztlan’ as it’s called. If Mexico got on top of the drug cartels – maybe as a result of drug legalization in the US – and lived up to its promise, it might become much more assertive about wanting to reclaim its lost territory, and much more attactive to Hispanics living in the area of the ‘reconquista’. This seems unlikely to me now, but even twenty years ago, so did the idea that boys should use the girls’ toilets if they said they were a girl.
Anyway, the people who post on this board are clearly of above-average intelligence and awareness, and so they can appreciate this article, which is about a crucially-important subject.