Posted on 08/21/2012 8:12:12 AM PDT by teflon9
Lets talk about secession. Not exactly the most suitable cocktail party conversation starter anywhere in the country, but take that notion deep into the heart of Dixie and you might find yourself running from the possum-hunting conservatives, trailer-park lifers, and prayer warriors Chuck Thompson encountered during the two years he spent traveling the American South asking the question: Would we be better off without em?
The result is a heavily researched, serious inquiry into national divides which is unabashedly controversial, often uproarious, and always thought-provoking. From a church service in Mobile, Alabama, where the gospel entertainer announces "Islam is upon us!" to a store selling Ku Klux Klan memorabilia on a quaint little street in South Carolina — Thompson lifts the green velvet drapes on a South that would seem to belong more to the time of Rhett and Scarlett than the dawn of the twenty-first century.
By crunching numbers, interviewing experts, and roaming the not-so-former Confederacy, Thompson — an openly disgruntled liberal from the Northwest — makes a compelling case for southern secession. What would the new nations look like if Virginia governor Bob McDonnell was elected as the first President of the Confederate States of America? If a southern electorate was left to fend for itself while the North did damage control on an auto industry decimated by cut-rate, union-defying southern voters for the last hundred years? If the BCS championship football game were replaced by a North vs. South Coca Cola/ Starbucks Blood Bowl™? If Florida went to the South and Texas to the North in the most complex land-and-population grab in American history?
Ooops, I pasted the wrong link. Try this one: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2921075/posts?page=60#60
A better alternate is to purge the North east. They don’t like America, they like Europe. All the states north and east and including New York should be purged and possibly ceded to an independent Quebec
I understand the fundamental point you are making about the ideological divide known to exist between liberal urban metropolitan centers and conservative suburban and rural areas. Maybe we would have to sort out the who-belongs-to-who issue at the county level. (Which, based on the pattern of the last several Presidential elections, would probably make Red Nation even larger territorially.)
This approach, of course, would make present state borders obsolete. It would also require state secession conventions agreeing to divide up the state territory in this manner. This is pretty unlikely as politicians understand that unsupported urban centers are fundamentally resource-less traps. Just as with the original Confederacy, secession would probably be an all-or-nothing proposition at the state level.
If you have read the Articles of Confederation (and I assume you have), you already know how inadequate they were and why, after a decade of trying, the US political class found it easier to simply abandoned them as a failing effort and start over from scratch with the Constitution. This is an important point to remember when hearing or reading someone waxing eloquent about the “genius” of the Founding Fathers; they got the organization of the national government badly wrong the first time around. In many respects, that failure was an important step to the success and longevity that the subsequent government has enjoyed.
Even then, we still had a very bloody civil war.
I would hope that, if it came to it, the new Red Nation would simply adopt a close version of the Constitution of the United States as its own constitution.
Given their proclivities, we know that the subsequent Blue Nation constitution, rather than adhering to the existing document, would probably read more like some liberal’s fascist wet dream for proletarian government.
And this is a problem, why?
We will, of course, want to welcome into the New Confederacy, the new states of South Illinois (everything but Chicago-land), East California (toss out the blue cities along the coast), and West Pennsylvania (probably the last will require a messy forced-exchange of populations to get the 'Rat enclave out of the Pittsburgh area and resettle some conservatives who want to flee the Northeast relatively close to home).
Don't be too sure. In the very unlikely event that the country splits up, it's really going to split up. If the South decides to leave, the Midwest and West may go out on their own, but they're not going to become a tail for the South (or the East or West Coast) to wag.
Anytime anyone mentions that lowlife sherman, its like a 4 foot flame burning my arse. I will not suffer for long the fools that bring him as some hero.
There were a lot of “less than honorable” things on both sides, but sherman’s actions were unnecessary and put a blight on any honor on those who allowed and encouraged him to do commit those crimes against humanity.
“It is well that war is so terrible - otherwise we would grow too fond of it.”
-—Robert E. Lee
Sherman was fond of it. Grant was too drunk to know.
Exactly. We don’t praise “bad guys” like the Germans and Soviets when they practiced scortched earth and burned countless villages to the ground; it’s hypocritical to praise Sherman for the same thing because he “saved the Union.”
The split in the US is largely urban-rural and is found in most every state. But if the US is torn asunder, where should a Jewish boy from New York move?
We have enough problems in the conservative movement without discussing the “merits” of secession.
To even raise that issue waves a red flag in front of a liberal bull.
I realize this is a liberal who raised the issue of whether secession would be a good idea, but some of us are taking the bait. That is not wise.
We all know there is virtually no chance of a secession happening without radical changes in the current political conditions. There is no point in discussing things that have virtually no chance of happening, especially when the discussion can get picked up by others as “proof” of conservatives being neo-Confederates.
This war was lost a hundred and fifty years ago. Let's move on and do what we can to fix the America we still have, not try to revive a Confederacy that failed.
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