Very cool, if true

Agreed. I'd love to see the red states (peacefully) become another nation, but it's not going to happen anytime soon.

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cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com

Ooh, another easy one :)

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My "yes" is based on the assumption that no economic alternative to petroleum is found. Given the deterioration of the country's public transport infrastructure, without cheap, prevalent personal transportation, and with communication becoming more expensive because of energy/plastics costs, it would be impractical to keep a country that physical size together.

I hope I'm wrong though, for many, many reasons.

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The people I've seen talking about it seem to think that the liberalisation of some states, and the rise of the Tea Party in others means that a split is inevitable.

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burkesworks.livejournal.com

Ah, the old "United States of Canada"/"Jesusland" map made flesh. Can see the working behind it but can't see it in practice; the likes of Rand Paul, Rich Lott and Christine O'Donnell could barely run a bath, let alone a country.

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Also, the confederacy was a shitload more organized than the Tea Party people are today and they couldn't pull a split off.

The tea party people will face similar problems as the confederates. Manufacturing is still centered around the liberal sections of the country, which means that they have the ability to manufacture weapons in far greater numbers than the people who would like to not be a part of "Liberal Washington."

Agricultural states versus industrial states is a losing war for the agristates.

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zornhau.livejournal.com

Seriously, what's the benefit for a liberal state in sharing any sort of polity with the bible belt?

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Cheap food.

If we let them become a separate country they could charge us import taxes on fruit and vegetables and cotton and other agriproducts that we are used to getting dirt cheap.

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zornhau.livejournal.com

Isn't US farming heavily subsidised anyway? Couldn't you get the food elsewhere?

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Where?

Canada's even colder and less fruit friendly than the Northeast, Mexico would be between us and them and it costs a lot more money to bring fruit and veg across an ocean than to drive it up Highway 9.

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Lots of food comes from California, and most of the grain comes from states that could go either way. The only thing that I see being a major loss is oil.

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I thought that was what you meant. If a split *does* happen, then it will probably break down along those lines, but that political split has *always* been there - it's still essentially the old slave states against the rest.
The levels of patriotism, and the love on all sides for what they perceive as the *idea* of 'America' (though the two groups see that idea totally differently) is so ludicrously high over there compared to any other Western industrialised country, that I don't see it. Both sides essentially see the other side as 'traitors' and see themselves as 'fighting for the soul of America' - *they're* not going to split away because *they're* the *real* Americans. "Let the other side split if they want to, but we're staying American!"
The only possible exceptions I can see are Alaska and Texas, both somewhat special cases...

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burkesworks.livejournal.com

Texas

One would assume Austin would become some sort of exclave of liberalism...

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Relative to the rest of the state, yes. Though one would also expect to see a mass exodus if anything like that actually happened...

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eatsoylentgreen.livejournal.com

those tea party people are talking out of both sides of their mouth, decrying government on one hand and receiving every possible handout with the other.

You want an anti-government believer, go find a religious colony member. Otherwise, can it.

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mm. Several Rep. Senators actively decried Obama's bailout while accepting 97% of the money. The one notable exception was unemployment benefits.
because, y'know, people who have nothing deserve nothing... right?

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pseudomonas.livejournal.com

An alternative might just be that the norm becomes that people travel just within their own state. Countries of a fair size (and empires of enormous size) existed before the steam train; it was just a given that most people didn't move far from home. The US might get more federal, but poor communications aren't a reason (in themselves) for fragmentation.

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True. But those old empires were also based on technologies and skills that don't really exist now - for example the huge number of horses in existence then compared to now - which allowed a greater amount of movement and communication than would be possible in a hypothetical post-oil society which hadn't bothered to adapt until it was too late.

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I wonder how long it would take to breed back up to sufficient horses...

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erindubitably.livejournal.com

Not very long. There are ~7 million horses in the States atm (depending on which figures you look at) and one census from 1867 lists the number of domestic horses at 8 million. There was an increase in domestic horses until 1915 where it peaked at 21.5, and then declined again after the introduction at the automobile. But assuming a significant portion of those are breeding age, you could breed a pretty large increase in usable horses less than a decade.

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sageautumn.livejournal.com

Not long at all for Kentucky. :)

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pseudomonas.livejournal.com

Yeah, but if you're in rural Texas, you're not at all less screwed if your government is in Austin than if it's in DC.

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Yeah. I'm pretty sure that a post-oil Texas is pretty screwed no matter what, though. The lack of air-conditioning alone would make it essentially uninhabitable...

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I'm fairly sure that Texas was inhabited before air-conditioning...

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Taking 1960 as a rough starting point for "when air conditioning became fairly prevalent", Texas' population doubled between then and 2000, while the population of the US as a whole increased by a little under 60%. In the last fifty years there has been a mass migration southwards in the US, and that's been in large part because air-conditioning has made the heat bearable for people who otherwise couldn't tolerate it.
It wouldn't be literally uninhabitable - very few places are - but it would be a lot less pleasant, and many fewer people would live there...

The air-conditioning thing is actually a big reason for the increased North-South tensions and the rise of the Republicans in the South.

See for example http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people2/Polsby/polsby-con4.html , http://www.lasvegasweekly.com/news/2010/jul/08/cold-truth/

“If we could travel back to 2000 and have each state vote red or blue just as it did that year but with the relative populations and electoral votes distributed among states as they had been in the 1950s (before the big southward migration) Democrat Al Gore would defeat Republican George W. Bush by 18 electoral votes instead of losing by three.”

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I am informed [but have no idea how to fact-check] that existing oilwells could have their outputs drastically increased by washing them out with liquid CO2 - that stuff we're so keen to get rid of.
Oilwells are currently flushed with cold water. You will already be aware how effective that is if you've every tried to wash anything vaguely oily.

this does not currently happen for various reasons, the most pressing of which is the glorious idiocy of mankind
[though I must declare that I utterly fucking despise the entire fossil fuel industry and hate cars with a furious passion]

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ninebelow.livejournal.com

The US is fragmented and will continue to be so.

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Who's feeling smart today? :->

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In 2012 we'll temporarily have a three party system. The Tea Party and the Republicans will split the right wing vote at the presidential level giving Obama the win, but the Tea Party will pick up a bunch of congressional seats.

Once there, they'll have just enough votes to fuck with the agendas of both the Republicans and the Democrats, which will force both primary parties to work together more rationally than they have lately - particularly since the original Republican plan was to use these people for votes, not to really get untrained and crazy outsiders into Capitol Hill.

This all sets up an interesting presidential race between Hilliary and some seriously moderate Republican challenger in 2016, as the GOP tries to repair itself and the Tea Party people go back to being marginalized and ignored by the general political class.

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I hope that happens, my fear is that the GOP will (as they are attempting to do) co-opt the tea-baggers and succeed well enough to drive the Republicans even further to the right.

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eatsoylentgreen.livejournal.com

no. and snicker.

the US will suck in 20 years, but it won't break up, breaking up countries is so 19th century.

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chaos-israel.livejournal.com

Yugoslavia called: the want the 1980s back.

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chaos-israel.livejournal.com

*sigh*

"they", not "the".

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eatsoylentgreen.livejournal.com

I was thinking that that, or maybe Sudan, would be exceptions. But both of them have distinct ethnic groups that hate each other, for a long time. We just don't have that here in the states, except for maybe black people, or the poor.

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don't forget the gays. Does America still hate the gays?

ok, I have no idea what I'm talking about.

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I think it depends on the result of their next election. If Sarah Palin runs, and ever gets into office, then I think a breakup is inevitable.

It all depends on how the Tea Party do.

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I dearly hope Sarah Palin runs for president, because she has absolutely no change of getting elected. She'd get at most 20% of the vote if she ran as an independent and maybe 40% if she ran as a Republican, but that's it. Her opponent would win by a landslide. She's a political messiah to the tea-baggers and either a joke or a damn scary joke to the rest of the US population.

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Yeah, I can see why the Republican party are pissing themselves at the thought of Palin getting enough support to run for office, she's probably about the only candidate they could select who wouldn't have a pretty good chance of winning.

Well, that Republican candidate for office who enjoys dressing up as a nazi at the weekends, he'd probably be a bad choice.

And that one who used to be a satanist. She'd probably not be great either.

... You know, a year ago I would never have said the GOP could seriously promote candidates who are nazis and satanists (but they never inhaled) and expect to still be taken seriously as a political party. And yet. Here we are. They still have their supporters.

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Sarah Palin gets elected: the rest of the world points at the US and laughs hysterically, then shits itself.

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Which is pretty much what the rest of the world did when Dubya got elected.

... and then got re-elected.

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Dubya was more of a 'Noooo fuckin WAY'
a genuinely scary moment. The process was stolen, as he had openly stated it would be.

Palin is different. Pretty much no-one outside of the US can understand why anyone takes her remotely seriously. It's like Jordan running for PM.

ah. my brain just vomited.

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It has surprised me in recent years the sheer scale to which the Republican party no longer even bothers to try and pretend that they aren't the party of the rich white power elites, bought and paid for, purely to further the interests of said elites.

It has further surprised me how their core supporters, primarily the poor and utterly disenfranchised, seem to be completely okay with this.

But then, as you say, the Palin Phenomena surely teaches us that even if we imagine the most bizarre and unlikely thing in American politics, the reality is, something even weirder than that is probably already happening.

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oh, the reason for that is simple and utterly insidious:

people who live in a state of self-perpetuating ignorance are *far* more comfortable with other ignorants than anyone even vaguely intellectual.
An offer of 'help' is seen as interference, and deeply unwelcome. Some rich idiot bangs on about low taxes and doing whatever you like with no government oversight, that's soul food for a guy living in a shack who wants the world to leave him the hell alone. With his daughter-sister-wife. and their 10 kids. And gun closet.

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