The first step is refering to yourself as a member of your state and not an American I guess
I usually refer to myself as Cascadian
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.
Fuck yeah! Cascadia! Let us stop funding this awful government and actually put our taxes towards improving people’s lives
It would have a hell of a lot of economic power, and natural resources.
Sounds like the kind of place the US would invade
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!
A bulkanized US would certainly be good for the planet, assuming it survived the preliminary civil wars as nation state boundaries are created and alliances made with Canada and Mexico. Who gains control of all the nukes would be a big question.
Fuck it why not. This country is proving to be a global liability due to its structure, size, and lack of codified protections for its own handling.
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I would absolutely prefer to be something else
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Yeah, it’s a little too late for that.
Agreed, that ship has sailed.
Can’t believe you’re not downvoted. How dare you say you want to change the nation for the better and not just secede
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This throws under the bus the many many non republicans in places gerrymandered such that the minority can continue it’s rule. My life would probably get better, but only at their expense as more and more solvent states leave the union. I’m not willing to ‘punish’ those people for the crime of being born in a impossibly corrupt district.
Gotta break a few eggs, etc.
Might be cruel but kinda my thought. We can’t save everyone.
I’m not so sure. Once the Republicans no longer have the democrats to fight against, they will fight against each other. This might happen as well in the leaving blue states, but I feel like the democrates don’t hold as big of a majority in most of them. So they are already used to it. And they aren’t so much the party of fire and brimstone. So more likely they would try to do all the social reforms and just fall on thier faces.
I wholeheartedly agree.
Why did democrats not stop the gerrymandering? Why are there so many laws that should not exist still there?
Because democrats have found a way to benefit from their own misuses of the law as well, so you can see how this leaves the people trying to change this with impossible choices they have to suffer consequences of even if they make the best one. It takes a lot of fight to stand up and keep pushing through that, and those are exactly the folk I’m proud to call my country-kin
Democrats do gerrymandering too. Basically without gerrymandering, the power would shift about 4% in Democrats favor. Enough to shift power in the House, but not as much as people think.
(That statistic comes from a video I watched a while ago, and could be wrong, so take it with a grain of salt. I’m not an authority on this matter.)
I suspect politics would actually shift a huge minority amount towards “no, don’t kill the planet, my grandchildren live here”.
The billionaire planet killers can afford to buy up and lock down two parties. I doubt they can afford to buy out everyone.
And that outdated electoral college, smells like the fourth republic in france IMO.
Only as a last resort and everything else has been tried.
CA should be split into two.
I don’t think the population is as hopelessly divided as the social media spaces make it out to be, but at the same time, the federal government looks more and more unrecoverable from corporate interests and back to the people every single day. It’s probably past the point of return, excepting major societal shakeup.
It feels like there may come a point where the states that are large enough to be countries on their own start looking into any mechanisms that would allow them separation, just to be able to run themselves without federal interference and incompetence.
Personally, absolutely. California subsidizes so many of the red states in this country, and it sucks, because we don’t get the representation we should. We have 10% of the population, but only get 2% of the representation in the Senate.
That being said, I am completely aware that this is Putin’s goal, and that is why there is a lot of discussion online from Russian bot accounts about this.
It sucks when your goals align with Putin’s, because he is such a monster.
I am not a bot, not a Russian asset.
I think.
I’m at the point where I think we should peacefully dissolve the Union entirely. Just grant all 50 states full independence. Let the states come back together in whatever new nation or combination of nations they want.
Look at the current state of our politics. Step back and really look at it. Every political system relies ultimately not on a constitution, but on the good faith of the people actually governing. Look at how the current president is wiping his ass with every check and balance built into the system. Words and laws don’t matter, there’s always a bad faith interpretation that can allow the president to seize more and more power. And the Supreme Court is openly giving broad sweeping authority to Republican presidents while severely curtailing the power of Democratic presidents. Bribery is legal, and both parties are completely captured by the wealthy. Oh, and every last scrap of freedom, privacy, and autonomy are being torn down in the path of an ever-expanding surveillance panopticon.
I’m sorry. But by the time your political culture decays so far to allow this level of dysfunction, there’s no saving it. Our constitution is a woefully out-of-date obsolete document that should have been scrapped generations ago. And it was made difficult to amend by people who had no idea how important amending it would later be. It was built for the compromises of the 1780s, not the compromises of the 2020s. We need to go through a new process of Constitution creation, potentially multiple such processes, and come back together based on new compromises that reflect the reality of the 21st century.
This nation cannot be saved. We need a peaceful national divorce. The alternative is likely something far worse, as we hurdle inexorably towards a second civil war.
Note: obviously there are practical difficulties with dissolving a nation. When this comes up, people love to hand wring about the national debt or how military assets will be dissolved in this kind of scenario. These are important but obvious concerns. But national myopia blinds us here. Nations have peacefully divided countless times through history. These matters are always handled through some negotiation process. American exceptionalism blinds us to our possible futures, simply because we are unwilling to look beyond our own borders for inspiration.
I actually read this, unusual for me. I appreciate your take, and while your reasons are real concerns, I’m not in agreement with your solution.
I think the only reason states have not truly waged war on each other is that we are part of a union. That’s just my opinion, but many states would simply begin to fail without the feds redistributing wages from states that have good industry and gdp.
Once they don’t get, they will start to try to take, and that fire would spread faster than it could be put out. Again all imo. But us Americans are “a bit shit” to eachother already, to borrow a British phrase.
I like the idea of it, but California is a cash cow and the US would never let that cash cow get away.
No, because it would lead to civil war. Do I wish it could happen? Yes. But is it realistic? No.
Ah, but Trump does not have the balls, brains, or moral integrity of Abraham Lincoln.
So, we got that going for us.
He doesn’t need to imo, these things have plenty of inertia right now. It wouldn’t take a lot to get Americans fighting even harder against eachother than we are now even.
Not “fighting against each other”…just “trying to repel a Nazi invasion”.
I live in Oregon, I’d prefer it if Oregon joined Canada as a province, or like Washington and Oregon together. I don’t think it’s realistic. There’s a lot of unanswered questions of how things would work but I have daydreamed about it.
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.”
I’m not American, and I think you should all secede. Just like EU is a shit and quebec should be free.
You would have more than half the population of the country plunged into abject poverty. West Virginia would look like an apocalyptic hillbilly hellscape.
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.
