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[Cthulhu]

I wasn't saying Hillary is the same thing as Trump either.  I'm saying the ideological divide has become so great it's become self-accelerating and we should get it to the breaking point so we can partition the US.

[MrRoboto75]

Dividing the US worked so well last time

[Criptfeind]

Yeah. You know. I'm not sure if I'm willing to accept "Working together is impossible. Civil war noaw."

I mean, if you want a to have a defeatist attitude clearly humanity is rushing towards killing itself and as much other life as it can off, and extinction is at least eventually assured... So what's the point of going for a civil war when everyone is going to die anyway?

[smjjames]

I wasn't saying Hillary is the same thing as Trump either.  I'm saying the ideological divide has become so great it's become self-accelerating and we should get it to the breaking point so we can partition the US.

Except that unlike the run up to the Civil War, the split isn't separated along state lines, it's a rural/urban divide and one cannot live without the other, economically.

In the US, the only examples of where the ideological divide was particularily deep are the run up to the Civil War, some period afterwards and again during the 60's and 70's. So, anybody know of examples outside the US?

[sluissa]

As much as I hate to pull out this talking point, and as much as it's misused for nefarious purposes. States rights might be a good direction to go, with the fully acknowledged caveat that some things are beyond an individual state and far more important to manage than a single state can be trusted with. (Environment being the one major issue that comes to mind immediately.)

If the states WERE allowed to manage themselves more independently you probably wouldn't have nearly as hostile a situation.

I know this is sort of slippery slope territory. How far do you allow an individual state to go before it's reigned in? Also as it currently stands you've got a number of poor states that would suffer greatly from less federal assistance in various things. But a major source of contention is that you've got legislators from New York and California telling Oklahoma and Iowa how to live their lives. At the same time you've got Texas and Florida telling California and New York they have to follow their rules or else.

I'm not advocating rolling everything back to "13 individual states" days where the federal government was completely neutered. But the federal government does have a bad habit of wanting to "fix things" that not everyone may want fixed.

It's easy to say that though, much harder to figure out where that line is drawn and how to get back to it.

My opinion though is that if people WANT to live in religiously imposed illness and poverty, that should be their right, as long as they're not hurting anyone else. Probably... there should be some sponsored relocation program to help refugees from these states to go along with any such policy.

Once again, this is not a realistic proposal. But the fact is you do have a huge country with 50+ states and other territories each with vastly different cultures. And you've got two catchall parties that are playing tug of war over them all, trying to appease their bases with half measures that don't typically make a majority of the people happy. Not all legislation is one size fits all. Sometimes you have to tailor it to a smaller group. We do that now, but more and more often you see the federal government overruling that.

[Cthulhu]

The last time wasn't a mutually agreed-upon partition, or even a partition.  It was a unilateral declaration of independence that the government didn't recognize.  It was a rebellion, basically.

I can't help you on specific examples of ideological divides but there's been a number of mutually agreed national partitions.  Norway/Sweden (non-violent), Singapore/Malaysia (racial riots, no civil war.  Singapore is now one of the richest countries in the world and kicks America's ass in a variety of metrics), Czechoslovakia (non-violent), Cyprus (part of cease-fire) are a few examples.

You'll notice that most of these were done not as an initiation of violence (Bangladesh Liberation War would be a 20th century example of that kind of partition) but to prevent or end violence.  I think most people, if it came to it, would side with a bloodless partition before tensions reached open conflict.

Yes, there have been other deep ideological divisions in the US, but I don't think anything tops this.  When Nixon was elected amid the last huge ideological divide as far as I know there weren't (immediate at least) calls for impeachment, and nobody demanded the electoral college ignore their constituents and elect Humphrey.

That was really the indicator to me that things are beyond normal solutions.  We're at the point of rejecting the democratic process itself if it doesn't produce the results we want.

[Frumple]

... no, I'm pretty sure older divides topped what we're dealing with, now. I seem to remember chunks of cities being on fire in the yesteryear. Actual lynchings, murder campaigns against protesters et al notably more overt than it is these days, all sorts of stuff like that. Shit during the earlier union struggles times that occasionally looked like actual straight up military action, and not in the militarized police bullshit we deal with today.

There's definitely a different sort of criticism vis a vis the electoral process at the moment, but that's kinda' because the situation last year was notably more fucked up on about a dozen different levels than just about anything that had came previously. You didn't have calls like that (to the extent or visibility, anyway -- always been a subset of folks that indulged) because they didn't come nearly as close to approaching warranted in most of the years previous.

[EnigmaticHat]

I wasn't saying Hillary is the same thing as Trump either.  I'm saying the ideological divide has become so great it's become self-accelerating and we should get it to the breaking point so we can partition the US.

Except that unlike the run up to the Civil War, the split isn't separated along state lines, it's a rural/urban divide and one cannot live without the other, economically.

In the US, the only examples of where the ideological divide was particularily deep are the run up to the Civil War, some period afterwards and again during the 60's and 70's. So, anybody know of examples outside the US?

The rural/urban divide has always existed.  First it was the federalist versus anti-federalist, with the federalists as the populous states and the anti-federalists as the low population states.  Then it was the slave states vs the non-slave states.  This was still a rural vs urban divide, as cash crop plantations were the main way for rural states to make money on the same level as urban industry.  Now, the Mason-Dixon line arbitrarily made this south vs north.  But you have to understand that the "small town America" connection between the midwest and south, didn't exist back then.  Back then the further west you went the more and more that the states just weren't developed period, which made the urban/rural distinction kind of a moot point since the settler's perspectives were very different from the southern or northern perspectives.

To give a less abstract and slightly more recent example, Jaywalking.  In the early 1900s you had a bunch of people moving from rural to urban and they didn't understand city etiquette.  As a result they'd walk out into the roads.  This isn't a huge problem AFAIK jaywalking is legal in most nations on Earth barring super high capacity roads like highways.  But in America as a result of the tensions caused by migration they not only criminalized it, they named the law after "jay" which at the time was derogatory slang for those same rural migrants (hence "jaywalking").

[misko27]

I can't help you on specific examples of ideological divides but there's been a number of mutually agreed national partitions.  Norway/Sweden (non-violent), Singapore/Malaysia (racial riots, no civil war.  Singapore is now one of the richest countries in the world and kicks America's ass in a variety of metrics), Czechoslovakia (non-violent), Cyprus (part of cease-fire) are a few examples.

Those are all the divisions on national and ethnic lines (except Cyprus; seriously dude? Might as well put Abkhazia and South Ossetia on that list). There's not a single example of political divisions, and with good reason, as the only ones I can think of off the top of my head are Vietnam and Korea, neither of which are something you'd want to emulate. Although I suppose North Ireland maybe counts? Not that you'd want to emulate that. Moreover, as someone whose family is from the former Yugoslavia I have a rather strong aversion to the breakup of states along lines anyway, as they tend to leave the individual states less than the sum of their parts... But regardless, do you really think that demands that a breakup will reduce division and bloodshed? That will come to nonsense as soon as the all-too-important question "who gets what?" is asked. Divide exclusively on state lines? If so, on which ones, and on what metric? And if not, how to handle the fact that geography is complicated? Does North New York get to secede and join Republican land? How about North California? Can Austin join the Democrats? What kind of broken monstrosity will result? And once you remember that not all land is made equally, and some areas are rich in oil and resources... Must we relearn the mistakes of Bleeding Kansas?

To give a less abstract and slightly more recent example, Jaywalking.  In the early 1900s you had a bunch of people moving from rural to urban and they didn't understand city etiquette.  As a result they'd walk out into the roads.  This isn't a huge problem AFAIK jaywalking is legal in most nations on Earth barring super high capacity roads like highways.  But in America as a result of the tensions caused by migration they not only criminalized it, they named the law after "jay" which at the time was derogatory slang for those same rural migrants (hence "jaywalking").

This is definitely different from the story I (as an urban dweller) have been told. It was the automobile companies that popularized jaywalking laws, and it has always been in New York, which is steadfastly anti-car in orientation (and has remained so since the 1900s), which has the most weakly enforced jaywalking laws in the nation. In fact, I once read a local magazine discussing the best ways to cross, leaving a space at the end for "The Tourist" method, which involved standing at the crosswalk, waiting for the light to change "as if this was freaking Denmark or something." And on a personal level, it's the people who come from more rural, suburban, or car-focused locations (LA, for example) which are terrified of crossing at the "wrong" time, and people from my area (NYC) who found that positively ridiculous. Attitudes and Response to Jaywalking is certainly correlated (although not perfectly) with the urban/rural divide, but the causation is a location's relationship to cars.


On an unrelated but very relevant to thread note, John McCain is apparently undergoing a surgery to remove a blood clot from his left eye, and this has imperiled the repeal effort.

[Loud Whispers]

It's worth noting that the reasoning behind the partition of India and Pakistan was that that would reduce the bloodshed

But regardless, do you really think that demands a breakup will reduce division and bloodshed? That will come to nonsense as soon as the all-too-important question "who gets what?" is asked. Divide exclusively on state lines? If so, on which onces, and on what metric? And if not, how to handle the fact that geography is complicated?

This is where everything gets bloodier than youtube runescape amvs from 2008

[Criptfeind]

I think the first question to ask when doing this partition is, who gets the nukes?

I feel like the answer would probably be "Don't worry about the nukes, we used them all up trying to answer other questions about the split."

[Loud Whispers]

I think the first question to ask when doing this partition is, who gets the nukes?

I feel like the answer would probably be "Don't worry about the nukes, we used them all up trying to answer other questions about the split."

They'd go to whoever assumes control over the majority of the US's military forces successfully

[Dorsidwarf]

I think the first question to ask when doing this partition is, who gets the nukes?

I feel like the answer would probably be "Don't worry about the nukes, we used them all up trying to answer other questions about the split."

They'd go to whoever assumes control over the majority of the US's military forces successfully

Or piecemeal to whoever gets a hundred guys with construction equipment and rifles out to their local nuclear silo first

[MetalSlimeHunt]

In the event of a collapse of US authority, they probably end up going to nobody. You need the codes to use them, and they're about as physical as a system like that gets. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a failsafe to make them permanently useless as well. In which case you just have a lump of weapons-grade fissile material.

[smjjames]

In the event of a collapse of US authority, they probably end up going to nobody. You need the codes to use them, and they're about as physical as a system like that gets. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a failsafe to make them permanently useless as well. In which case you just have a lump of weapons-grade fissile material.

Until someone figures out how to hotwire the system and bypass the codes, without accidentially launching them in the first place.

But yes, I wouldn't be surprised if there was some kind of contingency plan in place to render them inoperable.