Kulak, at the start of a very long post on historical eras of centralization and decentralization, touches on the most likely outcome of a second US civil war, and it’s not a rump USA and a neo CSA:
Every time the subject of a possible US civil war or national divorce comes up I hear the same micron deep takes. America couldn’t break up because the division isn’t by state, its Urban Vs. Rural. Or that Urban vs. Rural isn’t the divide, even then people of different politics are mixed up together. Or that for every clear red or blue state there’s a purple state. None of which is in any way relevant to anything until you recognize the naïve mental model many of these people are working on …
These takes betray a belief that a second civil war would be some kind of conflict between coherent independent states who’ve started identifying with/against the idea of union such as happened in the 1860s … or that somehow there’d be a series of tidy Quebec style referendums resulting in a clean division such as exists in so many meme maps:
The truth is any post-breakup map of America would not resemble an electoral map following state lines, nor even a redrawing of state boundaries, such that the fantastical greater Idaho or Free State of Jefferson might exist as part of a wider Confederation of Constitutional Republics, or a Breakaway Philadelphia city-State join a Union of Progressive Democracies …
No. It’d be nothing so comprehensible or easily mapped to modern politics.
A post breakup America would probably look closer to this:
If you’re a sane person and your immediate reaction is: WHAT THE HELL AM I LOOKING AT!?
… Well that’s kinda the point.
(I really do apologize for all I’m going to have to digress)
For our purposes we can broadly divide history into 2 types of period … Periods of Centralizing trends, and periods of Decentralizing trends.
Who knows what a disaggregation of the former USA would look like? It would probably take decades to fully work itself out.
Comment by MBlanc46 — April 1, 2024 @ 20:18
True, but no matter how such a series of events unfolds, it’s far more likely to look like the second map (American HRE) than the overly neat first one (United States of Canada versus Jesusland).
Comment by Nicholas — April 1, 2024 @ 21:07