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At this point, most people would agree that the political divide in this country is wider than it’s been since about the Civil War. It has led to various people proposing some form of “great divorce,” where the US breaks up into several more compatible nations. It’s a bit like Federalism on steroids, where we formally break up.
A recent Reddit thread contained one such proposal:
The rules for this were that all states had to remain intact. The blowback was immediate, particularly in the case of Missouri. Is Missouri a southern state, or a midwestern state? Well, historically it was southern because it was a slave state (and its neighbor Kansas was emphatically not, which led to much misery during the civil war). Other maps like this exist, where Missouri is classified midwestern.
BUT… when you drive through the southern half of Missouri, it looks more southern than midwestern. Cotton fields instead of corn fields, for example. If you head a bit east, you encounter Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. I’ve lived in all three of those states, and you can see that the southern ends of those states are not standard cornfield midwestern. They’re not Deep South, but I would say they are Appalachian and rather different from midwestern.
But as you look at these states, there seem to be more intra-state divisions than can be accounted for in dividing up the US by state. I grew up in Pennsylvania and in that time the state was basically two parts: Philadelphia area versus everybody else. You can take Illinois and divide it as Chicago versus everybody else. Many other states have similar divisions. So it would be fairer and result in better groupings if we looked past the somewhat arbitrary state borders of today.
In 1981 I read a fascinating book by Joel Garreau, “The Nine Nations of North America”. Here is his map of what he thought of as a natural division of the territory where each division had more similarities than differences:
As you can see, Garreau also ignored some national boundaries, but we can ignore that part to look at how the US is divvied up. Ecotopia is pretty obviously a coherent place, and it neatly solves the problem of eastern Washington, Oregon and Northern California being outliers in their current states.
It’s a long way from 1981, so I would extend “New England” south to include New Jersey, Philadelphia and northern Virginia. But you could argue about a lot of the details and still appreciate the ideas.
So, this idea has been repeated a number of times, with varying results. Here is a 2010 version with little detail:
Here is a 2017 effort — this time with 11 nations:
This is similar in some ways to Garreau’s 1981 division, but more detailed by county. This is not practical in terms of defining each of these as a separate country (New Orleans and Miami, for example), but the “Greater Appalachia” is an interesting aggregation. But it is imperfect because the original designation of Appalachia went much further north:
I grew up up in the NW part of Pennsylvania, and I would agree that we were in Appalachia. This was more accurate than any other way of describing how the people there lived.
I’ve lived in quite a few places, and my experience would lead me to make boundaries that might not be the same as people who are looking at this “from 50,000 feet.”
But the bottom line, it seems to me, is that we are past the point of reconciling our differences, and something will have to happen to separate us. Federalism is fine, but what do you do with the large population in rural Pennsylvania governed by Philadelphia, or the people in eastern Washington or eastern Oregon or southern Illinois dominated by a big city? This is not working.
My view is that we need to figure out how to negotiate a divorce. Would it be easy? No.
But it cannot be confined to current state boundaries. Otherwise, the whole thing collapses.
Discussion (78)
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I'm tempted to think about city-states, like in the German Federal system. Chicago would definitely be one as its character differs from everything south of it save a statehouse and its supporting government campus and a university. Other possibilities may be Atlanta, Philadelphia, Austin, Las Vegas, and probably more but those are places I'm aware of that seem to contrast to a significant degree to their surroundings.
The 2017 map is intriguing, particularly the I-80 Midlands corridor, but starting it in New Jersey? Maybe so. Where it really hits Indiana accurately, however, is those four northwest counties that are part of "Yankeedom." They're oriented to Chicago, for sure, but Chicago is a very different place than New York, despite that its residents would like to think it is not.
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I would ask what the criteria are for what determines a homogeneous area. And it seems to me that -- along with the idea of producers and consumers; federal eaters versus local eaters -- the areas that get the majority of their GDP from the federal government or not is the best indicator of loyalty to either federal largess or to broader local economy; and thus this determines the regional homogeneity, a sort of separation like the proverbial 47% who Romney described would never vote for him. But cities are already showing that they will increasingly require federal bailouts and infusions of billions of dollars (if not trillions) in federal subsidies.
And as for "divorce," the best way to do this is cutting off the federal teat.
This would either be done accidentally en masse by the government going broke such that it can't pay it's constituent populations. But this would involve a severe financial crisis leading to creating more money and a prolonged hyperinflation which would affect 100% of the population and not provide any differentiation or divorce at all.
The other way would be for states' populations to stop paying federal income tax, cut off money to the federal constituent populations, and let city populations of people benefitting from the federal coffers sink or swim: either develop a good work ethic or move away to a "free state" which itself will eventually either sink or swim.
I think the differences between the producers and consumers have NO overriding geographical significance. Like a metastatic cancer within the body, the rot is everywhere. And each tumor has to be gotten rid of, or the whole appendage or organ has to be excised.
Really interesting stuff. I love this sort of look at how people settle out. Great read and I hope it gets to main feed so I can share it with outsiders.
And
Americans are not as divided as vocal minorities make it appear.
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The problem with this approach is that it wouldn’t be just these cities, but pretty much all of them. Even rural NY is very different from NYC and Salt Lake City is a liberal enclave in a conservative state. I'm trying to think of a large city (say over 500,000) that has a conservative mayor and city council. According to Ballotopedia, there are 36 cities in the US with a population of over 500,000 and five of these have nominally Republican mayors (Dallas, Ft. Worth, Oklahoma City, Fresno, and Mesa).
ballotpedia.org
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These is one "Independant" (Ron Nirenberg of San Antonio, but he is as Liberal as any Democrat) so it's 31-5 and of the five I have doubts about the top 2. I'd also point out that four of the five GOP mayors are in council-manager cities where the mayor isn't the primary power in the city, but rather the city manager is the actual administrator.
If we look at vote breakdown for Dallas and Ft. Worth the last few elections, Austin (Travis County Biden by 45%), Houston (Harris 13%), San Antonio (Bexar 18%), Dallas (Dallas 32%), and Ft. Worth (Tarrant 0.22%) all went for Biden. We are also seeing the suburban counties around Austin and Houston turning Blue (Ft. Bend 11%, Hayes 11%, and Williamson 1.5%). I grew up in Georgia and it's a similar story. Atlanta dominates the state, but every larger city or college campus is blue and turning more so.
The divide in our land is on a urban/rural divide with the suburbs being the battleground where the people who don't want liberal governance live when they have to work in cities. Frankly I think that Covid-19 and the work from home Renaissance it brought about is going to accelerate this divide as people are moving away from the poorly run cities to love in lower population areas. Of course, as I see in my small bedroom community outside of San Antonio, those refugees of the cities (and in our case CA as well) show up and then vote for the same policies that forced them to flee. They may be more conservative than what they left behind, but they want parks, and more police and fire, as well as city services which all cost money. Then they want to enact restrictive zoning to keep out the Walmarts or Dollar Generals and in a decade or so, they are looking more and more like the cities.
Of course this urban/rural divide pits the mass population ce ters against the places where they get food, power, and manufactured goods from which would make a conflict difficult for the urban centers. Their populations are large, but their ability to project force is non-existant, especially considering that their large police forces are required to maintain control. The rural.areas are better armed and equipped to defend themselves, even against straight up military forces, assuming those people who are largely from rural areas are interested in actually fighting their own neighbors. It would be an interesting and extremely bloody conflict that most likely would result in mass famine more than anything else as city dwellers would flee the cities to find food and not know how to grow it, or preserve it.
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Take the Swiss route:
nationalia.info
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