America is Fracturing
A future once unspeakable is now being discussed openly…and seriously
“WHEN in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.” —Declaration of Independence, 1776
It will come as no surprise to anyone that President Obama in January 2013 said "nyet" to a petition signed by 126,000 people asking if Texas could secede from the Union. The petition was posted on the White House's "We the People" web site. If a petition garners at least 25,000 signatures it receives a response from the White House.
But what if the White House had said yes? Could Texas succeed as a separate nation? Check out the video below:
The video ultimately focuses on the legality of secession by any state, not just Texas. Secession that triggered the first Civil War wasn’t legal, either, but that didn’t stop the southern states from leaving. If several states decide to secede, there’s probably little that could be done to stop it. Americans don’t have the stomach for a violent internal conflict, so some accomodation will have to be made.
And if Texas did leave?
Besides the economic considerations, what else might Texas have in its favor? For starters, Texas has twenty-nine oil refineries capable of an output of 5.25 million barrels per day. With one of the world's largest oil ports south of Houston and access to its own onshore and offshore oil wells, Texas would be one of the largest petroleum processing countries in the world. It would have enormous leverage when dealing with the U.S. and revenues from refined oil products would provide critical income which would raise Texans' standard of living while lowering their taxes even more. Even considering the left’s Green New Dreams, any energy outside of Texas’s needs could be sold to other states or exported.
What might sucession look like?
2020 presidential election results by state (CNN)
Let’s carry the pipe dream a little farther and look at the electoral map from the 2020 presidential election. Let's assume that all of the red states on this map tire of kowtowing to Washington and decide to join Texas. Let's call this new country the Free States of America (FSA) and the remainder of the old USA the Socialist States of America (SSA). Several things immediately become evident.
The socialists, statists, and Marxists which are predominately found on the left and right coasts are immediately isolated in much smaller countries. Washington, Oregon, and Nevada would be tied together and would face the choice of going down the economic drain with California or defecting to the FSA. Colorado and New Mexico, bordered by the FSA, would face a similar choice. Go blue or go red. Florida could join the FSA or defect to Cuba.
But, it gets more interesting than that. The original Confederate States were formed when entire states seceded from the Union. Nice and clean, right? All of the seceding states kept their boundaries. That’s not necessarily the case now.
Greater Idaho (greateridaho.org)
Just this month, five counties in Oregon voted to secede and begin negotiations to join Idaho. This is in addition to two counties that had previously voted to do so. Idaho has responded favorably to the proposal. According to Greater Idaho lead petitioner Mike McCarter, “This election proves that rural Oregon wants out of Oregon. If Oregon really believes in liberal values such as self-determination, the Legislature won’t hold our counties captive against our will. If we’re allowed to vote for which government officials we want, we should be allowed to vote for which government we want as well.” A look at the map above reveals that the new Idaho would rival Texas in size, population, and infuence.
The Oregon secessionist counties are looking at a negotiated separation, but the truth is there is little Oregon can do to stop the eastern counties if they declare for Idaho. What will Oregon do, send in Antifa? If Idaho accepts them, it’s pretty much a fait accompli.
There are counties in Northern California who are also petitioning to join neighboring Idaho. Let’s assume they do. The same could probably be said for eastern Washington State. Let’s assume further that Oklahoma and Kansas join Texas in seceding. What happens to nearby Colorado?
While Colorado is politically a blue state, that’s mostly true of the Denver, Boulder, Ft. Collins metropolitan areas where most of Colorado’s population lives. Pitkin County, which contains the rich socialist enclave of Aspen, also votes blue, no surprise. El Paso County, which contains Colorado Springs, is reliably red, as are most of the counties east of the mountains. So perhaps they decide to secede to Kansas, Oklahoma, or Texas. Even today, there are some northern Colorado counties petitioning to join Wyoming. Colorado’s western counties could defect to solidly red Utah, which saw Biden win only the Salt Lake City environs.
In New Mexico, the counties surrounding Albuquerque and ever-so-hip Santa Fe went Democrat in the 2020 presidential election. But most of the remainder of New Mexico went Republican. Let’s send the eastern counties to Texas, also.
Arizona is probably not nearly as blue as the 2020 election results would indicate, but is so polluted with California refugees that it’s too hard to call. Arizona was flipped from red to blue in the 2020 election, but the margin was narrow and there’s a good chance it could flip back to red. In that case, western New Mexico can become part of Arizona.
Revisiting California, it’s not hard to envision the eastern part of California, i.e. any counties more than 50 miles from the Pacific Coast, saying buh-bye to the the rest of the state and joining up with the western counties of Arizona.
Nevada gets really interesting. Today, the state is 80-percent controlled by the federal government. In 2020, Nevada went for Biden, but almost solely because of the Reno and Las Vegas metropolitian areas. The rest of the state went for Trump. If the red counties defect to Utah and the eastern California counties, Nevada basically ceases to exist. In fact, since the governor and legislature control only about 20-percent of the state, it barely exists today. And all of that Federal land? Those Nevada counties get all of that land back under their control. In fact, all of the western states have large swathes of land controlled by the Feds that would revert back to local control.
And let’s not overlook West Virginia, who last year invited western Virginia counties to secede and join the state after Gov. Ralph Northam’s assault on gun rights and the Second Amendment. They should take them up on the offer.
At this point, the only thing between the west coast counties of socialist California and the red states of the intermountain and Mid-West states are a few urban socialist counties isolated in the middle of Colorado and in New Mexico and Montana.
Georgia is the only state in the south to swing for Biden, flipping from red to blue. The smart money says that will not last if the surrounding states bolt. Like Arizona, Georgia is not nearly as blue as the left likes to imagine.
So, what’s left of the “old” USA
Which leaves the remainder of the old USA, the socialist workers' paradise in the Northeast, as the heart and soul of the SSA. As some businesses defect to the FSA, with its lower taxes, abundant energy, and more friendly business climate, it’s not hard to imagine the SSA would more and more come to resemble East Germany, bleak and brown, with lousy weather and high taxes, populated by the last of the old hippies and aging liberal intellectuals recreating on rocky beaches fronted by freezing water in July.
The FSA would control the route of the Keystone Pipeline, which could be restarted, along with the rich agricultural breadbasket of the continent and the oil fracking fields of the Great Plains states, not to mention great pheasant hunting. Add the refining capacity of Louisiana’s 17 refineries (3.6 million barrels per day) and the FSA really becomes an energy powerhouse. The fishing industry along the gulf coast would provide additional income and food for consumption in the FSA as well as for export to the starving masses who stayed behind in the SSA. Perhaps the FSA could trade some Gulf shrimp for Maine lobster.
No surprise, then, the FSA would also control most of the food, energy, and fuel supplies that the present USA enjoys. That’s a lot of leverage. Cut off food and fuel to the SSA and things get dire indeed. California enjoys some of the best shipping ports in the world, which would give it a considerable advantage, but when your nation consists of a few former counties in a strip along the coast, you don’t have much of a country. Not to mention importing all of your goods is expensive.
What about the military?
To get a feel for how the military would respond to secesson of this magnitude, one has to look at the basic make-up of military personnel.
According to a 2019 article by Pew Research, there are roughly 1.39 million men and women on active duty as of 2017. No surpise, the average ages of service members is lower than that of the population in general. The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in 2020 blew a hole in the myth that most service members come from poor or disadvantaged demographics, forced into the military in an attempt to escape their underprivileged backgrounds. Most members of the military come from affluent, middle-class families. The outstanding question is whether the current movement toward wokeness in the US military has any staying power or fades under the next administration.
Military recruits, as expected, come from all fifty states and the District of Columbia, but the top five states are California, Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and New York. The New England states, despite their relatively high populations, rank fairly low in numbers of recruits. No surprise there, either.
The CFR also looked at “a share of a jurisdiction’s recruits as a share of residents between the ages of eighteen and twenty four.…” As the CFR points out, the representation looks a bit different from that perspective, with southern and western states overrepresented.
What this means is most recruits come from states with a strong tradition of military service, hunting, fishing, and gun ownership. They are affluent and relatively well-educated. How many of these personnel will want to fight for states which seek to restrict or eliminate all of these activities?
The FSA would also become an instant nuclear power, immediately inheriting a cornucopia of nuclear armed missiles throughout the plains states, as well as Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, which controls and maintains many of the silos. There are many other major military facilities located in these states. I supposed it’s too much to expect every military unit based in the FSA to swear allegiance to the new country, but the left, with their well-known hatred and contempt for all things military, might be in for an unpleasant surprise.
County by county presidential results, 2020
The great sort begins
No one is pretending any of this would be simple, but it’s unlikely the situation would devolve into the bloody conflict the country enjoyed in the 1860s. The FSA has far too many guns for that. The Prius-driving, man-bun wearing, man-purse carrying Gen-Xers that would make up the SSA’s “army” would be wiped out in short order. More likely, the SSA would contract with the FSA for military protection in exchange for, say, port access on the east and west coasts. In other words, sue for peace. Better yet, the FSA can demand hard cash if the SSA’s currency is worth anything at that point.
There’s a lot of hard, anxious work to be done before any of this could actually take place, but movement in that direction has already begun. With the votes by Oregon counties and attempts to hold a vote in northern Colorado counties and northern California and a similar movement shaping up in eastern Washington state, the door has been opened.
Michael Anton, a research fellow at Hillsdale College and senior fellow at the Clairmont Institute, is the author of a book called The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return. Anton’s book covers much of the approach of this article, that allowing counties to realign themselves politically with like-minded states could provide Americans with the breathing room they need to avoid civil war. If the blue states resist and keep treating the red state population as knuckle-dragging rednecks while attempting to keep their bootheels on conservative necks, Anton acknowledges that civil war is a possibility. Anton’s position is summarized nicely in this current article in The American Mind.
The interesting thing is that a subject which could not be spoken of out loud is now being freely discussed. Gee, does that sound like the Wuhan lab leak ‘conspiracy theory?’ The harder the left pushes its fundamental transformation of America into something resembling the old Soviet Union, the more citizens will seek to align themselves with other politically like-minded governments. It can be done peacefully, as the counties in Oregon, Colorado, and Virginia are attempting, or it can be done violently. Allowing people to realign according to their wishes may be the only way to preserve the Union in something resembling its current state. The choice is the Left’s to make.
In 1955, author Leonard Wibberley wrote a satirical story called The Mouse That Roared, which was made into a movie starring Peter Sellers in 1959. In the story, the tiny (three miles by five miles) European Duchy of Grand Fernwick, with its pre-industrial economy, declares war on the United States in hopes the Duchy will be defeated and enjoy the largess the US granted under the Marshall Plan to vanquished countries at the end of World War II.
In Wibberley's delightful novel, the Duchy of Grand Fernwick accidentally defeats its larger foe, in part because the United States doesn't realize it's been at war for two months. I can imagine the SSA seeking a similar outcome. After all, a society built on the dole will be in its element seeking a handout from the Free States of America.
Note: an earlier version of this article was previously published on my old Silence is Surrender website. It has been updated to reflect current events.