David Burge AKA Iowahawk posted a series of Tweets the other day which coincidentally said much the same thing that I did to a friend on Wednesday evening.
America is so deeply divided over how it should be run that people are now talking as though it is in fact two separate nations. Apparently thousands of people upset by Trump’s victory are talking about moving to Canada, seemingly unaware that they have the sort of immigration controls that caused such outrage when Republicans suggested introducing them in the United States.
David’s point, which a lot of people seem to have missed, is that America is, as the name suggests, a federation made up of 50 different states. The sensible solution to people wanting to live differently under the same American flag is to allow people to live differently in different states. Indeed, this was the whole damned point in the first place. As David says:
“The problem isn’t Trump, or Clinton, or Obama. The problem is a Leviathan omnipresent centralised government in DC.
People in SF don’t want to be ruled by stump-toothed hillbillies, and people in Kentucky don’t want to be ruled by bathhouse pervs.
Right now, both of them feel threatened by a sinister distant colonial force they can’t comprehend. The answer to this is not a perpetual conflict on who gets control over the levers of colonial power. The answer, oddly enough, comes from the original intent of the founders – state-level self determination.
If California of Oregon wants to have legalised weed and high-speed rail, then bully for them. It’s none of Alabama’s business. And if Oklahoma wants to have voter ID and cut welfare benefits, bully for them. It’s none of Vermont’s business.
The idea of America is that localities are laboratories, and they should be free to enjoy or suffer the consequences of their decisions. Instead, what we have now is the great God Baal, the Sacred City on the Potomac, who deigns to rule 320 million diverse people. As a consequence, we have an unending cycle of revolutions and revenge porn against whoever was in control of DC last.
Here’s a fucking thought: Let Californians decide what works for California, let Texans decide what works for Texas, and the rest of you STFU. But feel free, when the shit hits the fan, to vote with your feet. As long as you remember why you did.
Instead we have “non profits” from CT filing lawsuits against charter schools in Louisiana. This is fucking insane. We all have the most deeply held convictions that if not for us, we’d see a return of slavey and/or mandatory child molestation.
As I said, this was precisely the point I was making to a friend over dinner on Wednesday evening. As a solution, it is exactly what is required: a return to states having a greater autonomy over their own affairs and only that which must be handled at a Federal level – defense, monetary policy, etc. – passed to Washington D.C.
Ah, but no. Just as Stalin would never let Lithuanians get away with not learning Russian in school as a first language, the American Left would never allow people they’ve never met living thousands of miles away to hold themselves to different standards. Hell, they don’t even want them to have different opinions. For the Left, it has always been about control and compulsion. They have overseen the expansion of Federal involvement and Presidential power precisely because they insisted that their preferences must be applied to everyone, by force if necessary. This is why they have enacted so much of their programme via the Supreme Court rather than the ballot box: it’s a lot easier to get a handful of judges to rule that marriage can apply to more than just a man and woman than to persuade people of the same thing. Only it is this governance-by-legislation which has caused the massive divides we see today.
The irony is that this has now come back and bitten them on the arse. Californians are bleating about how they will allow their way of life to continue regardless of what laws Trump passes or repeals, but these idiots are too dense to realise that this is precisely what the red states were saying when Obama was ramming his “progressive” agenda down everyone’s throats. The Democrats made it quite clear, using the courts if necessary, that there would be no cherry-picking or selective application of what Washington decrees, and everybody had better get on board or else. But now it’s not their guy in charge they want to do just that.
The hypocrisy is obvious, but pointing it out to the Left would do no good: for them, any means is fair if it advances their aims. The danger they now face is that the Right may have come to the same conclusion, and with the gloves off the Left don’t stand a chance. If so, Democrat supporters might one day wish they’d left people alone a bit more.
If California is an indication then states left to their own devices will see large movements between them. California suggest Democrat controlled states will suffer high levels of depopulation.
I have long told anyone who will listen that United States is a confederation of states under one banner. It is not ‘one nation’ as such. That is why one individual state can happily ban drinking standing up and the first bar over the state line can cheerfully allow people to get pissed while not seated. It does increase cross border traffic, but that is each state’s business.
True there are things like, for instance, an agreement that a person who gets married in say, Colorado, is still fully married in Rhode Island. The defence of all the states is a collective responsibility but — and this pisses lefties off no end — each state gives its people the right to bear arms for, I believe, the defence of the state.
I do believe that this loose-association (which curiously would have worked better for us if the damned prats of Brussels hadn’t tried to turn our national identities into mere borderless regions, rather than sensibly acknowledging different nations under one agreed banner of standards — and trust me, I am no EU fan) works well if one leaves it alone. The Feds have to have some responsibility, such as diplomacy, for all but increasingly I can see it all fracturing into separate and much less controlled nations currently ruled by Washington. I heard recently that someone wants California ‘to go it alone’ after Trump, but this person is a bit slow: for some time people have been talking about smaller states within California to get away from, as Burge puts it, the bathhouse pervs.
But we had this last time as well – the “United States of Canada/Jesusland” map after Bush II’s first (or was it second?) coronation, for example. Nothing ever comes of it.
Watcher, the EU is a far looser association than the USA. One that can’t even impose adequate fiscal discipline on the users of its common currency (the way the USA imposes such discipline on users of the dollar).
@ Watcher: No government gives anybody the right to bear arms. It is a preexisting right born of the natural condition and is not in any government’s gift, state or federal.
The 2nd and 14th amendments merely clarify that governments are prohibited from infringing that right.
I write this, not to be pedantic, but because a core element of the statist agenda is to fool the people into believing that even negative rights are the gift of the state. That must be opposed at every turn.
Tim, yes, leaving the states alone would be wondrous. But that’s just the first layer. Most every state has a large population center that votes predominantly liberal. Their votes vanquish the rest of the state who don’t hold their views… or their types of jobs. Do-gooders in Portland pretty much destroyed the logging industry in Oregon in order to “save” the spotted owl. (I live in Oregon). The busybodies in California have nearly destroyed farming in a large chunk of the state due to a small fish.
Take a look at a electoral map and you always see a blue Democrat dot in a sea of Republican red in most states. More people always live in the blue dot, so the Red Sea gets outvoted.. If only the big cities could leave the little cities alone, too.
If California is an indication then states left to their own devices will see large movements between them. California suggest Democrat controlled states will suffer high levels of depopulation.
And that’s half the problem in the US right now: these people fuck up their own states and then decamp to another one, bringing their idiotic politics with them.
Howard Roarke,
Thanks for visiting and commenting!
If only the big cities could leave the little cities alone, too.
Absolutely. Thanks for the examples.
The blue-red map gets even more interesting at the county level. However, things are more complicated in the real world. No matter how much you decentralize, a small village can easily turn into a dictatorship in the way a big city cannot, thanks to the anonymity of city life. Customs and mores can be more cruel and intrusive than governments. Individuals are always at risk of being oppressed either by society or by the state. There’s probably no universal remedy against it, only temporary solutions. A culture of minding one’s own business and treating others as individuals rather than group members is probably the best for personal freedom, but it can also degenerate into atomization and apathy.
“Just as Stalin would never let Lithuanians get away with not learning Russian in school as a first language…”
Actually, he did let them get away with that – and more – and so did his successors. It was under Soviet rule, after 1945, that Lithuania became Lithuanized like never before.
@ Alex,
Actually, he did let them get away with that – and more – and so did his successors. It was under Soviet rule, after 1945, that Lithuania became Lithuanized like never before.
I stand corrected, as usual on such matters! 😀