This Country Needs to Split

Because you're supposed to win by the electoral college?

 

Get the congressmen of your state to put the motion forward and see how well it is received.

 

Probably should tell Trump. He thought it is a joke and it sucks.

 

Well, I suppose an objective observer would note that that time the leavers wanted to have large numbers of Black people living side by side with them.

This time, it will be the opposite.

The Civil War was an enormous tragedy -- more Americans killed in that war than in all of our other wars, before and after, added together, atlhough our recent overseas adventures may have brought it up to evens..

It could not have been avoided. Every other civilized country gave up slavery peacefully, usually by buying out the slaveowners. But in those countries, the slave owners were a small minority. In the US, they had enormous power in the Congress. But they could see the writing on the wall, as America expanded into the lands it had stolen from the Indians and the Mexicans, which would probaby be Free States. Eventually they would be outnumbered in Congress, and the terms of giving up slavery might not be so generous as those that could be negotiated now.

So instead of going for the sensible, peaceful solution ... buying out, gradual emancipation, compensated transfer of land to the Freedman so that each family got '40 acres and a mule' ... they resisted the peaceful solution, and forced the North to fight a bloody war. The South was sure it could win. Better to wage war, than to accept a sensible peaceful solution. One side would wage war, to tear the nation apart, the other would accept war, to keep it together.

Although formally it seems the case is similar, it is exactly the opposite. The hard Left, and the gullible liberals who are being led by the nose by the Hard Left, will accept war, to tear the nation apart. Burn those flags, paint over those pictures, tear down those statues! The right -- peaceful at the moment and unaware of, or unwilling to see, that their nation is going to be destroyed, unless they act to preserve what is left of it by separation -- will hopefully not allow the nation -- which is not a piece of geography, but a set of institutions and values -- to be destroyed by by the Left.

A peaceful, sensible solution, vs forcing a bloody war. Who is really the modern counterpart of the Slavocracy?

 

Oh, come on! Good God, man! Of course,the Left will eventually go after Lincoln, driving their bleating liberal flock ahead of them, because Lincoln was a racist and wanted to send the freed slaves abroad. But not yet. One step at a time.

 

No, no. The ground must be prepared.

And you can help. You're well armed and trained. Encourage your Leftist friends to follow your example. Publicize it wherever you can. Broadcast your deep hatred for us, your social inferiors, the white mobs who wil seek any excuse to loot and burn.

Please.

 

Accept today Booth would be a Republican. The dems were the far right, conservative party at that time. They didn't become the liberal, progressive party until the 60's, when the left-wing, branch of the party took over under JFK, and bushed for civil rights.

 

Well, it would help if you guys actually practiced what you preached. You talk **** bout peope living off the government, but almost every single red state pays far less in federal taxes, than they use in federal aid. They live off of the taxpayers from other states.

Maybe you shouldn't "threaten" us with secession, when you can't even afford to run your own ****ing economies. Believe me, no one in the north gives a flying **** if you guys leave. That just means we don't have to pay our hard earned money to hold you up anymore.

 

It isn’t going to happen.

Even if it did, it wouldn’t last long.

Why right wingers are always entertaining this dystopian fantasy eludes me. But it is coming up more and more often as 2020 approaches.

Of course, irresponsible reactionaries warned of “civil unrest” every time the black man was a Presidential candidate.

 

Trump had an opportunity to be a Great President.

He choose to be a reality TV performer and divide our country and disparage our citizens and allies thereby weakening America.

The citizens who have become non Trumpers just Love America more than his base

 

No, I fear not.

Hillary lost through an accident of the Constitution, drawn up to curb and temper popular democracy, in a period in which fear of 'the mob' was strong. The Founders did not want to get too far from the successful British model, with an unelected House of Lords and a monarch. They gave us the closest thing they could get to that -- the British model, not the French.

She beat Trump by two million votes in the popular election. If the case had been reversed -- if she had lost the popular vote, but had won through the electoral college votes of California, New York, etc. .... can you imagine how conservatives would be screaming???

We must look to the future. Demography is on the Democrats' side. Were this the old Democratic Party, which used to swap places with the Republicans every few years, that would be no problem. We would have a bit more socialism, possibly even a more sensible foreign policy, a bit of race pandering, but it would not be fatal.

But things have changed. You have to pick up on the little signs -- the stillness in the air, the flutter of the birds, that they say occurs before an earthquake.

About thirty-five years ago, I lived for a few months in the Soviet Union. (My then-wife, a Russian-speaker, was a Fulbright Exchange scholar, lecturing in economics at one of their universities there.) I had broughth along a little microcomputer and a monitor, and because of this, I got to go on a small lecture tour of the USSR to talk about 'Microcomputers and Education' -- out to Siberia, back to Estonia. I got to talk to a small sample -- a few dozen -- of the Russian intelligentsia ... mainly university lecturers ('professors' in America but in Europe 'professor' is a very exalted post.) When we got back home, I told my wife -- she reminded me of it for years afterwords -- that I thought we would see the end of the Soviet Union within our lifetimes. I was way too pessimistic -- it came just five years later -- but at that time, no one, no one, thought it would happen. I can give you a list of quotes from eminent sensible people -- John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul Samuelson, and many more -- who affirmed that, for good or bad, the Soviet Union was going to be with us for a long time.

And they had so much on their side to bolster their view! There was no starvation, life was easy, the Party's grip was tight but not painful. (If you were a dissident, you just couldn't get a good job. But you could get a job (in fact, it was compulsory), cleaning toilets, and otherwise you had the same advantages economically as everyone else -- subsidized food and housing, etc.

There was no mass, angry discontent. But I sensed that the intelligentsia were deeply discontent, from the people I talked to. They wanted to become a 'normal country', to be able to travel abroad, to get the dead hand of the Moscow bureaucracy from around their throats. It just seemed to me that the deadening institutionalized bureacracy of the USSR could not go on forever, when its failures were so painfully obvious: they could put a man in space but could not produce a pair of bluejeans. Their computers were copies of the IBM 360 and DEC PDP 10 and they could not produce their own microcomputer at all.

So I predicted that this could not last. I didn't realize it would be gone in six years.

I feel the same way about the US now. I see the direction of motion of the Democrats, taking them as the representative of the whole of the American left, moderate liberals, 'progressives', hard Left alike. There are hundreds of signs of what's happening -- I won't go into them here.

I know a bit about modern history -- how the Weimer Republic collapsed, how the Spanish Republic did likewise, how Kerensky's liberal Provisional Government was overthrown, how the French Second Republic was subverted. No historical situation is exactly like another, but people are people, and you can learn from episodes like this. There are signs to be read. No one can predict the future -- too many unknowns and unknown unknowns, but we can try to make educated guesses, and plot both favorable and unfavorable variants.

The embrace of the thug Michael Brown, and the condemnation of the policeman who shot him in self defense, cleared by Obama's Justice Department, is my 'firebell in the night'.

The sensible liberals are being pulled inexorably to the Left, and nowadays, that doesn't mean extension of Medicare to all and more bargaining rights for unions, something a lot of conservatives of my persuasion wouldn't really worry too much about. But when Elizabeth Warren chose to embrace the Michael Brown lie -- she's an intelligent woman, this was not an ancient or obscure case -- then she knew what she was doing.

Demography is on their side. Trump may win in 2020, but he will be the last Republican President. I can envisage some preferable options to separation -- a new political party built out of large fragments of the old ones, as sensible liberals recoil from the Leftward descent of their party and Republicans who do not worship the unfettered free market break loose from the hold of the donor class of their party, a JFK/Eisenhower party ... but I don't think it's likely. (Hey, I'm a conservative, I'm a natural pessimist!)

I think separation is our only hope for retaining the genuine America. However, I know that most people recoil from the idea, especially conservatives who are genuine patriots. But I think it's our only hope.

So I want to start talking about it now, so that it becomes a 'normal' possibility in people's thinking -- not one they will initially agree with, but a realistic possibility. Then we can count on the liberals led by the Left to make it a more and desirable possibility.

We've got to leave. The next driver of the bus will head for the cliff, and we've got to get off before he goes over.

 

Easiest way to do it. Cut the power off to any major city and it will collapse on itself in days.

Imagine if you blew up major highways and food couldnt get in. Imagine the EBT mob if they couldnt get their free ****.

We all saw what happened at the Walmart in Louisiana when the EBT machines malfunctioned. There was a riot, theft, assault, absolute chaos.

City folk arent capable of surviving without electricity.

 

Well, as Bobby Joe posted, most people either don't know or don't care about any of this. Us idiots that post on a message board, or even follow politics a little aren't the majority of US citizens (for better or worse). My wife's somewhat of a liberal, but she hasn't much of a clue what goes on politically day to day.

The nutjobs on both sides are the ones being shown and promoted by the media, politicians, etc. There have always been fringe maniacs. The problem now is, those maniacs are high ranking politicians. When every democrat presidential candidate raised their hands in support of free health care to illegal immigrants, the writing was on the wall that this nation may be lost. Think about that divide. You have a president that wants to build a wall to keep illegal immigrants out of the country, and the other party is enticing them to come in with free health care.

 

You are absolutely right. Except that we're not "threatening" you with "secession", we're rewarding you with separation. And although I don't think you're right about no one in the North caring -- how I wish that were true, but it's not now a reality, just our aspiration -- I think it can be made true.

We're not threatening you with anything! We're offering you a wonderful future. You can carry out all of your lovely progressive ideas without our encumbrance -- no fillibusters in the Senate, no nasty border patrol agents, no Fox News exposing things night after night. Your kids at college won't have to have safe spaces with cuddly toys, anymore. No necessity to go to conservative meetings and howl down the speaker. You can get rid of any conservatives in the employ of the state or of state supported institutions, and make life hell for the religious people, reshape your military to be transgender-friendly ... anything you like.

Best of all, you can watch our Red State Republic as it struggles to live without Federal Aid, obviously a total impossibility. Imagine how much fun it will be to watch on your TV as a country with lots of farmers and ranchers and truck drivers and auto mechanics and carpenters and miners, but no website designers or rap 'musicians' or performance artists or film directors, struggles to survive! Great fun! Under that nice caring liberal surface, as in all of us, lives a sadist, and how much pleasure we will give him!

So, curb your anger, and get to work. Convince your friends that it would be a good idea to kick out the trash. Tell them how all the money we now drain from you, can be spent on providing more welfare and free healthcare for all the new citizens you will soon have.

Come on, what's not to like? Get on board, man. TRUMP TRASH OUT! TRUMP TRASH OUT! Make it the new chant at your rallies, either before or after, or during, flag-burning!

 

Yes, yes and yes.

Now draw the logical conclusion. By "this nation" you don't mean a piece of geography. You mean a certain idea of how a free people should behave and govern themselves. This idea was once embodied in 13 states. For a while it lived in 50. It's now dying there. We can't just sit back and watch and shake our heads and hope for a miracle. We've got to do what the original founders did, and think the unthinkable.

 

Shhhhhhh!!!!!
Liberals: don't listen to this man. You'll just put up your solar power panels. And with us horrible racists gone, there will be no racial tensions!!

You'll be able to build a socialist paradise. You can warm yourselves from burning American flags, feed yourselves from ecological rooftop gardens, ride bicycles instead of destroying the earth by burning fossil fuel.

All the money you will save from no more Federal subsidies to Red States can go on increased welfare spending! No more death camps for children at the border!

You should be yearning for our departure!

Don't listen to this man!!!

 

But here's why it won't happen. Like the saying, if a conservative doesn't like a TV show, they change the channel. if a liberal doesn't like a TV show, they write letters, protest the station, threaten the actors, etc until the show is cancelled. I really don't think even the far left moonbats want a separation, because then their 'mission' in life is over. Nobody left to change or destroy.

Remember, liberals are always one revolution away from happiness.

 

Speaking as a non-Trumper, I have to say that sometimes you get lucky in history, and sometimes not. "Cometh the hour, cometh the man," is true, but not always. We had Lincoln, we had Churchill, we had FDR.

But we also had the Kaiser, the Czar, Kerensky, Chamberlain. Had JFK lived we might not have gotten mired in Vietnam. We might have made the moon mission a joint project with the USSR. A smarter President than Eisenhower might have supported Mossadegh instead of overthrowing him and thereby earning the burning hatred of every Iranian patriot.

Trump is the hand we were dealt and for the moment we must play it. But we must look to the future and not be afraid to think the unthinkable.

 

You've hit the nail on the head. I'm going to steal that TV show example and use it without attribution, sorry.

But now let's expand it a bit. The show they are cancelling -- not just want to cancel -- is traditional America.

Conservatives might like to change the channel -- it's what we did for the last hundred years, wait until the next election -- but we can't. We waited for future elections and while waiting we just watched the liberal channel, or went out for a beer -- hey, let's admit it, in the past the channel we were forced to watch wasn't really all that terrible. Seriously, would you have really minded living under JFK and LBJ?

As for the moonbats -- when we're gone, they will turn on the less moonbatty. Even now, the radicals attack the remaining liberals. Note that poor liberal professor at Evergreen College in Washington ... attacked for opposing racial segregation on No Whites Allowed Day. (We must be open to refugees in Red State America!)

But very soon, historically speaking, there aren't going to be any more alternative channels. We're going to have to build our own TV station.

 

Yeah, as the republican party of today in any way shape or form resembles the republican party of Rockefeller, NIxon, Richardson, Brooke, Dirksen etc, As socially liberal, financially conservative party.

The dems veer to the left is just the party going back to thier 30s thru 70s agenda.

 

I don't recall any warnings of "civil unrest" when Obama ran (assuming you're referring to him and not Eldridge Cleaver.) Perhaps there
were, but I don't recall them. I will grant that most conservatives have a greatly-exaggerated view of Obama's faults and actions re. race -- while
some of them I depore, most of the time I thought he was pretty reasonable. He understands the deep inner problems of the Black community, for
instance. My real disappointment in him was in foreign policy -- I think he privately believes the US should 'come home', but was afraid of being
seen as unpatriotic ... plus there is the 'sunk costs' fallacy.

I do recall, in 2008, a discussion/argument I had with another conservative on another forum, after Obama won. Although we were conservatives, we were proud of the US electing a Black president -- one in the eye for the America-haters who believed the US was an incorrigibly racist country. He believed that now the racial demagoguery would die down, because, see ... Blacks can even become President, elected by millions of white voters. I told him he was naive -- that the race card was far too valuable for the Left to give up, and would continue to be played forever. Don't know what he thinks now, but I was proved right.

I do hope the "dystopian fantasy" comes true, but it won't receive much serious attention on the Right until after a Democratic Presidential victory, and a few years of rule thereunder. Then we will be able to talk about escaping from Dystopia, which will look something like a street in San Francisco.

But it's necessary to start recruiting a small band of publicists now, so the meme gets started, which is why I go on about it here. Liberal reactions are interesting -- so many of you say you would love to see us go, so you could watch us starve to death!!! Ha ha!!

I've been expecting angry reactions from conservative super-patriots, but I haven't had any yet. Some conservatives rejecting the idea, but no shouts of 'Traitor"! Super patriots may not post too much on a forum like this, or they may not exist now in the number I thought they did, or used to -- or they may be soberly assessing their future, not ready to make a radical leap --they are conservatives after all and don't like radical change. But the logic, I think, is irrefutable, short of a miracle.

We shall see.

 

Have fun.

A "Conservative Utopia" would have to give up all the tech giants, the shipping ports along the west coast and the financial center of the world, NYC. These financial centers support the life-style of most of the Southern states. Almost all the goods we import from China and India come through the West coast ports, so there will be an extra layer of import tax as goods travel into the New Conservative Republic. Most of the good coming and going to Europe arrive/depart through the New Jersey and
New York area sea ports.

Most of the US oil is in parts of the Mid-West, but the West coast would now be free to move more toward non-fossil fuel energy sources. The New Conservative Republic would have to give up almost all the Naval Bases.

Who gets Florida? South Florida is mostly liberal - the less financially solvent North Florida is conservative.

Every dime the conservatives think they will be saving will have to be spent on creating a new Federal Government. And many of the country's most destitute cities would still be in the New Conservative Republic.

Yup - some conservatives may think they want this "utopia" but my guess is they haven't thought about the actual consequences.

 

Would that were true! Elizabeth Warren champions Michael Brown -- Bill Clinton did not champion Sistah Soulja. The San Francisco School Board paints over a mural -- painted by a communist in the 1930s!! -- depicting George Washington -- actually a subtle critique of America's westward expansion. No, this is not the old Democratic Party my whole family in Texas once supported.

Actually, 'Left' is not really the right word any more for what has happened to the non-conservative side. To me -- who grew up in a home where Eleanor Roosevelt took the place of the Virgin Mary -- the Left is about free speech and civil liberties and Black rights, organizing labor unions, fighting for social security, opposing unnecessary wars. I remember reading Ray Ginger's The Bending Cross -- a biography of Eugene Victor Debs -- and about the Scopes Monkey Trial and the great lawyer Clarence Darrow vs William Jennings Bryan ... both of them 'on the Left' in terms of being for the little guy, and both of them, and Scopes, genuine Americans. So far from today's academic Left and the human products they have trained. Even the American Communists, in their own way, loved America. So different from AntiFa, the screaming student mobs shutting down conservative meetins, the flag burners, the statue smashers, the pronoun policemen. It's like living on a different planet.

The social conservatism of the Republican base is a kind of reaction, in some ways, to modernity, I don't deny it. But most of them have accepted Black equality, women's rights -- except for abortion -- even free speech. (That was definitely not always the case, certainly not in the 50s.) Most of them accept, even are happy to have, gay people who are on their side: witness their championing of Andy Ngo. They would have been happy with a President Palin (gulp), and positive yearn for a qualified Black to stand as President. Iraq and Afghanistan have forced a re-think about the uses and limits of American power. They could have lived with a pre-Roe situation regarding abortion -- legal in Calfornia and New York, not in Mississippi.

I suspect they would gradually have come round, but maybe not -- it's a highly emotional issue, and the logic is inescapable once you decide to define a fertilized egg as equal to a full human being. They've accepted so much, including the most blatant in-your-face pornography -- admittedly in the past there was a lot of hypocrisy about it among the men, but .. a certain amount of tribute from vice to virtue is necessary in a complex society. Keeping it under the counter in certain bookshops in the seedy part of town would have been okay. But they have learned to live with their nine-year-old children seeing it on their computers now. They've accepted the loss of school prayer, but probably never realized the prayer before a city council meeting, the memorial cross to fallen American soldiers, the Ten Commandments engraved on the courthouse wall, would be going as well. Have a little sympathy for them.

 

Bill Clinton would have been a republican in the 60s. A law and order, lock the blacks up, scale back social safety net beyond what even was allowed under Reagan! Just because he wanted national health insurance, as did Nixon/Rockefeller/Brooke does not make him a progressive.

 

You have inadvertently exemplified the split you seem to fear. This fear you project is likely to cause Self Destruction and in many ways already is, while you and your party play this game they just focus on their agenda and eliminating your hero.