It looks like a national divorce will be very difficult to avoid. On one side is the political establishment who look like they stole an election and who seem determined to dominate and impoverish the working class. This attempt to dominate has been going on for decades, as American manufacturing has been off-shored and millions of illegal workers have flooded the labor market. This combination of cheaper foreign and domestic labor has fattened corporate bottom lines but it has hollowed out entire regions (c.f. the "Rust Belt").
The Biden Administration looks to be dialing this up to 11, perhaps because they fear the 2022 elections when redistricting will eliminate a bunch of Democratic House seats. Or maybe they think that after stealing an election they don't have to respect the traditions of unity and governing in the interests of all citizens. But the agenda is radical indeed, not just banning oil drilling on federal lands but preventing oil drilling at all in the country.
Doubling the price of gasoline is a massively regressive tax. Combined with the loss of millions of jobs, it's hard to see how those on the losing end would want to stay in a union with a party who they suspect did not legitimately win the election, and who they seeing as governing illegitimately. And so to the "What comes next" part of the question. What will come next will be very, very messy. You see, we're not divided along "Red State/Blue State" lines, we're really all mixed together.
This is a map of the 2020 election returns by county. The size of the circles represents the number of votes for Joe Biden (blue) or Donald Trump (red). What you see are very few states that are almost all one color or another. A few, yes, but not many. And so to the breakup scenarios.
The Slovenian Option
On June 25, 1991 the province of Slovenia seceded from Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) invaded the province but were defeated in a shockingly short 10 day conflict. Slovenian police blocked key road junctions and blockaded JNA barracks. The JNA forces never were able to establish unit or territorial cohesion. You could see something similar playing out in, say, West Virginia. Even though it is only an hour or so from Washington D.C. most of the state is very rough terrain. Local sheriffs would likely be able to block passage to unfriendly forces. The Slovenian option is the cleanest option, but is also the most limited - a fairly cohesive population (almost all red, almost no blue) combined with difficult terrain make this unlikely for most of the country.
The Croatian Option
Fighting in Croatia actually started before fighting broke out in Slovenia, when Serbs opposed to Croatian independence pre-emptively seceded from the province of Croatia. Things escalated and by the summer of 1991 it was a full scale shooting war between the JNA and the Croatian forces. This was no 10 day war; fighting continued into 1995 and much (perhaps most) of the ethnic Serb population became refugees. We might be able to term this the "Texan Option", where multiple enclaves of Blue voters exist in a sea of Red voting neighbors.
The Sarajevo Option
The siege of Sarajevo lasted four years and destroyed much of that city. It was famous for attacks on the civilian population, and indeed thousands of civilians were killed in the conflict by artillery and snipers, among other horsemen of the Apocalypse. This is what Civil War would look like in Atlanta, Detroit, Pittsburg, and Denver. The ugliness here will be proportional to just how hard the Democrats push the working class red state populations - and right now it looks like they want to push pretty hard.
The Mixed Option
Nothing says that these options are mutually exclusive. Indeed, they would probably all be seen although in different locales. But looking at the map it's hard to see a stable Blue government outside of New England/Mid-Atlantic and Pacific Coast.
In Yugoslavia something like 150,000 dead and 4M refugees were the result, from a starting Yugoslav population of 24M. It's hard to extrapolate those losses into what we would see but it's hard to imagine that there would not be many millions - maybe tens of millions - of refugees and hundreds of thousands dead. That's quite a butcher's bill for today's Progressive Left who seemingly will not just leave half the country alone.
18 comments:
Point of order:
the map does not represent the number of Biden votes versus the number of Trump votes.
The circles represent the number of votes of which of the two won each respective county. What it doesn't show is that in nearly every case, there is a circle almost equal in size but slightly smaller for the opposing candidate, particularly in the bigger-circle counties.
It thus under-estimates the degree of friction by orders of magnitude, as in most place the race was 60/40, 55/45, or even 51/49. The map makes it appear 100:0, one way or the other.
That's a recipe in most high-pop areas for Sarajevo, on steroids, crack, and meth, simultaneously.
And that's before we even mention the number of imaginary voters some of those Biden county circles are filled with, which is the point of the underlying problem.
The map is, in short, the ultimate Straw Man Fallacy, for illustration purposes.
Far more useful would be shades of red, blue, or purple, but I get that you're working with what you've got.
I agree with Aesop. The data is misleading for all the reasons he stated.
In addition to what he said, I have been wondering why all of the mapped election data we have been seeing is *county* based. Counties are a creation of the individual states and therefore have no standing in federal elections. However, congressional districts and their precinct subdivisions, do.
How hard would it be to get this same data based on congressional districts rather than counties? I don't know, but it seems to me that someone had to translate the election returns from precinct to county somewhere just to get a map like this one.
Well, nobody is more skeptical about data quality than I am - see basically everything I've ever posted about Global Warming.
But while the details remain dodgy (for the reasons you point out), the big picture remains the same: West Virginia is basically 100% red. NYFC is massively blue. Georgia is red, Atlanta is blue.
And so I think that the analysis still holds up. There are a few places that you could essentially have a clean separation, a bunch more that will go either red or blue, and a whole bunch of potential Sarajevos distributed across this fair land.
And when (if?) the divorce comes, you'll see each of those three, all at once. It will be ugly. And all I see is the new administration running around sloshing gasoline all over everything and drunkenly slurring "Hey buddy, got a match? Oh nevermind - here's my lighter ..."
Unfortunately, the Eastern Panhandle of WV is heavily dependent on D.C. jobs and is now just a bedroom community full of people who came here for lower costs but brought their voting patterns with them.
The point is, it's spring-loaded to Sarajevo in the big cities.
E.g. L.A. County:
Biden 3M
Trump 1.1M
70/30? Sure.
But more Trump voters in that one county than in all of WV and Nebraska combined. There are more Trump voters in CA than there are in all of Texas, BTW.
Neither of which facts the map conveys.
That does not bode well for a happy time for the charade, in the long run.
But it predicts one helluva lot of likely insurgents, even if that's only 1-2% of the total.
Aesop, that's a particularly good point. Glad I don't live in LA County.
In support of Aesop's arguments (and Borepatch's), I used to live in LA County for a decade or so, following having grown up in E. Kern Co. (China Lake NWC or whatever they're calling it nowadays). I have 3+ decades of direct experience of living there, and two things strike me about the discussion ongoing here:
1: The distribution of voters within the state of CA (and to a lessor degree here in Texas today) is a plausible but somewhat misleading example of how citizen sentiment breaks down. Adding to that confusion is the level of dissembling people have always practiced in public, and arguably more so now. The point being that you can't really tell what people will do from their public actions/statements.
2: I remember stories of the LA Aqueduct construction - actually, more so the resistance to its construction and operation (those were much spicier stories to teenage me). As well, it was not a secret that the USG had developed plans to destroy transportation routes and infrastructure throughout SoCal and the Bay Area during WW II (and maintained the plans afterward - there is at least one whole side of the Pentagon given over to doing just that), and that those documents were available from the USG Printing Office. I've seen examples; it is surprisingly easy to make interstate overpasses and such impassable to regular (which is to say non-engineering equipment) traffic. No explosives required.
The number of people who possess the knowledge and the willingness to exert themselves (at no little personal risk) to go do anything like this is vanishingly small as a total number, but only a few of them need to succeed at any given time to create an effective disruption of regional and even national transportation infrastructure. We all know (or interweb's "know") someone who is that capable and willing, too. The question we might want to ponder is where does that particular bit of knowledge fall on our personal version of the Rumsfeld Scale? Also, that's the sort of conversation you never want to have where you can be overheard, which brings this comment to a close.
Aesop points out that there's a lot of Trump voters in Kali. I think Ben Shapero made the point that everyone that's a Republican in Kalifornia should all leave. Go to battle ground states or future battle ground states and you will not have a Democrat president for generations. But more to the point here how many Liberals have others as friends. I'm betting the amount of friends they have that are not of Liberal mindset are few and far between. I see it daily with my own of that nature. (Though the most radical of them gladly advocate for genocide of the Republicans and that's okay by Twatter and Fatbook...) The issue is going to be decided with who is willing to shoot former friends or buddies. Guess who strikes first and would really cook this off. Aesop is right this will not be city vs county so much as its going to be ideologies in each city, state and county.
Been advocating for a peaceful secession for 10+ years, and as discussed above, I agree, hopes for that appear unlikely.
My concern now however is how many folks in the "red?" column will actually fight for their freedom against the "blue" progressive enslaver's?
My belief at this point is sadly very few! Why do I think this? Well certainly normalcy bias is a big part of it, and as long as the fabian progs keep the power on and the food supplies running, well look at how everyone rolled over during this chinky-pox exercise? All you serfs lock yourselves in your house and stay there till we allow you out, and then wear your face diaper, etc. There are clearly proper methods of dealing with a viral pandemic, but how the chinky-pox was handled was not it, it was a prog exercise in serf control and small biz economic destruction, cloaked in a gubmint we will keep you safe cloth.
I will give you another reason, everyone has seen how the fed, state and local gubmints have easily embraced tyrannical repression of their serf populations. We also have painful evidence of how corrupt and incompetent all 3 levels of gubmint are. But what do we serfs do in almost every single and multi-family development built in the last 30 years? We allow the creation of a 4th even smaller more oppressive level of government - the HOA! The new farm team level gubmint for the breeding and training of corrupt power mad officials - hoorah!
So I am not optimistic of what the future brings other than more tyranny and control. Now again, should the power fail and/or food supplies fail, well then it's game on. At that point however it will not be a fight for freedom and liberty, but for simple survival. The level of violence and death will be epic.
Ben Shapiro is an idiot (and I mean that clinically, in the classical sense, as in "an IQ less than 25"), in that he hasn't yet grasped the obvious: there is no more "voting".
The algorithms will steal enough votes, every damned time, so that you never win, anywhere. that was the whole point of the 2020 election. They didn't even bother to hide our new banana republican status.
There's nowhere to run, and no other way to fix this, except kinetically. What must be, will be.
(And nota bene, it will not be "city, county, state", it will be house by house, and block by block. In some families, room to room. Le sigh.)
Anyone who didn't get and read that memo NLT Nov 4th of last year (to include, obviously, Mssr. Shapiro) has their head clenched somewhere up north of their buttocks, probably in up to at least their shoulders. I suggest he try a crowbar, petroleum jelly, and some hollow wedges to break suction.
Diamonds aren't the hardest substance in the world.
Those we can cut, and they polish up nicely.
Delusions are.
Because of the rampant fraud in the 2020 election and for better accuracy,the 2016 election map should be used in determining friend/foe control
Secession will happen but it will be organically not a 'grand plan' and it'll be along county lines not state boundaries. Plan for this.
The fact is nobody knows if it will happen or not at this point. You're all speculating.
A couple of things...
The map only looks at the 2020 election, and thus ignores historical data. Since my family is from WV and I still visit, I can tell you that WV is hardly red. I will also say that their sentiments tend to be, but they have a long and continuing tradition of voting blue, because Blue brings home the pork.
I think the solution is partition, a la India/Pakistan. Not pretty, probably, but it if most of the red folks move to red areas and vice-versa, it eliminates many of the opportunities for conflict, at least of the Yugoslavian/Lebanese sort. I think that would be a Good Thing and would minimize the death toll. Because there will be one, no matter what.
@the freeholder I don't think India/Pakistan is something I want to emulate. Rivers of blood there. Czechoslovakia is the optimal case. Even the Soviet Union wasn't too bad. Lots of violence in the Caucasus but that is business as usual there. Not so bad in the rest. Bit in the Baltics.
Richard, I agree that a less bloody partition would be good. I just don't see it. The Left has dialed their rhetoric up to 12. they will inevitably inflame the hotheads on both sides. One little spark will happen and "this thing will get out of control".
That's because they think they can win.
There's always one mouse who thinks the cheese is worth the trap. It's a Darwinian flaw, but the only way to make the point is to crush their little heads.
I'm okay with that.
I am more optimistic about a combined county-state separation:
https://surakblog.wordpress.com/tag/secession/
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