While reading this I was thinking about the WWI videos that Tom posted below, which (like last weekend's WR Mead article) reminds that in Eastern Europe the breakup of the old empires into nation states was a liberation. Just as Huns or Poles might have viewed the end of the old empire as a kind of liberty, so too might Californians appreciate being freed from the tyrannies of a disproportionately-rural US Senate. So too might Alabama's residents enjoy being cut loose from the kind of liberal courts that impose such strange rules upon it all the time.
There are definitely things I would miss, especially the ease of travel and the freedom to move anywhere in what is now America. But it might be that at least some of those things could be retained in a new arrangement.
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Edward Porter Alexander, who was Lee's artillery commander at Gettsysburg, and became a railroad president after the war, had some thoughts that bear on this:
"Well that (state’s rights) was the issue of the war; & as we were defeated that right was surrendered & a limit put on state sovereignty. And the South is now entirely satisfied with that result. And the reason of it is very simple. State sovereignty was doubtless a wise political instution for the condition of this vast country in the last century. But the railroad, and the steamboat & the telegraph began to transform things early in this century & have gradually made what may almost be called a new planet of it… Our political institutions have had to change… Briefly we had the right to fight, but our fight was against what might be called a Darwinian development – or an adaptation to changed & changing conditions – so we need not greatly regret defeat."
See my post What Are the Limits of the Alexander Analysis?
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/54565.html
Interesting discussion in the comments.
My first question is how we would maintain the nuclear deterrent under those circumstances, and what the consequences (direct for the presumed former US, and global for our current allies) if we can't? I can easily see, for example, China deciding to remove its ideological competitor from the game for good if they could do so without direct consequences, economic consequences be damned.
We could probably manage that with a controlled and negotiated breakup into three or more nations with defense and trade treaties like the original EU/NATO arrangements. China is probably hoping for Civil War 2.0.
A soft landing might be possible, but it would be hard to make it work with a simple breakup. The problem is that there aren't conservative states and liberal ones; there are liberal cities embedded in a conservative country. Even Georgia is now purple because of Atlanta, which has half the population and half the economic activity of the whole state (but a tiny part of the land area).
I think what would work best is a new constitutional structure, still Federalist but substituting city-states and wide country-side states for the state structures we have now. Very limited Federal powers, including defense, but avoiding the danger of using the Federal government to let the City States impose their way of life on the Mountain Tribe, or vice-versa. Let people do what they want to do, and preserve freedom of movement so that you can always leave if you don't like the way it's being done where you happen to be.
Also related: my new post on Coupling
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/58361.html
@Matt: I see maintaining the nuclear deterrent as only half of the nuclear-related problem with a national divorce. I don't see a plausible scenario in which both daughter-countries do not each demand their own strategic arsenal; otherwise, the nuclear have-not would not be truly independent but would be at the foreign-policy mercy of the nuclear power (for example, Blue America applying muscle to force Red America what it deems to be sufficient LGBT or abortion rights). Yet it would also be perilous for both successor states to possess nuclear arms: flight times would be so short (particularly for coastal enclaves) that one side might be tempted to adopt a launch-on-warning stance, with all of the dangers that attend that.
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