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Comment by smhenderson | Hacker News Reader

When, during the Wilson-Palmer saturnalia of oppressions [1918-1920], specialists in liberty began protesting that the Declaration plainly gave the people the right to alter the government under which they lived and even to abolish it altogether, they encountered the utmost incredulity.

I find this true today as well. A lot of people just can't seem to accept the idea that the founding fathers of the USA wanted to allow their descendants the same right to start over that they were exercising at the time.

I must admit that even given an appreciation of that I am hard pressed to imagine what a popular uprising and establishment of a new government would look like in today's America.

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There is the possibility of calling a Constitutional Convention. But most people have the heebie-jeebies over that, as everything then comes up for grabs. Women's voting rights, separation of powers, two-term limit for presidents -- having a president at all. You name it.

Or the second amendment, which a growing number of Americans feel no needed for, unfortunately. As of disarming the populace works well long term for citizens.

It's worked pretty well for citizens of other first-world countries who have practically zero chance of dying from gun violence. So, yeah, I'd say it works great long-term.

Article V is the part of the Constitution that governs conventions. It is just for recommending amendments that get approved in the usual way. So there really shouldn't be any more concern about it than normal.

http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/print_friendly.htm...

It's worth pointing out that the Constitutional Convention started out as a convention to amend the Articles of Confederation.

You say that, but look at what happened last time they held a convention.

I don't think that can happen. I don't know, obviously, but despite our support for popular uprisings in other countries, I can't imagine the federal government not engaging in battle with the "traitors" knocking at their gates. I don't know what it looks like for the US military to engage its citizens en masse, but I'm guessing that happens before capitulation.

Other speculations?

Edit: I mean, the FBI, CIA, NSA, Secret Service are all built up around protecting the government from its people, right? The US government had been setting up a firewall between itself and its people for decades. (The NSA ostensibly not, but we know they were spying on Americans since at least 1945 [0]).

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/08/23...

A civil war in the US would be brutal. On the US and on global economy.

The devastation of modern western society would be absolute. I can't even begin to imagine what the outcome would be.

Mind you, the US government has the largest military force in the world by far. Bigger than the next 3 or 4 biggest militaries combined.

Does anyone really want to fight that? The answer is probably No.

Or we can just allow secession without a civil war.

The last Civil War, contrary to popular belief, was fought over this premise, and the outcome effectively gauranteed it will never happen.

But what was the cause of secession? Well, if you believe the various southern legislatures, the cause was the defense of the institution of slavery:

http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/primarysources/dec...

Let's say California wants to secede.

Do you really think the government will part calmly with its largest economy?

Let's say Britain wants to leave the EU.

Do you really think Europe will part calmly with its second-largest economy?

Very different. The EU has a legal method of succession (article 50), the US was brought together under a strict constitution, creating a single federal government. Compared to the original Articles of Confederation:

> In dramatic contrast to Article VII–whose unanimity rule that no state can bind another confirms the sovereignty of each state prior to 1787 –Article V does not permit a single state convention to modify the federal Constitution for itself. Moreover, it makes clear that a state may be bound by a federal constitutional amendment even if that state votes against the amendment in a properly convened state convention. And this rule is flatly inconsistent with the idea that states remain sovereign after joining the Constitution, even if they were sovereign before joining it. Thus, ratification of the Constitution itself marked the moment when previously sovereign states gave up their sovereignty and legal independence

A better comparison would be the formation of Canada, or better yet: the Quebec referendum to separate from Canada (put to a vote of the people, but narrowly lost: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_referendum,_1995)

> Does anyone really want to fight that? The answer is probably No.

You won't be fighting the US military. Many of them will join with you. They are people, not killing machines. They are your neighbors and the sons and daughters of your neighbors. They will not fire on their countrymen because a politician told them to.

The men and women in our military swore to uphold the constitution. They did not swear to be the thugs for a group of elites who got elected only through virtue of millions upon millions of dollars of campaign contributions from organizations that do not have the best interest of this nation as their goal.

Okay, so you're fighting half of the US Military. A civil war in the US isn't going to be against some mustache-twirling cartoon villain that everyone recognizes is the greater evil. It will be a complex conflict where the participants don't even agree on the facts behind things. Add to that the various identity groups who all vary widely in how much they trust the government...

Rather than Tiananmen square, we would get Syria.

Hahahahahahahahaha. Sorry but your naivete is amusing.

Sure, I may have been 5 years old when I went through a [very short] civil war, but I still remember the news. Many soldiers didn't even know why they were being asked to shoot this or that. While in the barracks they were kept under strict radio silence from outside and most had no idea a civil war had started. They were just told to go there and shoot over there. They didn't know if they were shooting at their neighbors from back home, at somebody they hate, or what.[1]

Eventually news spread and the war got very very bloody as people who used to be comrades became personally involved in drinking the kool-aid. Luckily the bloody parts were removed from where I lived, but a lot of my classmates in elementary school were refugees.

Civil war ain't nothing to sneeze at. It is the worst type of war.

[1] There's a video from a private telling all of this to a news crew. Seeing it on TV is one of my earliest memories. It's in serbocroatian and I don't know if there's a version with English subtitles. -> https://www.facebook.com/zetraprojekt/videos/865414093588116...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_Yugoslavia

I think what he's getting at is a valid point. It won't just be rebels against the military. If the rebellion or revolution picks up enough steam, significant elements of the military will likely defect to the other side and in a very real way the war would be the US military vs itself. Ex-US soldiers, officers, generals, with clandestine support from foreign powers like China and Russia, would be taking on the remaining part of the US military.

Or the US splits and the revolution is turned into a North vs South, East vs West, type of civil war.

I agree, eventually the military breaks up and starts fighting itself.

But you're still essentially fighting the US military. The biggest baddest military in the world. Surely the US military agrees that fighting the US military is a Bad Idea (tm).

Point is, civil war is messy. There's no clear right or wrong, good guy or bad guy, it's by definition neighbor killing neighbor, friend against friend, sibling versus sibling. Everyone thinks they are protecting the One True Way Forward to make the country great again.

The US military is a highly sophisticated war machine but ultimately it requires resources to support its operations. No military can ignore the cold hard facts of logistics, something that many armies have done to their own demise. If there is no continental US to provide the food, materiel or the money to pay for it, I doubt the machine could last very long.

If the entire continental US rebels, who exactly are they fighting against?

If there is a civil war, you kind of have to assume that each side is going to have access to some of the US's resources.

Can you find any cause of action against the government that you feel is worth dying for, which is not actually a complaint about a majority-ish segment of the population?

I don't believe you'll find any rallying cry for "the citizens" vs "the government," just opposition among citizens that gets expressed in government.

In the last one, with about 1/10 our present population, about 3/4 million people died. The military split between sides, which, were it to happen now, would be the end of the country.

Well...in history nobody has ever needed a document to start an uprising. And we aren't going to see one (atleast in the US) today cause most people have better things to do with their lives.

We may well be heading towards a future where some large fraction of the populace doesn't have anything better to do with their lives.

Martin Luther disagrees.

For a minute I assumed you were referring to King, Jr. He used some writing, but relied much more on oration and protests.

But yes, the Protestant theologian is a great example. The short time delay from the printing press to the Reformation, I think, highlights the immense power of the written word.

In modern America, I suspect the medium is more likely to be television than text.

> I find this true today as well.

It has literally always been true, since the very beginning of the country.

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