Comment by CuriouslyC | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CuriouslyC | Hacker News Reader

California is almost certainly going to break off from the larger United States in our lifetime. The interests of the United States are already too heterogeneous to be effectively served by a single government, and the problem is only going to get worse.

I don't believe California will be successful if it attempts to secede solo though. I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that if it is going to work, it will need to secede as part of a coordinated action with Washington and Oregon. The end result will probably be a commonwealth of nations relationship similar to the one shared by Canada and Great Britain. I've even got a catchy name for this new nation: the pacific coalition of states, or Pac Coast for short.

I'm also going to go out on a limb and predict that a combination of pushback on federal enforcement of marijuana laws and immigration policy is going to be the match that starts the fire burning. I believe popular pressure on both of these issues is going to force the coastal states to take a stand rather than roll over, and things are going to escalate from there.

On what planet do you expect that the US at large is going to accept 1/7th of their economy seceding without a fight?

I saw it here in NYC after the election - "We'll secede, and we'll fight the other states if it comes to it." OK, good luck winning when no one owns guns, trucks, generators etc.

It's a pipe dream. You can't win a war with a bicycle and a baseball bat. Montana could probably win a war of secession, but this ain't Montana.

"You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it… Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth — right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail. " (Gen. Sherman)

Ironic reversal, but you're 100% correct.

In this hyper-connected social media age, the horror of a war waged on people that you closely identify with would have the near instant effect of turning the population against the government waging it.

It is much more likely that the federal government would try to put strings in place so that it could act as a puppet-master for the newly "independent" nation.

The EU is about to see 16% of its economy disappear so there's precedent...

The EU isn't a country, never has been, and the UK only joined in the early 70's. What existed before was essentially a lot of tribes who'd been at war on and off for a few thousand years.

What are they going to do? Occupy the entire coast with federal armed forces?

Sure, they could do that, but it's hard to take any sort of moral high ground or project strength on the world stage when you are forced to militarily occupy your own country against its will.

That said, I doubt any states are realistically going to secede, but at least Texas won't be the only ones constantly going on about it now.

...Moral high ground? We've been manufacturing that since Vietnam, and people still haven't caught on well enough to stop it happening again. The economic devastation brought about through secession would be the casus belli anyway.

I don't know. Americans were fine claiming the "high ground" the last time a bunch of states and territories tried to secede and forced back into the union with military force.

The thing people forget when talking about secession is that unless the constitution was explicitly written to make affordances for future secessions, every attempt at secession is illegal and can be considered an act of civil war.

Aside from "voting irregularities" one of the major talking points when the Crimean peninsula voted to secede from Ukraine and be annexed into Russia was that there was no legal basis for them to do this, even if the elections had been undisputed.

> I don't know. Americans were fine claiming the "high ground" the last time a bunch of states and territories tried to secede and forced back into the union with military force.

Slavery.

Yes, and look how thoroughly the North acted to secure the rights of former slaves!

Americans also like to make every historic victory sound like the entire conflict was about moral ideals and they were the flawless defenders of the Right Thing.

Interestingly the way people outside the US are taught about the American Civil War is far more nuanced: state rights, economical reasons, sovereignty, etc.

But I guess "the North declared war on the seceding South because the South was literally worse than Hitler" is a valid interpretation too. Teach the controversy, right?

I'm not sure there would be much opposition. Without California fucking things up, conservatives would reliably win the electoral AND the popular vote. The people with the most to lose are liberals in red states who would become a permanent minority.

Personally, I would not want to live in an independent California. I love everyone's good ("bleeding heart") intentions, but our legislative system seems fatally flawed.

Cali represents far too much GDP, far too much raw valuable coastline to ever let go. It would be cheaper to kill every last man woman and child in the state, and repopulate it, than it would be to let it secede.

Never mind what Lincoln knew... if one goes, the union will wall.

Not just the economy.

You'd also need high level US military leaders to go insubordinate, voluntarily ignore their chain of command, and "donate" the assets of the US armed services to the Republic of California.

Texas is the only state that could probably put up a fight, but it'd be very ugly and very bloody.

Secession almost always equals war.

I think the folks advocating for secession trivialize the fact that the end result is armed conflict and not knowing which side your neighbor is on.

And Brexit is not precedent whatsoever -- Britain can exit from the EU because there was no large amount of shared military/defense assets based within the UK, and the EU is primarily an economic cooperation effort.

I have no doubt that many military leaders would defy commands to kill non-aggressors that they have a sense of kinship with. Unlike the civil war, we don't have the moral high ground provided by slaver to drive men to kill their brothers.

I suspect that the federal government would try to negotiate a secession that gave them some power over the newly formed nation, in order to "give the people what they want" while maintaining the status quo as much as possible.

At least the southern states in 1861 had the advantage of providing a large percentage of the prewar officer corps and West Point graduates, as well as graduates of the other military academies like VMI and the Citadel. The demographics of the current US military are not favorable for liberal coastal regions thinking of secession.

This planet perhaps. The divide between rural populations and urban populations have grown so far that people in city hubs feel more kinship toward other major cities around the world than they do toward their rural co-citizens.

Division is a dangerous thing. The us at large might not have a choice.

I agree 100%

My friends from Long Island don't know a single person in the military. Not 1. That does not bode well for them in a theoretical war of secession.

"California is almost certainly going to break off from the larger United States in our lifetime."

What?! That won't happen.

I would go further and say that California will split into 7 states, Washington and Oregon will split into 5 between them.

Then we can go further and call this new union the Twelve States of the Pacific, or Pac12.

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