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Comment by grappler | Hacker News Reader

The train of thought I'm on now is: why was keeping the Union together back in the civil war such a great thing?

Now we have this bloc of red states in the South who are backward, racist, intolerant science deniers, and they've managed to get just enough on the winning side of the electoral map to make the advanced, multicultural, cosmopolitan science-respecting blue states' lives miserable.

That chunk of states should be a separate country. Then they can go their own way and the rest of us can carry on without them.

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The resolution you choose has some stark effects on the narrative that you will allow yourself to be convinced of. The idea of "red state, blue state" is a peculiar consequence of a winner-take-all presidential election system, and does not adequately represent reality. An underlying truth, viewed at another resolution, is that there are red and blue densities moreso than states [0]. The current (and changing) distribution of densities across the states has currently led to what you perceive as the "red state, blue state" situation, when zoomed out and with a blur filter applied

For example, take a useful look at CityLab's Congressional Density Indicator [1]. There are zero "pure urban" districts that are represented by Republicans, regardless of the state (red, blue, purple), and there are nearly none among the "urban-suburban mix" districts (again regardless of state).

Viewed through yet another lens, by percentage of landmass, Alabama is more is more "blue" than Illinois and Oregon [2]. Your characterization could use a little more thought and refinement.

[0] https://www.niskanencenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Wi... (see section beginning page 12)

[1] https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/11/citylab-congressional...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/upshot/election-201...

You are right, and I made this simplification with full awareness that I was doing so.

On the other hand, I really like the idea of splitting apart the country in a way that frees most of us from a large enough number of the people who are holding us back. I don't think that's possible to do in a fine-grained way. It only makes sense if done for some large contiguous regions. And the states in the southeast who actually did try to break away a few generations ago seems like an obvious way forward with that.

Here is another look at some of the natural regions within the country: [1]

I'm also aware that changing the voting systems we use holds a lot of promise for some of the same underlying problems we're talking about, and am completely open to that as an alternative to, or in addition to, my suggestion to break up the country. But that too seems very difficult politically.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/opinion/sunday/a-new-map-...

The challenge is that our founding fathers unwittingly created a gerrymandered situation due to both the electoral college and the senate, where 40% or less of the population is able to control the entire federal government. Now that they're stacking the judiciary with political judges, they control all 3 branches of government, and the only democratic check on their power is 50% of the legislative branch (the house).

I'm not a political scientist, but at some point the increasingly larger 60% of the population is going to take this country back. I hope they're able to do it without a war.

The abolition of slavery was worth it. But the failure of Reconstruction allowed the south to backside right where they were.

yeah, abolition of slavery is a noble cause, obviously, but the rhetoric at that time put a lot of emphasis on the importance of preserving the union, as if that in and of itself was a valuable thing. I propose that it wasn't, and isn't.

Humans are happier if they're grouped together with their own tribe, and not with other neighboring tribes they don't identify with. In this way it's like some of the problems in Africa and the Middle East where the groups there had borders imposed on them that didn't follow this simple principle.

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