Comment by koheripbal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by koheripbal | Hacker News Reader

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> Territories aren’t just up and leaving Canada

It is a bit funny that you mentioned Canada - given that Quebec barely voted down independence by a 0.2% margin in 1995. Something that would have been a disaster for Canada to be literally split in THREE pieces.

..and it may very well have led to armed conflict as violence in separatist violence in Quebec was not uncommon.

Separatist movements are very very often superstitiously supported by foreign rivals and it is worth quite a bit of political power to physically keep you nation together.

> Individual states do not have the resources to oppose our military.

They do not need to. When independence movements are militarily squashed, that is when foreign rivals step in officially to fund and supply weapons to them. It happened in Kosovo, Taiwan, Donbass, South Ossentia, etc..

> I don’t think even hostile countries like China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea would even attempt to get involved in an internal conflict

I hesitate to even reply to this comment. I think you know, reading it, how wrong it is.

Yes, I’m aware of Quebec’s history (and other provinces/territories threaten it these days). But the same thing happens in the US and having a Senate hasn’t changed that. That was the original point, our Senate/Electoral College isn’t keeping our states in the US. Just like a lack of a US-style Senate isn’t causing Quebec and others to flee Canada. It’s the original point I was trying to make about how this is magical thinking and ignores what history around the world shows us.

The examples given are a far cry from a situation like a US state leaving. A couple are Russian-armed separatists from neighboring countries. No state’s relationship to the US at all resembles Taiwan’s to China. And Kosovo is in a region that has dealt with strife since the early 1990’s.

A state seceding from the US would look very different than these.

Perhaps they would try to give aid covertly, but they wouldn’t risk a hot war. Intervening in a state seceding would be seen as a direct attack on US soil, very different than us aiding Ukraine or Russia aiding Syria.

I think you're discounting second order effects of the Senate.

Why is the US as culturally-homogeneous as it is?

Because small states' population's interests are represented. How are they represented...?

But the small states are the ones who voted for Trump's populist revolution and who keep talking up secession because they believe it's impossible for their culture to coexist with that of "city-dwellers" and progressives (in other words, the culture of most of the country by actual population.)

American culture is only homogeneous in their terms because they reject every American cultural framework but their own as illegitimate, a cancer to be burned out, a corruption of the true ideals which they believe they alone uphold. Talk to me about cultural unity when they stop talking about killing liberals for sport or calling LGBT people "groomers" or passing laws forcing women to flee from their states for fear of their own safety.

I don't want to fulminate - I'm getting angry just thinking about this - but if there's been a running theme in American politics in the last decade, it's been the destruction of the facade of cultural homogeneity by right-wing rural culture, and that's with a system designed to pander to them as much as possible, because apparently 245 years of shared history and heritage and citizenship in the world's last superpower isn't incentive enough to keep them in the union. At this point I almost welcome civil war just so we can just get it over with already.

Rant over. I need a break from this place before I get a talking to.

> destruction of the facade of cultural homogeneity by right-wing rural culture

O_o Looking at it from the perspective of rural culture might be useful.

The idea that "global free trade made us all richer, but poor and middle income rural America by cents and upper class and tech by millions, while leaving the former un- or under-employed" isn't without basis.

And specifically, explains lived experience over the past few decades in rural America.

At some point, you have to stop being angry at people for thinking the way they do... and start being curious about why those ideas are attractive to them.

Sorry if I don't have what you feel is the necessary amount of empathy... I actually did stop being angry for a bit, then they turned my state into the Handmaid's Tale and now I'm angry again.

This is an extremely good point, thank you for recognizing it.

In the lead up to WW2, Nazis in Germany appealed to the ailing rural population by telling them the Jews, Marxists, social democrats, feminists, and intellectuals were the reason they struggled.

I suppose I don't have to draw the modern US connections. I don't have to say replace Jews with globalists or George Soros or the media or Hollywood. Like we all see the similarities, right?

Yes, rural America is suffering. I grew up in rural America. The people are being misled into focusing their ire on immigrants, BLM, CRT, and transpeople. Sometimes I wish I could shake them and tell them while they're fuming over an imaginary culture war, their politicians are grifting them out of their donations and using the levers of government to make their suffering worse. But that ever growing suffering just provides a hotter fire to feed more grievances to.

Don't get me wrong, Democrats have been pro-corporation and offshored jobs just as much, but they've certainly done more for lower income people than Republicans. If you look at the extremes of both parties, Bernie's or AOC's policies would do far more for them than MTG or Matt Gaetz's. Sadly, contesting the 2020 election is more important to their 2022 vote than actual tangible plans to improve their economic conditions. Oh sure they'll give lip service to the grievances of soaring fuel prices or inflation, but not a one will give a tangible plan to do anything about it.

And that's where I'm at. I know rural people have real grievances. I just haven't seen a way to connect them to electing people who instead focus on improving those real grievances rather than feeding them imaginary grievances to get outraged over.

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