As the United States descends further toward becoming a banana republic, support for secession from the union reaches new highs.
Monied interests obsessed with important unlimited peasant labor and unending war abroad have seized total control in Washington. Even democrat voters who’d been promised a minimum wage hike, student loan forgiveness, and no more foreign wars are feeling buyers’ remorse.
For the Right, the situation is deteriorating even more rapidly into an existential crisis. The country which, within the living memory of generation Y and older, denounced the Soviet Union for consigning dissidents to gulags, now holds and tortures political prisoners.
Meanwhile, America’s rulers huddle behind barbed wire and draft proposals to crack down on the invisible army of Nazis they blame for a protest whose only proven homicide victim was one of the protesters.
Amid all the confusion, the only certainty is that our rulers no longer share the least shred of commonality with the people they ostensibly represent. The government is already waging implicit war on its citizens. We can no longer trust our rulers, while they in turn hate and resent us.
That the time has come for a clean separation is a rational conclusion.
The problem is, a political divorce from Washington, even if it’s possible, may not resolve these conflicts.
It’s often remarked in dissident circles that a second American Civil War would bear little resemblance to the first. Instead of a first-generation conflict fought with cavalry charges, cannon, and bayonets, we could expect drone strikes, partisan guerrilla raids, and house-to-house urban warfare.
And though some or all of that would probably happen, contemplating those eventualities overlooks the main impediment to escaping the totalitarian regime that now controls America.
The phrase “totalitarian regime” probably conjured images of martial law, midnight knocks at the door, and work camps.
What you probably didn’t think of, but should have, is this:
Equating oppression only with state power is a relic of obsolete Conservative and Libertarian ideology.
William Gibson's cyberpunk got the zaibatsu part right, but he missed the tyranny of the karen-ocracy
Readers would have found it so outlandish as to break suspension of disbelief.
That's ironic, given the technological and computational flights of fancy he took in the Sprawl trilogy.
Furthermore, secession would play right into their game: "divide and conquer". A strong Federal power, if it weren't also equally infiltrated, is designed to present a united front and counter all enemies, foreign and domestic, against which a mere state or region would be insufficient.
At this point, though, with every institution left weak and tottering, from the White House and the state house to the corner church and the local library, prayer is our best and only weapon. In fact, it always has been.
The chastisement can no longer be averted. It can always be mitigated through penance and prayer.
There are strategic considerations that complicate a simple regional breakup. Where are the mineral resources located? Where is the farmland? Who gets what major ports? Who controls the mouth of the Mississippi? Speaking of the later, my eyes were really opened when I saw a map of the oil and gas pipelines. Whoever controls Louisiana also controls the northeast. Everything in this country has been integrated across regions. There will be war.
Zeedub makes a good point. A lot of the rich places in America can only be rich *because* the country is united. All those big Democrat cities can't feed themselves without sparsely-populated Flyover Country, which is overwhelmingly filled by their opponents. Dependence on external water is the biggest obstacle to any attempt at Calexit, and would remain a crippling problem for them in any attempt at independence (maybe they might be able to get by on supplements from the Pacific Northwest, if Oregon and Washington joined them, but I'm unsure about the viability of that). But none of that really changes Brian's basic point, that the real enemy is not *exactly* the Federal Government – they're just one of the (admittedly higher-level) pawns of the real Adversary.
Also, minor nitpick Brian, you wrote "important unlimited peasant labour" when I presume you meant to write "imported".
Corrections welcome.
Hmmm … should we postpone separation until after we reform copyright law to break the corporate death grip on the past 100 years?
I dunno, man. I also follow Razorfist (though admittedly he's wrong on a number of issues, but he's usually decent) and he's opined that public domain works stagnate and almost never have any meaningful work produced from them. I dunno if I agree with him exactly, but it's worth thinking about.
If our elites are so corrupt as to make secession preferable, they're corrupt enough to circumvent any change to copyright law.
Canvis
On this point I disagree with him. I understand his perspective but I can refute with the following observation: for decades Wordstar users have pleaded for the source code to be in the public domain but to no avail.
So if there's no profit how exactly does the last owner benefit from holfingbon to its copyright?
xavier
Corporations hold the reins of influence. Corporate power is running amok precisely because governments find it convenient to permit it; where they do not, even quite small players in terms of GDP – like Russia for example, but also members of the EU – are trivially able to halt the behaviour, because they can have every employee of a given company within their borders arrested and held indefinitely at a whim; close down and seize any and all accounts and assets, and in most cases should they desire it strongly enough, have anyone within their borders killed.
In other words, we're seeing a totalitarian consensual co-movement of corporation and state, in other words, technical fascism.
Yep. Governments are outsourcing their censorship dirty work to corporations.
The Media-IT-Government Complex …