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next_migrationThe following text backtracks to present almost all of the last bit of my chapter on selecting a new region to live. It offers answers to a few questions that could be asked in response to my suggestion that migrants should select their destinations with an eye to the possible geographic outlines and politics of successor nations following the collapse of the United States. If you are confident that the scenario of breakup within your lifetime is ridiculous, then you may wish to ignore this topic.
However, the country is so severely divided that one of the few alternatives to a civil war leading to breakup or total loss of democracy could be the development of an extreme form of federalism, in which states are free to have secular or theocratic government, democracy or the mere pretense of it. In that scenario, while the disparate regions would continue to enjoy the wealth and power that come with being part of the U.S. imperial homeland, the legal regimes, education, social safety nets, civil rights and liberties, and so forth that their citizens would experience would be so different that they might as well be different countries. The one major difference is that people would be much freer to vote with their feet—unless their state’s laws forbade them to exit.
Therefore, three controversial questions:
“Are you saying we should just throw all the minorities and liberals in the “theocratic” states—most of the land area—under the bus? They’re American citizens!”
No, I don’t want to see the Union break up, nor to see any of its parts become authoritarian. But when a large imperial state breaks up, successor nations go their own way. There’s no stopping it. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia could no longer dictate Poland’s laws. After the Roman empire collapsed into chaos, every barbarian warlord did exactly what he wanted for a while. At all costs, we must avoid that outcome with the addition of nuclear weapons.
Once the regions of the U.S. have become separate countries, if those in other successor nations see one nation’s laws becoming retrogressive and cruel, that’s no more their problem or their responsibility than it is ours today if Mexico’s laws are retrogressive and cruel. Hopefully, they would set up an underground railroad to help members of scapegoat groups escape. If the breakup is slow and/or peaceful enough, some people could vote with their feet in advance—as, indeed, a few are already doing. Southerners who see the future becoming too dangerous for them might move north. Northern conservatives might move south on the promise of living in a state where their beliefs are dominant.
Is any of this desirable? Certainly not. But it would be better than a massive, all-out civil war with no clear front lines. Or, if the consequences of schism seem totally intolerable, we might try tolerating each other instead.
Let me answer a provocative question that might be occurring to people from each extreme of the political spectrum. Lefty first:
“Fifteen states with less total population than California get thirty senators. Why don’t 50,000 or 150,000 of us each move to Alaska, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, and Wyoming and just take ‘em over?”
Aside from the fact that there wouldn’t be jobs or housing for so many people? It’s a bad idea to try to hijack a state—to move in, hoping not to join and add your diversity to the local culture but to impose your own culture on an existing population who overwhelmingly don’t share it. Such a campaign can influence a small state’s politics. New Hampshire has been for decades the target of a Free State project that encourages “libertarians” (many actually rather theocratic, with weaponry as their primary liberty issue) to move to the state, and they now have the numbers or money to exert considerable political influence. Christian libertarian Kenneth Royce, under the pen name of Boston T. Party, wrote a novel proposing a Free State takeover and secession of Wyoming, planned out in competent detail, as an alternative, but the super-rich funders and many thousands of committed people that the plan would have required did not appear.
When carpetbaggers like the Free Staters change laws affecting public safety, longtime residents reasonably resent it. At that, the “libertarians” target states whose populations are not only small, but mostly rural, white, conservative in the traditional sense of that word, and generally pro-gun, therefore not all that dissimilar from them. They haven’t tried to take over Rhode Island or Hawai’i. A swarm of Californians moving to Wyoming to take over their politics would inspire anger, if not violent backlash, from locals who would say, reasonably enough, “You’re trying to get away from the problems in California by bringing them here to dump on us.” Indeed, as noted, there is already sometimes violent backlash against Californians for moving in at all, regardless of how they vote.
When you move to a state where many people share your most essential beliefs about politics, whether the legislature does or not, or when you move to a place for personal or economic reasons, you can vote your conscience with pride. Moving to a state with the intention of depriving the people at your destination of the ability to live as the large majority would prefer to live is a different matter. If (when) the campaign fails, how do you think you’ll enjoy living there, among people who hate you and whom you hold in contempt?
However, there is a difference between trying to overwhelm a state with a diametrically opposing culture and hoping to help to tip the balance in a state with a more evenly balanced culture. Conservatives, it should be noted, are doing this now, even though they already hold most of the country’s landmass. A recent NPR report discussed a trend of blue-state, especially Californian, conservatives moving to Texas. It is entirely sensible for conservatives to leave a state that is firmly liberal, secular, and overregulated for a state that eschews regulations other than the religiously inspired, where they will be happier with the government. It’s called voting with your feet. However, Texas is, under the surface, an increasingly purple state as its population becomes majority-minority, and its government has responded with increasingly extreme gerrymanders and voter-suppression laws. Some Californian conservatives explicitly identify their inmigration as contributing to the goal of maintaining GOP dominance of the state. One migrating activist, the reporter says, “maintains that Republicans migrating from blue states are the most militant about stopping creeping liberalism.” She’s quoted as saying:
People used to come up to me and say “Don’t California my Texas.” But we’re the damn cavalry! We’re here to save you. Because we know what’s going to happen. And if we don’t run for office, get involved in school boards, and pay attention and get out and vote, then you’re gonna California Texas.
Implicitly, the intention of this conservative interstate migrant is to contribute to suppressing the preferences of what she believes would soon be a majority of the Texans who are able to access voting. If she believed that most Texans, and their children who in the coming decades will grow up and seek to vote, really were and would remain firmly conservative, Texan conservatives would not need to be “saved” from creeping liberalism by an influx of migrants. As one of the biggest states, Texas has an awful lot of electoral votes and gerrymandered Congressional districts to deliver, and she views her move as contributing to the long-term goal of keeping those, as well as the state leadership, in GOP hands. Should the Union start to come apart, her inmigration would likewise increase the likelihood that Texas became an independent Christian-nationalist republic.
In the map Stephen Marche envisioned for a breakup of the Union, the “Red” republic would get a huge majority of the land, including a large majority of the land whose climate is suitable for agriculture. And that is assuming that a few large, minority-ruled northern states do not end up like Kashmir, with their rulers managing to force their citizens into a country they don’t want to be part of. However, a solid majority of the current population of the eastern U.S., and of the likely first waves of climate refugees, would prefer to be in the “Blue” democracy. More states choosing democracy means more room where those people can live. It is entirely reasonable for Blue climate refugees to choose borderline states with populations that might plausibly go either way, hoping to tip the balance. I hope to retire to Iowa, where I have family, in the hope that that state would choose democracy over theocracy when the time came, and the sincere belief that it could do so. My moving and voting there, though, would also inherently increase by 0.0001% the chance that it actually would; and there’s nothing wrong with that. If Blues were to refuse to move strategically with their children’s future in mind, while Reds do it in large numbers, the former faction would be catastrophically disadvantaged; but the stakes could be far higher than control of Congress. And you may soon have few good alternatives anyway.
“Why should we let minorities and city folks have a say in where Midwestern states wind up? Let’s do whatever it takes to maintain GOP minority rule until the Union breaks up, and shove all the liberals into New England and Southern California. Then we can just build walls around those spots and leave them to starve to death and eat each other!”
Polarization means that increasing numbers of people in each superfaction actively hate the other, and wish for its members to suffer and be impoverished or perhaps best, die. They might like the idea of forcing many millions of their “enemies” into bantustans that were small enough that they couldn’t survive there, then cutting them off. Because of the distribution of mostly-rural vs. mostly-urban states, only those in the Red superfaction could rationally envision any possibility of doing this.
If they managed it, though, the Blue superfaction would then likely have no choice but to pick up guns and invade the neighboring nation to seize some of the farmland on their borders. It’s called Lebensraum. Don’t think that there are no guns in urbanized “liberal” states, or that nobody there knows how to use them. A war in which you are on the less numerous side, even if you have by far the more territory, is not an enjoyable experience. The population imbalance might not be huge at the national level, but every little slice of farmland on the border is sparsely populated (that’s why it’s farmland) and could be hard to defend. Furthermore, tens of millions of people who had found themselves unwillingly trapped in Redland by the choices of minority-ruled state governments would serve as a fifth column. (Do you envision rounding up or ethnically cleansing all those folks? That would amount to a two-front war—and increase the chance that other large nations would start pouring large amounts of military aid into the Blue nationlets.)
For the same reason, it would be equally important that if large numbers of Americans want to live in a theocracy after the Union breaks up, the ensuing Christian nationalist state should end up with a territory big enough, with enough water and crop or pasture land, to support all those people. Given America’s current demographics and politics, this isn’t going to be a problem at all: Red states have far more land per capita and include a large, geographically cohesive bloc of states whose appetite for evangelical government seems to be limited, to the extent that it still is, only by the Supreme Court. But if it were a problem, steps would have to be taken to make sure that that nation had enough land. No rational liberal would want eighty or a hundred million people all to be shoved into Alabama and northern Idaho. That would guarantee instant warfare.
If the United States breaks apart, no matter how much we may all hate, fear, and despise one another, we’d better not try to make it impossible for the other half to survive. On the contrary, we’d better try to make sure that each half (or every major fraction) of the population has what they need to survive. Otherwise, a catastrophic war could not possibly be avoided.
