Thoughts on elections and terrorism

For those who wish to continue to live in a more or less democratic society, by which I mean one in which citizens are allowed to have some say in who rules over them and how, the 2022 elections and contemporaneous legal and illegal actions have given us both good and bad news. First, the good news.

 

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Provocative questions about the Really Big Sort

The 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:

 

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