Planning the Next Great Migration

Finally, I hope you’ll forgive me for some remarks on Right Attitude in your new home, especially if that home is a small conservative town and you are a Blue urbanite. For some this will be very obvious and you may think I’m being condescending, but please believe me that some other people need advice. Lifelong city residents can be just as parochial as rural villagers in their own way. Everyone they know is from the city; they have never met a farmer. (Many urban children actually do not know where tomatoes or potatoes come from.) Better-educated urbanites often have friends and colleagues who are ethnically diverse, but all similarly well-educated; they may never socialize with anyone who isn’t, or have more than a brief conversation with them at the checkout counter or the tire shop. How can they know what behavior is appropriate in a small blue-collar town? Just like a rube going to the big city and unwittingly shaming himself by bristling or sneering at its diversity, city folk in small towns can look like arrogant fools without realizing it. If you get that reputation in your first months, it could take many years to shake it. At worst, if the rural vs. urban cold war turns hot, that could put you in real danger.

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Before I comment on three “weird states,” I want to double back and put up the second half of my chapter on the possible future breakup of the United States, whose first half is here. This will inform why I would be leery of advising anyone to move to those states. I also wish to post a digression into my views of the recent election. Suffice it to say for now that I think, for the most part, that its results were compatible with the possibility of the future regional divisions I have envisioned as possible. I am also inclined to think that we may have more than two years before a full-scale civil war breaks out ... but, contrarily, that a breakup may well be the best outcome many of us can hope for.

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In addition to the widespread urban-rural divide in America, there are, historically, conflicts among regions whose differing environments, economies, and cultures would lead them to favor different political policies. At the moment, these regions are strongly tied together by mass fossil-fueled transport of people and goods and by electronic communications. (Surely TV and the Internet are main drivers of the Southernification of rural areas.) However, the continental U.S. “homeland” alone is extraordinarily large by the standards of pre-fossil fuel empires. Several authors have noted that, under the façade of shared consumer culture, the United States contains multiple regions that are as different in culture and environment as neighboring nations on other continents might be. At some point, long-distance travel and shipping and possibly even communications will be reduced by declining energy supplies, infrastructure, and wealth, possibly coupled with extremist violence. As a result, some have suggested, the breakup of the United States might follow naturally, perhaps even peacefully.

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I’m continuing to skip around in presenting text from my book. Since I haven’t yet been able to post it as a free PDF, I do want to make all of the text (modified for Internet) available. However, I want to skip over some of my grim introductory discussion of the political collapse of the United States in order to get faster into the most important part, which is, if you can’t stay where you are, where should you go? So the following text presupposes some argument to the effect that we’re on the verge of a civil war and the breakup of the Union may follow, and some discussion of others’ views of the geographic divisions in American culture. I will go back to those topics at some point.

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There’s no question that America’s political system is falling apart. Members of both major parties often loathe or outright dehumanize members of the opposite party. Extreme partisanship prevents much of anything from getting done, as even the tiniest or least controversial issue can be swallowed up by rabid partisan politics. The Republican Party undermines faith in the electoral process and encourages violence more openly every year. The public thinks the situation is terrible. However, it could, and probably will, get much, much worse.

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