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Comment by simonblack | Hacker News Reader

Podhorzer isn’t predicting another civil war, exactly. But he’s warning that the pressure on the country’s fundamental cohesion is likely to continue ratcheting up in the 2020s.

Seeing the US from outside, some of us think that it's going to be a neck-and-neck race between a another US Civil War or a big US peer-to-peer International War that happens first.

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There is no need for a civil war if the US returns to a less federalist approach. People can spend more time improving their communities and states and less time worrying about what others are doing across a state boarder.

Defederalizing won’t work, for three reasons: - the red state/blue state divide isn’t actually real. What we have is a rural/urban divide, and the red/blue state phenomenon is just an artifact of that and whichever faction happens to be larger in a particular area. - Defederalization doesn’t fix human rights violations when there’s disagreement on what counts as a “human right”, which is the case for a lot of our divisions. - the reason the United States doesn’t have its own version of the Greek debt crisis is huge, permanents fiscal transfers from blue states to red ones. This wouldn’t work under defederalization and a bunch of red states would go bankrupt.

>> the United States doesn’t have its own version of the Greek debt crisis is huge, permanents fiscal transfers from blue states to red ones.

The Greek debt crisis happened because those southern countries joined the euro without centralizing country debts up to EU. Greece still had it's debt yet could no longer service it by printing it's own currency. At inception, USA federal took over State debts.

Nebraska is a red State and has about $1000 State debt per resident. Not likely to go bankrupt before blue Illinois.

https://www.270towin.com/maps/blue-red-states-2000-thru-2012

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/debt-by-sta...

That debt is after federal transfers, though.

Illinois loses a net of $4.7k/year/person to federal transfers[1]. Get rid of that and they could pay off their full debt in a few years.

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/donor-state...

In a past post, I mentioned that I thought the city was the appropriate area of division for this country--i.e. city's rights not states' rights.

It may not ever happen, but I think it addresses your first concern since, as you mentioned, the divide is urban vs rural which is a good proxy for city boundaries.

What I don't understand is the economic implication of such a split. Is there a way to keep the economic stability of the country while having more cultural freedom?

I suppose one of the problems with this sort of split is that some cities can leverage agriculture, heavy industry, business activity, or tourism; but some cities probably exists that don't have any means to generating income beyond taxing citizens.

It's the 1920s all over again - a civil/cultural war between urban and rural areas.

Honestly, I think that a split _without a war_ is more likely.

Either states decide they are going to leave, and people decide not to stop them, or congress decides that "this isn't going to work" and each state has a vote more or less on which "side" they will land on.

If you think that is crazy, remember the USSR split up much like this (more or less).

Sure there is fighting these days but the split happened with less of a civil war than you would have expected.

Also it works for the politicians. Say Democrats win the next election. By offering the split, the losing side still gains power, there is still an ideological enemy they can point at, without the need for a war.

There is no requirement for a war in the case of a split, and honestly, it is very unlikely there would be one, since neither side gains anything out of having one.

If anything it may avoid a civil war.

This would be absolute mayhem. The USSR was, at least in some sense, independent nations. The USA is nothing like that. Imagine what happens to the army and navy bases of seceded states. Do you think either side will just let them go?

Wasn't that exact scenario basically what started the previous civil war?

Exactly, and that’s the bloodiest war in American history.

Honestly, the states are pretty independent anyway. They have their own taxes, governance, legal system, laws, etc.

This isn’t a terribly comforting example, as the former states of the USSR have been fighting a slow-motion civil war since 1991, of which the Russian invasion of Ukraine is simply the latest chapter. See also Chechnya, Georgia, Nagorno-Karabakh, etc.

I suspect a serious political divorce in the US, and the bad blood engendered, would inevitably lead to a similar outcome.

Also Tajikistan, which was pretty much destroyed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tajikistani_Civil_War.

Also Transnistria.

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