Political dissolution is an idea whose time has come. Advocating it a decade ago was met with mockery even from many of those on the dissident right. No longer. A few years ago, Pat Buchanan began talking about it. Now it's entering mainstream discourse. From New York Magazine (via IHTG):





Let’s just admit that this arranged marriage isn’t really working anymore, is it? The partisan dynamic in Washington may have changed, but our dysfunctional, codependent relationship is still the same.

There is no longer any racial, religious, moral, cultural, political, linguistic, or ethnic unity in the US as it is currently defined. The last remaining bond holding the thing together, beyond inertia, is economic expediency. It's why talk of dissolution will begin in interest once the impending economic downturn hits. The Federal Reserve, with rates already under three percent, will be unable to stave it off.



It is as a nationalist that I support political dissolution. A nation requires a shared sense of the aforementioned characteristics. As currently constituted, the United States shares none of these things. It is not a nation. It is an empire comprised of several disparate nations inside of it. The empire must fall for those nations to flourish.



When the US dollar loses its status as the world's reserve currency, it will become obvious that not only are the federal government's debts unpayable--which just about everyone already assumes to be the case--but that they are no longer even serviceable. Running away from the Imperial Capital's obligations will start to sound appealing. Gubernatorial campaigns will put secession at the center of the platform and the breakup will begin.



The NYMag article takes a fairly predictable stab at what dissolution might look like, at least initially, but it would be excessively audacious to pretend to know precisely how it will play out. It may be municipalities that get the ball rolling, it may be a single state, a compact of states, an entire region, or it may manifest in some other way.



However it begins, once it has it will not take long for the cascade to occur. Imagine a Texit that includes Oklahoma and Arkansas. Rather than prevent the exit, leftists will be cheering--Congress, the presidency, and the making of the Supreme Court will forever be under Democrat control. Remaining red state America will presented with a stark choice--effectively forfeit all political power indefinitely, or bail. Many other states will follow Texas' lead and choose the latter.



Initially, the emergent states will be based on preexisting political and geographical arrangements but over time the realignment will take on distinct racial and ethnic characteristics. Savvy red states will drastically slash welfare benefits while encouraging, even aiding, low-income residents (read blacks) in relocating to Blue America where benefits are more generous. SWPLs won't stop migrants from truly foreign lands moving in now, so they're certainly not going to stop former American blacks and browns from moving in tomorrow.



The conjecture on what potentially follows dissolution is just that. Political dissolution sounds scarier than it should. That there will be any support for militarily stopping a state or compact of states from seceding is highly unlikely. The federal government could hardly get away with snuffing out the Branch Davidian complex a generation ago. In the Current Year there is no stomach for scaling that up by a factor of ten thousand. The Soviet Union's disintegration was not bloody and neither will that of the United States.



As for the concern that an emergent smaller new country or countries will be susceptible to invasion, there is no invasion of Mexico, Canada, or Cuba on the table today and those countries don't even have nukes. Let Montana purchase a few nuclear warheads and its risk of invasion will be nil.



When the topic comes up in conversation and people ask what will change from the way things are now, I answer that the money withheld from their paychecks each week for federal income taxes will no longer be withheld and whatever services the federal government provides them--if they can think of any, because I can't!--will no longer be provided to them.



The reason we're whipped into a frenzy each time a putative federal government shutdown looms ahead of a debt ceiling 'crisis' is because the Cloud People don't want the Dirt People to realize how superfluous said Cloud People are. Furlough a couple million federal government employees and nothing happens? Why didn't we scrub these parasites off sooner?



Last Spring I put together a couple of posts based on a Reuters-Ipsos poll from 2014 asking respondents whether or not they supported "the idea of your state peacefully withdrawing from the USA and the federal government". Unbeknownst to me at the time but subsequently brought to my attention by a pro-secession Faceborg group, R-I picked the poll back up a couple of years later, running it through Trump's inauguration in January of 2017.



As a consequence, we now have a sample size of 37,465 to work with—more than twice as large as the one initially used. The following graph shows the percentages of people, by selected demographics, who support peaceful secession. "Don't know" responses, constituting one-fifth of all responses, are excluded:







That the military is a bastion of pro-secessionist sentiment doesn't bode particularly well for the idea that the federal government will successfully instruct the army to turn its guns on states or compacts electing to leave the union.



Political dissolution is most strongly supported by the young and by non-whites. Boomers are strongly opposed, but from Xers on down it's hardly a radical idea. In other words, it is the country's future.



Political dissolution is a decidedly non-partisan issue. More than one-quarter of Republicans and of Democrats, and nearly one-third of independents are supportive of the idea. As support grows across the political spectrum, the possibility of a relatively amicable breakup will grow with it. Acrimony—let alone bloodshed—will be unnecessary and should be avoided. A soft landing is preferable to crashing into the mountainside for all on board.

[Crossposted at Audacious Epigone]