The problem is ultimately the civil war. The US was originally envisioned as something much closer to the EU. Each State was effectively an autonomous country with the federal government setting some simple common ground rules and facilitating inter-state trade. That worked right up until the states could no longer agree on those ground rules which ultimately led to the civil war. Following that rather than going back to what existed before or reevaluating the fundamental design of things they instead just attempted to paper over things by increasing the federal government’s power while slightly reducing each state’s power, but without addressing problematic leftovers of the previous system like the senate or the electoral college.
The US government makes sense as a very loose confederation of countries. It doesn’t make sense as a country in its own right. Too much of the federal government is designed to grant power to states governments at the expense of the public’s right to democracy.
The reality is that following the end of the civil war they should have gone back to the drawing board and re-architected the federal government rather than attempting to go back to business as usual.
Yeah, I always wonder when people were bullshitting about Texas leaving the union how they expect they would factor in the National debt. Like sure you can leave if you if pay $100,000+ per person who lives in your state, and we remove all our assets and draw up trade deals that leave you with no ability to acquire anything. I mean hell, at least California could trade with Canada, Mexico, and the EU. Texas was anti Mexico, a far stretch from Canada but wouldn’t be able to ship through the U.S. likely, and would get worse trade deals with the EU do to the policies they were fighting for.
They don’t trust China, so their only possible ally would have been Russia, which the U.S. wouldn’t allow Russia to be that close, or the best case scenario is Texas got the Cuba treatment, worse case would be hard to imagine.
The US was democracy 1.0 up until the civil war when it became democracy 1.1. The rest of the world meanwhile has moved on to democracy 2.0+ that fixed a lot of the fundamental problems that the US inherited from feudalism. We’ve never really fixed any of the fundamental problems with the US government because everyone is too afraid to make significant changes. We would literally have to throw the constitution away and start with a new one, and nobody trusts anyone to do that these days. So we’re left to hobble along while the country slowly tears itself to pieces.
Any one state leaving is similar to what happened with Brexit but significantly worse. It would leave that state in a significantly worse position in all respects than it was previously. The only way to make it work would be to literally dissolve the federal government and reform it as something new, but first you’d need to find enough states willing to do that and who could agree on the form that new country should take.
The problem is ultimately the civil war. The US was originally envisioned as something much closer to the EU. Each State was effectively an autonomous country with the federal government setting some simple common ground rules and facilitating inter-state trade. That worked right up until the states could no longer agree on those ground rules which ultimately led to the civil war. Following that rather than going back to what existed before or reevaluating the fundamental design of things they instead just attempted to paper over things by increasing the federal government’s power while slightly reducing each state’s power, but without addressing problematic leftovers of the previous system like the senate or the electoral college.
The US government makes sense as a very loose confederation of countries. It doesn’t make sense as a country in its own right. Too much of the federal government is designed to grant power to states governments at the expense of the public’s right to democracy.
The reality is that following the end of the civil war they should have gone back to the drawing board and re-architected the federal government rather than attempting to go back to business as usual.
Yeah, I always wonder when people were bullshitting about Texas leaving the union how they expect they would factor in the National debt. Like sure you can leave if you if pay $100,000+ per person who lives in your state, and we remove all our assets and draw up trade deals that leave you with no ability to acquire anything. I mean hell, at least California could trade with Canada, Mexico, and the EU. Texas was anti Mexico, a far stretch from Canada but wouldn’t be able to ship through the U.S. likely, and would get worse trade deals with the EU do to the policies they were fighting for.
They don’t trust China, so their only possible ally would have been Russia, which the U.S. wouldn’t allow Russia to be that close, or the best case scenario is Texas got the Cuba treatment, worse case would be hard to imagine.
The US was democracy 1.0 up until the civil war when it became democracy 1.1. The rest of the world meanwhile has moved on to democracy 2.0+ that fixed a lot of the fundamental problems that the US inherited from feudalism. We’ve never really fixed any of the fundamental problems with the US government because everyone is too afraid to make significant changes. We would literally have to throw the constitution away and start with a new one, and nobody trusts anyone to do that these days. So we’re left to hobble along while the country slowly tears itself to pieces.
Any one state leaving is similar to what happened with Brexit but significantly worse. It would leave that state in a significantly worse position in all respects than it was previously. The only way to make it work would be to literally dissolve the federal government and reform it as something new, but first you’d need to find enough states willing to do that and who could agree on the form that new country should take.