Political Memes

Such a hypothetical president could add some basic terms to their dissolution plan. They would be in a position to organize a treaty between the new nations. And part of the agreement to let states have their independence is that freedom of travel must be preserved between the states, similar to how the EU operates. So people can always vote with their feet and leave.

But if you're asking if we can preserve the nation just to help blue voters in red states, I'm sorry. Ultimately the people of each state are going to have to be responsible for their own fate. I would owe nothing more to the citizens of Alabama than I do the citizens of Azerbaijan. It's your country, not mine. You're responsible for it. If your countrymen want to turn their nation into the seventh circle of Hell, well those are their sins, not ours.

I know it sucks, and it's not fair to a lot of good people. But the likely alternative is that the city you cherish so much will be burned to ashes in the civil war we are inexorably marching towards. Realize, I do not champion as radical a solution as complete national dissolution lightly. If I didn't think the alternative was a horrific and bloody war, I wouldn't think to recommend it.

A second civil war would be so, so much worse than the first one. The destructive technology is so much greater. And we wouldn't even be divided between two nice clear blocks of North and South. We would have fighting between states and within states. And foreign adversaries will be happy to contribute to help fan the flames even more. At least with the first civil war foreign powers were mostly content to ignore the US; it was a remote backwater at the time. But now? The US is a global hegemon, and we have no shortage of adversaries that would love to see us burn. China and Russia will probably be arming both sides of the conflict, just happy to see us tear each other to pieces. I'm worried about millions of people being killed, tens of millions displaced, most of our greatest cities turned into bombed-out wrecks, and our entire society seeing a massive and permanent decline in our quality of life and standard of living. Look at the images of the leveled cities of Syria. That is our future on the path we are currently on.

We could walk that road, or we could have some maturity and wisdom and say, "look, this nation clearly isn't working anymore. It was assembled based on compromises for the world of 1780, and it's no longer working for us." Instead of tearing ourselves apart violently, let's just go for a peaceful national divorce. No one needs to die. We don't have tens of millions made homeless. We don't have to watch as all the great cities and infrastructure we've spent generations building are reduced to bombed-out craters. We can simply walk away with all of our lives, infrastructure, and national wealth intact. Even if the national divorce was a difficult and expensive process, it's a drop in the bucket compared to what we will lose in the civil war that awaits us.