The dissident right agrees with me that Republicans will never win an election again. Naturally, they've turned to secession as the next solution. If we can't win an election, just partition the country into a Republican half and a Democratic half, and then win Republican elections from there. Unfortunately, this won't and can't happen either.
In every state that went Republican, some 40% voted Democrat. Their right to remain in the Union cannot be abridged, and the North would intercede to protect these citizens from any domestic takeover. Nor will this 40% bloc of treacherous voters ever decrease, because they represent black and hispanic minorities who are actually growing in the South instead of shrinking. It will be the 1960's all over again if the South tried to deny minorities their right to citizenship in the United States of America by separating off.
Second, it's radical overkill to secede when the difference between the South and the North is as tiny as the difference between Romney and Obama. In all three debates the two candidates agreed about things more often than they disagreed. They were debating only marginal changes on the fringe of public policy, but shared the consensus center about most everything -- medicare, social security, the military's role in policing the world, the importance of college education, and so on. What kind of movement would secede just because their taxes were 2% above where they felt they should ideally be? It takes radical differences to foster radical solutions, and the 60% of Southerners who voted Republican just aren't that different. It's not like Ron Paul won the South in a landslide during the primaries. Nor did any third party candidate get massive support who offered a more radical position. It's all well and good to say we can start 'radicalizing' Republicans now, but these people are 60 years old and aren't about to change their minds about anything. Most people are set in their values and unwilling to change their minds about anything past age 25 or so, so 'radicalizing' an entire region of the country with propaganda is just hopeless nonsense. To actually change hearts and minds, you must raise them from childhood with that in mind -- like the Mormons do, or Muslims do, or home schoolers do. You need to create your radical polarized population from the ground up, because horizontal transmission simply does not work.
Third, the difficulties surrounding secession are just too severe. What about America's sports leagues? Will they separate too? What about people with family all around the country? Will they not be able to see each other again? What about the free trade zone within America? The shared currency? Infrastructure projects that span between multiple states? What about people who find job offerings in New Jersey or Texas and want to move to the other 'country' therefore? What about vacationers? What will our diplomatic relations be with each other and the world? The cost of separating a country which has been united for so long is astronomical. No one would be willing to pay it. Only a matter of life and death could justify such a traumatic separation -- and we just aren't there yet. The economy continues to grow, not shrink, in America. Population is rising, not shrinking. There is no catastrophe to speak of. People are generally better off than ever before. TV's are getting bigger, not smaller. Houses are getting bigger, not smaller. Cars are more fuel efficient, not less. Length of life has grown, not shrunk. Even crime has gone down for decades. By virtually any measurement America is currently in a golden age. And they think this is a ripe time for secession?
In South Sudan, it took thirty years of brutal warfare to win independence from North Sudan. It took millions of their people being raped and murdered to win the approval of the outside world and their backing as an independent state. The North isn't doing any such thing to the South, so how will our new state be recognized? If it isn't recognized, we will be crushed by overwhelming force of the entire United Nations as a 'new Nazi Germany.' Even if they didn't invade us to protect blacks and hispanics from Southern tyranny, they could easily pass crippling sanctions on us like they did to South Africa. If the whole world refuses to trade with us, poverty in the South would be far more dire than it would be if we just obediently stayed in the Union. Without trade economies start to look like North Korea, we wouldn't even be able to keep our lights on. If we do anything to offend the liberal sensibilities of the modern world, we will be destroyed utterly, whether directly or indirectly. So even if we did secede, like say Quebec would from Canada, or Scotland from Britain, we could do so as only another liberal state that has virtually the exact same political platform as the state we just left. Who would secede so that we could stop gay marriage, legalized marijuana, or a tax increase on the top 1%? Who on Earth would go to such an extreme over such a fringe, trivial issue? But if it's in order to get rid of democracy and purge all the mud colored filth from our clean white homeland, what chance of the country ever even getting off its feet -- even assuming the current population of the South could be radicalized into wholesale approval of this about-face?
There is no route to secession, there is no imaginable set of circumstances that could allow it. The only path to political freedom does not exist in a settled area, but only on a frontier. Nor does it exist within an already extant polity, it must be created bottom-up from a whole new population base. If radicals all moved to Alaska or northern Canada or Siberia, turned it into a thriving utopia, and then seceded from the country that ostensibly owned them, that might work. Settling the ocean might work. Most conceivably, escaping into space and settling an entire new planet would definitely work. But breaking up a nation with firm roots in its previous existence and culture is just hopeless. We need a new land for a new people, people who have absolutely nothing to do with the old country and are completely radicalized in every way, absolutely detached from their surroundings. We need to be far enough away from everyone else that no one else can affect us, through violence or trade boycotts, and such that we don't pose a threat to anyone, whether domestic minorities or foreign foes, so that no one feels the need to extinguish us as a self defense measure. These conditions cannot be met by Dixie. Or the Pacific Northwest, for that matter. They could be met on Mars, or one of these new Earth-like habitable planets our telescopes keep finding around other stars. But present day America? No. It's just impossible.
This is why the hope of every radical on Earth cannot be fixated on the present. You just have to enlarge your horizons and embrace the prospect of technological change. If you include technology into your calculations, all sorts of new possibilities emerge. Starting a new civilization from a small, radicalized base of fellow-believers on a journey to a new planet isn't a fairy tale -- it's an emerging technology. Starting a new people by genetically engineering every single one of their traits before they're born, that will be amenable to the cultural and political order you prefer isn't a fairy tale -- it's an emerging technology. Since technology is going to empower radicals at this rate, all radicals really need to do is wait. Science labs all around the world are working with billions of dollars to fulfill all our dreams. If we pass this dream down within our families and instill them in our own children, our opportunity will come. Our day will come. And so long as our dream is fulfilled, does it really matter when? In the long scheme of things, life has a four billion year history. If our favored lifestyle begins today or a thousand years from now, what difference does it make? There are still many billions of years left of the galaxy's habitable time zone to work with. The majority of human history will be a paradise whether we secede now or 1,000 years from now. As a result, what radicals need isn't sufficient hatred to gain the courage to defy the world and separate from their current ties -- what we really need is sufficient love to start a family and pass on a positive dream to our children which they will embrace, which leaves them also capable of finding a family which will pass that same dream on down to their children, and so on. Do you really love what your newly independent country would and will be? If so, paint a picture so bright that other people will buy into it, and invest their future into your dream too. If it's a truly bright future, the dream will last however long it takes to be realized, because it will inspire every single generation without end.
I have a dream. I dream of the day where no one has to suffer, and everyone can be happy, because they are given the tools necessary from day one to fulfill their every need. This ranges from food and water to fellowship and good cheer. Everything should be arranged in advance, such that no child enters this world without a guaranteed quality of life awaiting it. I have a dream that when a child is born, everyone already loves it, and already has a long list of things they want to do to help it, and evil itself simply does not exist in the child's nature. The child's genes simply will not possess bad instincts like greed, cruelty, selfishness or deceit. People will not be able to hurt themselves through foolish addictions to things like drugs, because drugs will not appeal to them in any way. Meanwhile, they will not be able to hurt others by cheating on them, stealing their stuff or calling them names, because they will get zero sense of satisfaction from any of these acts. They will not feel bigger by making other people smaller, they will not enjoy material goods beyond basic necessities, which they will already own in the first place, and they won't be led astray by such a primitive instinct as lust to break other people's hearts and make a mockery of everything that is holy in this world. I dream that in this world people won't be taught to value money and status, like America does, but Love, Beauty, and Truth. I dream that in this world education won't be logarithms and square roots, but reading truly moving books like Plutarch's Lives or Plato's Dialogues and watching truly moving anime -- like Clannad and Pretty Cure -- in order to form a moral adult, rather than an effective trivial pursuit player. I dream that in this world families won't separate because they are too evil for even five people to get along in the same house, nor will extended families separate because their job prospects send them all across the world, nor will villages separate because they all believe in something different from their neighbors and secretly hate each other, nor will anyone separate in the whole country because they'll all love each other and all of their hearts will be one. I dream of a world where it isn't unusual to wake up to people greeting you and falling asleep to people telling you good night. Where hugs are as common as lemondrops, and smiles as common as sunlight.
The citizen's dividend and birth licensing could create this dream, but it doesn't have to be now, or happen to the current residents of America. It could start in a community of just five hundred people, and flower into its true essence centuries from now. Just so long as it happens, the vicarious joy I'd have in those future lives, the satisfaction I'd take in my team's victory would be no different from a soldier who died on a battlefield after seeing his victorious flag sweep the opponent's flank and the battle cries of his companions ringing ululations of triumph in his ears. The dissident right needs to buck up. We don't have to win a single election for the rest of time. We don't have to have things our way. If we love the system we're trying to impose on the world, if we truly love it with all our hearts, just believing in it should be enough. Believing that it is true, and therefore is invincible to all slings and arrows, and therefore must come true sooner or later, should be enough for anyone. So long as freedom of thought itself isn't banned, so long as our children aren't ripped from our very arms when we tell them bedtime stories, does it really matter if Obama's president? Does any of this back and forth nonsense matter in the least? Love life, love your family, and the rest will work itself out. I guarantee it. Technology has too many benefits for anyone to stop its progress at this point, and every single technological innovation takes us one step forward to achieving our society -- not theirs. We are the real progressives, and as a result, all progress naturally ends with us at the helm.
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