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No. Imagining an independent future for any state (including California and Texas) is pure cope. The states are so interdependent that attempting to secede would be ruinous for the state in question.
The only exceptions I can think of are Alaska and Hawaii, which might be able to survive if they found another country to keep them supplied and economically connected.
Sure? Balkanization seems like a good way to speed up the process of the Empire collapsing.
Balkan are the greatest thing ever.
plus there is the bonus of schadenfreunde, since they always want to balkanize countries that happen to stand in their path.
Californian here, bye Felicia. I'm fucking done with my hard earned money going towards ungrateful backwoods idiots that actively hate me, my state, and my neighbors because they're told to by thuh teevee, yet don't realize it. I'm done subsiding hatred for the sake of it, because "it's the right thing to do." I'm done being at the political whim of people that can't spell potato. I have a lot of heart for my countrymen, but considering far too many of them hate us for reasons they don't even understand, I don't see the point anymore.
I like the idea of it, but California is a cash cow and the US would never let that cash cow get away.
Absolutely
New England. Maybe with NY, you could have New New.
What you are proposing would start a North American war deadlier than any that has ever been seen. Everyone thought Texas was dumb for talking about secession, but now that other states donβt want to be part of the union, people act like it is a serious idea. It isnβt. Never has been.
In the words of Ben Franklin, βwe must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.β
I'm not American, and I think you should all secede. Just like EU is a shit and quebec should be free.
You would have more than half the population of the country plunged into abject poverty. West Virginia would look like an apocalyptic hillbilly hellscape.
Everyone knew Texas talking about it was dumb because they're not self sufficient
California actually is, and if we're hated by the rest of the country anyway, we'll just go ahead and leave. Let the rest states have fun paying for shit without us
Define self sufficient.
California is not self sufficient in my opinion. They may have a lot of money, but they rely heavily on interstate commerce and trade routes for their prosperity. Taxes and cost of living are already high, and those things would explode if cut off from trade. The federal government wonβt hesitate to use their leverage to keep other countries from supporting the newly declared independence of California.
Texas is not self sufficient either, but Iβm not advocating for their secession.
Put simply, we need fewer borders, not more of them. Any state that thinks they can take their money and run will find themselves brutalized by the federal government, taxed to oblivion by neighboring states, and experiencing an exodus of companies who are based there. It is the path to destruction, not liberation.
This throws under the bus the many many non republicans in places gerrymandered such that the minority can continue it's rule. My life would probably get better, but only at their expense as more and more solvent states leave the union. I'm not willing to 'punish' those people for the crime of being born in a impossibly corrupt district.
I wholeheartedly agree.
Why did democrats not stop the gerrymandering? Why are there so many laws that should not exist still there?
Washingtonian here, I've been saying this should happen for like 8 years now lmao
The marriage isn't working. Let it go.
We have had a name for it for awhile, my fellow Washingtonians call the Washington/Oregon/California union 'Cascadia'. Wouldn't be such a bad idea.
Fuck yeah! Cascadia! Let us stop funding this awful government and actually put our taxes towards improving people's lives
If you donβt take AZ and NV with you, you will get your Colorado River water cut off and lose a lot of farming power. That might even require UT. Unless itβs only Northern California included, in which case you still lose that agriculture, and possible land based trade lines to Mexico. Itβs not a clean and pretty separation.
I don't think the population is as hopelessly divided as the social media spaces make it out to be, but at the same time, the federal government looks more and more unrecoverable from corporate interests and back to the people every single day. It's probably past the point of return, excepting major societal shakeup.
It feels like there may come a point where the states that are large enough to be countries on their own start looking into any mechanisms that would allow them separation, just to be able to run themselves without federal interference and incompetence.
Yes. In fact, I've decided to take a leap of faith and join the California National Party, which you can all check out here: CNP website. I am sick of the usual Republicans vs Democrats. Everytime one party is in power, we are constantly worrying about the loss of civil and human rights. Lets start with a clean slate. If you are a California resident, at least check out their party platform. Also, in 2026, there will be a gubernatorial candidate for CNP. His name is Sean Forbes.
If having human rights is dependent upon who's in power at the moment, you don't have human rights.
Right. Which is why I want to break free from the usual bullshit.
No, not really. While I am not white, I am American through and through. I don't really prefer to be something else. I just think we should fix what we can. Preferably while we can.
Anything that hastens the death of the U.S. is good by me.
As a US citizen and Oregon resident, absolutely.
But I don't honestly foresee it being possible or happening.
Californian. No.
It wouldn't solve any problems that can't be solved by other means, and it would create new problems that we haven't had to worry about before. It'd be a net loss for everyone involved.
We'd have to spend a fortune on defense.
We'd suffer massive losses from being cut off from interstate trade agreements.
We'd have to deal with massive immigration issues.
We'd probably get our shit pushed in from all the federal military bases within the state.
I think it's waaaay easier to just oust the current leadership and remove all the Congress members that aided and abetted.
If the Union completely dissolved and each state had to function as nation, it would be a massive boom for the oligarchs. They already have more money than most states.
Coloradan. Only if a neighboring State does, because if not, we are neighboring other borders and we would be landlocked without food or water imports. Its either all Pacific and Front Range States agree we have to split, or none of us can.
Our most populous cities, Denver and CO Springs, are below the mountains, and are screwed in a combat scenario.
I don't see Utah, Wyoming, Nevada, or Kansas doing so willingly.
No. We'd be overrun by federal troops and decimated within a week. If we could secede peacefully? We (Wisconsin) would probably need an alliance with Minnesota and Michigan to survive.
Yes
I'm at the point where I think we should peacefully dissolve the Union entirely. Just grant all 50 states full independence. Let the states come back together in whatever new nation or combination of nations they want.
Look at the current state of our politics. Step back and really look at it. Every political system relies ultimately not on a constitution, but on the good faith of the people actually governing. Look at how the current president is wiping his ass with every check and balance built into the system. Words and laws don't matter, there's always a bad faith interpretation that can allow the president to seize more and more power. And the Supreme Court is openly giving broad sweeping authority to Republican presidents while severely curtailing the power of Democratic presidents. Bribery is legal, and both parties are completely captured by the wealthy. Oh, and every last scrap of freedom, privacy, and autonomy are being torn down in the path of an ever-expanding surveillance panopticon.
I'm sorry. But by the time your political culture decays so far to allow this level of dysfunction, there's no saving it. Our constitution is a woefully out-of-date obsolete document that should have been scrapped generations ago. And it was made difficult to amend by people who had no idea how important amending it would later be. It was built for the compromises of the 1780s, not the compromises of the 2020s. We need to go through a new process of Constitution creation, potentially multiple such processes, and come back together based on new compromises that reflect the reality of the 21st century.
This nation cannot be saved. We need a peaceful national divorce. The alternative is likely something far worse, as we hurdle inexorably towards a second civil war.
Note: obviously there are practical difficulties with dissolving a nation. When this comes up, people love to hand wring about the national debt or how military assets will be dissolved in this kind of scenario. These are important but obvious concerns. But national myopia blinds us here. Nations have peacefully divided countless times through history. These matters are always handled through some negotiation process. American exceptionalism blinds us to our possible futures, simply because we are unwilling to look beyond our own borders for inspiration.
Indiana. We'd fail so hard and so fast that I literally cannot imagine it. People are nuts. It'd be instant MAGA-flavored Mad Max if they felt like they had an excuse to preemptively defend themselves with their guns across the countryside.
Wouldn't work out. World's too complicated for simple answers like that.
Leaving, even if it would produce a viable nation, would involve leaving a lot of people in the lurch. There's people in conservative states who need the counter balance of blue states to slow down their government's trend to self destruction and fascism.
Even though it's increasingly frustrating with how feeble that resistance is, it does keep things like banning gay marriage in the "difficult to pass" territory and not the "a few compromises" one.
I live in Oregon, I'd prefer it if Oregon joined Canada as a province, or like Washington and Oregon together. I don't think it's realistic. There's a lot of unanswered questions of how things would work but I have daydreamed about it.