You're criticizing my analysis of being non-materialist while saying that "America will split along these straight lines on a map" which is much further from a materialist analysis.
Literally every single country has these divisions and they’ve held together just fine.
No, there is definitely a difference between countries that got their national and subnational boundaries from rapid colonial forces (most of North America, Africa, the Middle East, and Australia), and those that developed theirs slower. Mali and Iraq, 2 examples of non-Western countries with straight-line colonial borders, are not "holding together just fine" the way that Iran or Vietnam or Lesotho are.
IF state borders ceased to exist, you’d probably be right that the new borders would not be the same as the old.
OK that was the pith of the argument.
But you’re expecting the ruling class to play a passive role in all of this.
They're letting the federal government collapse, but for some reason they're not letting the state government collapse? That's kind of odd. Correct me if I'm wrong, but if my memory is right, you have posted before about living in a state that happens to have a rather dysfunctional state government. I can relate.
Other countries have had cultural divisions and have been just fine.
Messrs. Sykes and Picot thought exactly the same.
Not all state borders will collapse. River and mountain boundaries, plus the Mason-Dixon line, will all stay fixed. The use of state National Guards is a good point I hadn't thought of, but it's not enough to prevent CA, OR, WA, TX, IL, PA, NY, and FL (and maybe NC, VA, and OH too) from splitting up and reconfiguring. Look at the Syrian civil war- the only subnational boundary that was reflected on the lines of control was al-Suweyda, around Jabal al-Druze.
In terms of the grid, I would expect some states (or fragments of states) to try to reconfigure regional cooperation. But I don't expect it to extend very far.
The other crux of the point is that cultural divisions follow economic divisions. In this case, New Netherland only extends to NYC plus some of the trade-navigable Hudson, Greater Appalachia follows the economic patterns of the highlands, the Midlands is the farming lowlands of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, the Far West is dominated by big ranchers, El Norte is the result of hundreds of years of connected haciendas and missions, and the Deep South is where slavery was most scalable. The back cover says "cultural", but in the actual text the author talks mostly about economic paradigms.
I learned a lot from the book, and it helped me cut through several liberal political illusions and some of the rigidity of Western thinking.
They are literally an example of a country making different cultural groups work.
Yes, and it's a very unlikely history. Only by a certain twist of fate did all the colonies end up rebelling at once; the confederation almost fell apart several times; various states threatened to leave the union many times, with the majority of the first 13 doing so at least once; a central point and tension in the country's history was when the economic and ideological enmity between a handful of regions escalated first to a civil war and then to a continuation campaign of cultural extermination that (unfortunately, imo) failed. It has always been threatening to come undone, because it's forcing things together that are not inclined to stay together. I don't think it's a controversial idea to claim that the United States is far less stable in the long run than many European and Asian countries.
It's not like Woodard's map is going to be the exact outcome- these realignments take a long time to happen, and there's a lot of blurring of the boundaries between them- but there are many fault lines through existing states that he traces that will be very likely to split.
The first states to go to war with each other are most likely going to be coastal California vs. inland California. This is way more likely than PA and MD/VA going to war, or KY and TN, or CO and UT, or MI and OH. I can't really even name a pair of states that would have a likely dispute between them that would cause one to invade the other (besides water wars, which wouldn't clearly have states themselves as belligerents). There are, however, very noticeable strains within states that could rip them apart. It's technically only happened once before, but with even a weakened federal government, it could easily happen more. State governments are not unitary things, they're agglomerations of many different interests. We should not be viewing them as coherent wholes.
Kentucky and Tennessee became their own states, instead of extensions of the charters that Virginia and North Carolina had, largely because the people who settled within and west of the Appalachians had a society with an economic composition and class structure that differs from its counterparts along the coast.
Social structure follows economic structure, and state lines don't line up with economic structure at all, except to the small extent to which they've induced it. I find it really hard to conceptualize the federal government dissolving but the state governments holding strong.
Most people in SC see the people in the northwestern part as "different". Most people in AL see the people in the northern part as "different". In FL, the more north you go, the more South it gets. In Louisiana, you get a couple dozen miles away from the bayou and you're in a very different place. Cleveland and Cincinnati have less to do with each other than with Erie and Louisville, respectively.
I can apply this to other countries with straight line surveyed borders too. Mali, Niger, Libya, and Chad all have conflicts involving the Tuareg and other peoples of the Sahara. Then there's Iraq and Syria, which I've mentioned. Yemen too. All of these have regional economic and social lines that match each other but not the political delineations.
There is an economic reality that is largely a bunch of different patches, and our rectilinear state lines paper over this. In the event of governmental collapse, intra-state conflicts are going to be way more common and consequential than inter-state conflicts; that's my point that I'll stand on and I wonder if you will challenge it.
deleted by creator
You're criticizing my analysis of being non-materialist while saying that "America will split along these straight lines on a map" which is much further from a materialist analysis.
No, there is definitely a difference between countries that got their national and subnational boundaries from rapid colonial forces (most of North America, Africa, the Middle East, and Australia), and those that developed theirs slower. Mali and Iraq, 2 examples of non-Western countries with straight-line colonial borders, are not "holding together just fine" the way that Iran or Vietnam or Lesotho are.
OK that was the pith of the argument.
They're letting the federal government collapse, but for some reason they're not letting the state government collapse? That's kind of odd. Correct me if I'm wrong, but if my memory is right, you have posted before about living in a state that happens to have a rather dysfunctional state government. I can relate.
deleted by creator
Messrs. Sykes and Picot thought exactly the same.
Not all state borders will collapse. River and mountain boundaries, plus the Mason-Dixon line, will all stay fixed. The use of state National Guards is a good point I hadn't thought of, but it's not enough to prevent CA, OR, WA, TX, IL, PA, NY, and FL (and maybe NC, VA, and OH too) from splitting up and reconfiguring. Look at the Syrian civil war- the only subnational boundary that was reflected on the lines of control was al-Suweyda, around Jabal al-Druze.
In terms of the grid, I would expect some states (or fragments of states) to try to reconfigure regional cooperation. But I don't expect it to extend very far.
The other crux of the point is that cultural divisions follow economic divisions. In this case, New Netherland only extends to NYC plus some of the trade-navigable Hudson, Greater Appalachia follows the economic patterns of the highlands, the Midlands is the farming lowlands of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, the Far West is dominated by big ranchers, El Norte is the result of hundreds of years of connected haciendas and missions, and the Deep South is where slavery was most scalable. The back cover says "cultural", but in the actual text the author talks mostly about economic paradigms.
I learned a lot from the book, and it helped me cut through several liberal political illusions and some of the rigidity of Western thinking.
deleted by creator
Yes, and it's a very unlikely history. Only by a certain twist of fate did all the colonies end up rebelling at once; the confederation almost fell apart several times; various states threatened to leave the union many times, with the majority of the first 13 doing so at least once; a central point and tension in the country's history was when the economic and ideological enmity between a handful of regions escalated first to a civil war and then to a continuation campaign of cultural extermination that (unfortunately, imo) failed. It has always been threatening to come undone, because it's forcing things together that are not inclined to stay together. I don't think it's a controversial idea to claim that the United States is far less stable in the long run than many European and Asian countries.
It's not like Woodard's map is going to be the exact outcome- these realignments take a long time to happen, and there's a lot of blurring of the boundaries between them- but there are many fault lines through existing states that he traces that will be very likely to split.
The first states to go to war with each other are most likely going to be coastal California vs. inland California. This is way more likely than PA and MD/VA going to war, or KY and TN, or CO and UT, or MI and OH. I can't really even name a pair of states that would have a likely dispute between them that would cause one to invade the other (besides water wars, which wouldn't clearly have states themselves as belligerents). There are, however, very noticeable strains within states that could rip them apart. It's technically only happened once before, but with even a weakened federal government, it could easily happen more. State governments are not unitary things, they're agglomerations of many different interests. We should not be viewing them as coherent wholes.
deleted by creator
Kentucky and Tennessee became their own states, instead of extensions of the charters that Virginia and North Carolina had, largely because the people who settled within and west of the Appalachians had a society with an economic composition and class structure that differs from its counterparts along the coast.
Social structure follows economic structure, and state lines don't line up with economic structure at all, except to the small extent to which they've induced it. I find it really hard to conceptualize the federal government dissolving but the state governments holding strong.
Most people in SC see the people in the northwestern part as "different". Most people in AL see the people in the northern part as "different". In FL, the more north you go, the more South it gets. In Louisiana, you get a couple dozen miles away from the bayou and you're in a very different place. Cleveland and Cincinnati have less to do with each other than with Erie and Louisville, respectively.
I can apply this to other countries with straight line surveyed borders too. Mali, Niger, Libya, and Chad all have conflicts involving the Tuareg and other peoples of the Sahara. Then there's Iraq and Syria, which I've mentioned. Yemen too. All of these have regional economic and social lines that match each other but not the political delineations.
There is an economic reality that is largely a bunch of different patches, and our rectilinear state lines paper over this. In the event of governmental collapse, intra-state conflicts are going to be way more common and consequential than inter-state conflicts; that's my point that I'll stand on and I wonder if you will challenge it.
deleted by creator