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.
You keep saying "cultural differences" even though I haven't said it in the past 3 posts. Maybe read past just the publisher's description instead of getting hung up for 20 paragraphs on a single phrase. Forget I ever said "cultural". We're talking about different economies within a country, and different superstructures that thereby have emerged.
China is not a counterexample to what I'm saying. Federal Chinese polities have existed for 4000 years; the US has had most of its territory for just 175 years. The US got most of its population by rapid immigration and expansion and displacement; none of these are true of China. Are you seriously suggesting that China and the US are comparable in the scale of the forces that drive them toward disunity?
A country of 8 farmers... ...homogeneous economic activity is not an advantage
I never argued that. I am saying that it is difficult to bring people together across distances longer than a regular commute or short-distance trade route. Most localities have multiple industries anyway, places with just one are the exceptions. With a territory the size of a metropolitan area, you're not required to restrict activity to 1 industry. That'd be ridiculous.
I'm not interested in going back and forth with you putting words in my mouth. I'll get back to your original question: "wouldn't Texas be better off with their separate grid?"
Logistics are going to break down in the event of collapse, mostly based on geography. Texas might be big but it's not self-sufficient; no place is in today's globalized market. When things start to falter, it's going to become a lot harder to acquire and transport resources. Texas has lots of oil reserves, but those are less valuable than nuclear plants or hydropower for maintaining a baseline for the grid, and they have more vulnerabilities- for starters, most of the refineries are close to Houston and much of the sources are in North Texas. Reliable transportation/shipping infrastructure in Texas after federal disintegration is an unlikely prospect.
Furthermore, it's likely that states on the same power grid will have a strong incentive to work with each other. Wherever there are fault lines, there will be fragmentation, and whichever side has more power generation is going to be better off, and whichever side has less power generation will be worse off in reestablishing a grid.
Would it surprise you if I told you that the Texas Interconnection doesn't actually line up with Texas' state boundary? What if I told you that there's a certain familiar pattern in what that disparity is?
I have no idea where you're getting that from. It has nothing to do with "being homogenous", you're pulling that out of nowhere and shoving the words in my mouth. There are regions that have different factors that influence their production and markets, and that also have different class structures. It's plain old human geography. It is not such a complicated idea that, for instance, watersheds are more spontaneous/natural ways that people organize themselves, compared to latitudinal/longitudinal rectangles.
Granted, we do see some state borders that are formed by rivers and mountains. Those are the more stable ones.
You seem to be pretty confident that if the federal government (and armed forces) collapsed, that the factors that caused this would leave the state governments untouched. I guarantee you that many state governments (if not the majority of them) are way less stable than the federal government. And you seem to take it for granted that not only would the National Guard be in full operational order, but also ready and willing to engage in battle with and fire on their own citizens.
Let me give you a hypothetical if you want to knock it out. Federal government dissolves or weakens, and then the eastern 2/3 of both Washington and Oregon secede from their respective states. What happens next? Do the governments in Olympia and Portland engage in military campaigns to bring back the status quo ante of imaginary lines on a map?
Okay, then explain exactly what you mean by the 11 nations argument.
There are connections between places, largely resulting from terrain and biomes and climate, that matter much more than imaginary straight lines on a map. People naturally associate with others in their locality (<50 mile radius or so). For associations beyond that, geography matters much more than arbitrary straight lines. In the case of Africa which is not united by a single language, language is another thing that influences how close the association between neighboring countries is. If you were to forget the associations that American history primes you with, and then look at the physical map of the continent, you probably wouldn't divide it up the way it is now. You'd probably have the Appalachians separate from the east coast, and split each coast up into at least 2 parts at the climatic dividing line. You'd also see a continuity between the Rio Grande valley and northern Mexico. American Nations is one of the books that helped me develop a constructivist understanding of geography and anthropology instead of an essentialist one understanding.
Why would the guard, who does not depend on the fed, suddenly collapse?
Because the state governments are not independent of the federal government, and more importantly, the factors that would collapse the fed would also put very heavy strain on the states. You're assuming a situation that's like a person being killed by an explosion, but their brain and heart and lungs and stomach and liver and intestines all staying intact. What rips apart the whole is going to rip apart (at least some of) the components.
I would almost guarantee that any state apparatus would be more than willing to kill and suppress protesters in the event of a federal collapse.
Why would they do it to keep the imaginary line in place though? What matters is securing population centers and resource flows.
[Oregon] would not hesitate to kill some traitorous rural farmer.
The Great Basin is too dry for farming. Between the eastern edge of the Great Plains (concentrations of population in a north-south belt across SD, NE, IA, KS, MO, and OK) and the Western Rockies, you either have extremely unsustainable megafarms, or tiny individuals hanging on here and there, or nothing at all. The Malheur standoff was over grazing rights. I think you'd do well to read stuff about geography.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You keep saying "cultural differences" even though I haven't said it in the past 3 posts. Maybe read past just the publisher's description instead of getting hung up for 20 paragraphs on a single phrase. Forget I ever said "cultural". We're talking about different economies within a country, and different superstructures that thereby have emerged.
China is not a counterexample to what I'm saying. Federal Chinese polities have existed for 4000 years; the US has had most of its territory for just 175 years. The US got most of its population by rapid immigration and expansion and displacement; none of these are true of China. Are you seriously suggesting that China and the US are comparable in the scale of the forces that drive them toward disunity?
I never argued that. I am saying that it is difficult to bring people together across distances longer than a regular commute or short-distance trade route. Most localities have multiple industries anyway, places with just one are the exceptions. With a territory the size of a metropolitan area, you're not required to restrict activity to 1 industry. That'd be ridiculous.
I'm not interested in going back and forth with you putting words in my mouth. I'll get back to your original question: "wouldn't Texas be better off with their separate grid?"
Logistics are going to break down in the event of collapse, mostly based on geography. Texas might be big but it's not self-sufficient; no place is in today's globalized market. When things start to falter, it's going to become a lot harder to acquire and transport resources. Texas has lots of oil reserves, but those are less valuable than nuclear plants or hydropower for maintaining a baseline for the grid, and they have more vulnerabilities- for starters, most of the refineries are close to Houston and much of the sources are in North Texas. Reliable transportation/shipping infrastructure in Texas after federal disintegration is an unlikely prospect.
Furthermore, it's likely that states on the same power grid will have a strong incentive to work with each other. Wherever there are fault lines, there will be fragmentation, and whichever side has more power generation is going to be better off, and whichever side has less power generation will be worse off in reestablishing a grid.
Would it surprise you if I told you that the Texas Interconnection doesn't actually line up with Texas' state boundary? What if I told you that there's a certain familiar pattern in what that disparity is?
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I have no idea where you're getting that from. It has nothing to do with "being homogenous", you're pulling that out of nowhere and shoving the words in my mouth. There are regions that have different factors that influence their production and markets, and that also have different class structures. It's plain old human geography. It is not such a complicated idea that, for instance, watersheds are more spontaneous/natural ways that people organize themselves, compared to latitudinal/longitudinal rectangles.
Granted, we do see some state borders that are formed by rivers and mountains. Those are the more stable ones.
You seem to be pretty confident that if the federal government (and armed forces) collapsed, that the factors that caused this would leave the state governments untouched. I guarantee you that many state governments (if not the majority of them) are way less stable than the federal government. And you seem to take it for granted that not only would the National Guard be in full operational order, but also ready and willing to engage in battle with and fire on their own citizens.
Let me give you a hypothetical if you want to knock it out. Federal government dissolves or weakens, and then the eastern 2/3 of both Washington and Oregon secede from their respective states. What happens next? Do the governments in Olympia and Portland engage in military campaigns to bring back the status quo ante of imaginary lines on a map?
deleted by creator
There are connections between places, largely resulting from terrain and biomes and climate, that matter much more than imaginary straight lines on a map. People naturally associate with others in their locality (<50 mile radius or so). For associations beyond that, geography matters much more than arbitrary straight lines. In the case of Africa which is not united by a single language, language is another thing that influences how close the association between neighboring countries is. If you were to forget the associations that American history primes you with, and then look at the physical map of the continent, you probably wouldn't divide it up the way it is now. You'd probably have the Appalachians separate from the east coast, and split each coast up into at least 2 parts at the climatic dividing line. You'd also see a continuity between the Rio Grande valley and northern Mexico. American Nations is one of the books that helped me develop a constructivist understanding of geography and anthropology instead of an essentialist one understanding.
Because the state governments are not independent of the federal government, and more importantly, the factors that would collapse the fed would also put very heavy strain on the states. You're assuming a situation that's like a person being killed by an explosion, but their brain and heart and lungs and stomach and liver and intestines all staying intact. What rips apart the whole is going to rip apart (at least some of) the components.
Why would they do it to keep the imaginary line in place though? What matters is securing population centers and resource flows.
The Great Basin is too dry for farming. Between the eastern edge of the Great Plains (concentrations of population in a north-south belt across SD, NE, IA, KS, MO, and OK) and the Western Rockies, you either have extremely unsustainable megafarms, or tiny individuals hanging on here and there, or nothing at all. The Malheur standoff was over grazing rights. I think you'd do well to read stuff about geography.