by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I will admit that it definitely FEELS like the United States has finally run out of political gas and we’re just about to implode into a Second American Civil War. In an abstract manner, you could say there are about 20 states in the Mountain area of the United States that could secede and make then try to negotiate their peaceful exit from the Union. (This, of course, will never happen, but they can try.)
But that’s not really the issue. The issue is the former states of the Confederacy. It’s all the good old boys in across the South who are itching to see the South “rise again.” But, as I’ve said, ironically, it would make a lot more sense for Trump to drive Blue States out of the Union, then crush them using the Insurrection Act than it would for Red (CSA) States to attempt to leave the Union.
The issues: race and economics.
And effort to leave the Union by the old CSA states slam into two pretty huge problems. The first, of course, is race. No amount of pouting by easily triggered snowflake good old boys is going to convince the Southern black community that they could get a better deal in a New Confederacy. It’s a dead on arrival concept.
It’s that specific issue that makes me believe that even if Trump snapped at some point after January 6th and went transactional on Twitter about secession that it just wouldn’t work out. It might cause rolling political — and racial — violence across huge swaths of the country, but it wouldn’t be a civil war. And even if there was a secession crisis, I can’t think of a single old CSA state that cold leave the Union cleanly via a convention.
Andy secession would have to happen after a violent coup and even then, how secessionists would be able to take places like Atlanta, Richmond or Austin is a puzzle. So, at best, they might control big parts of the old CSA and declare some sort of Neo-Nazi state and start murdering black and liberals wholesale. But the whole “South Shall Rise Again” mythos would be…..not quite what the good old boys think it will be.
Let’s talk about economics.
The South, which would do much better as part of a Red State USA instead of a Neo-CSA, is not uniform anymore. States like Texas, Virginia and Florida are far more modern and urban than the Southern Good Old Boys would have us to believe. As I mentioned, Atlanta in itself is such a huge city that it would likely rather stay in the Union by itself than join any secessionist movement by the rest of the state.
As such, not only would you have to have some sort of political 9/11 for secession to take off, but your best bet as a Southern Good Old Boy would be for it to be BLUE states that leave the Union, not Red States.
But good old boys gonna good old boy.