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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   26195 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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I think stuff like this is good, and I think red state governors should be encouraged to do more of it.

However, most of the big issues the country faces can’t be solved by red states. Immigration in particular is a federal issue. If the US government issues visas for a hundred million inhabitants of the third world to come to the US, Texas can’t do anything about it other than secede.

And I think people overestimate the will for secession, too. Most Texans are politically inactive and see themselves as Americans. They are not willing to risk any reduction in quality of life as a result of political change. An independent Texas would be a pariah state - the US would force all Western countries not to recognize it, so its passport would be worthless. Most smart and wealthy people would emigrate. The state would be sanctioned and embargoed into poverty.

A committed Democratic President can destroy states that nullify federal instruction without ever sending a single soldier in. They can instruct banks to make minor changes to who they do business with and how that would destroy their economies in months. They can pull funding for key infrastructure. They can stymie interstate commerce by claiming that Texas or whoever isn’t following the rules, which would destroy their economy further.

Red states could challenge this, but SCOTUS (even now with Kavanaugh and Barrett much more leftist than anticipated on every non-Tradcath issue) wouldn’t help them and cases would be tied up in legal wrangling for years, all the while anyone with any money or skills would emigrate.

If the US government issues visas for a hundred million inhabitants of the third world to come to the US, Texas can’t do anything about it other than secede.

Texas can coordinate defiance to federal authority without pursuing secession. Federal authority is a norm, not an immutable law of the universe, and norms can go away over time. Here, defiance by Red Tribe provides the other half of the back-and-forth wrenching that will tear this norm out of its cultural foundations. The first half of the wrenching has been amply supplied by Blues for decades to any exercise of Federal authority by Reds. If Trump wins, we're absolutely going to see more broad-spectrum "resistance". If Abbott and DeSantis continue on their current trajectory, then we'll see more Broad spectrum resistance from Reds as well. Keep that up, and it's entirely possible that Federal authority loses all credibility, and the existing system simply dies. That's a better outcome than most we could ask for, and requires no battles or redrawing of borders.

I mean, everything is a norm. The command structure of a military at wartime is a norm. The security of your home is a norm. Adherence to contracts is a norm. That police arrest you for breaking the laws passed by the legislature, as opposed to the laws the police chief makes up, is a norm. Yet, we don't expect any of those norms to fall apart.

Yes, any of those norms could change. But they'd need good reasons to. Corporations are very familiar with what happens when they blatantly break federal regulations - it goes poorly - and they maintain close relationships with regulators. Texas just doesn't have much leverage, as one state of many, and the biggest and most economically productive states are blue anyway. Yes, sufficient disruption could break this norm - if the regulators started demanding war communism, your hypotheticals would stop being hypothetical. But they aren't, and nobody involved has enough dissident energy to do anything.

Federal authority is a norm, not an immutable law of the universe, and norms can go away over time.

Except it's a norm backed by a lot of guns.

Here, defiance by Red Tribe provides the other half of the back-and-forth wrenching that will tear this norm out of its cultural foundations.

And what is left after the norm of Federal authority is "torn out," if not the raw "obey or die" assertion of power through raw force?

If Abbott and DeSantis continue on their current trajectory, then we'll see more Broad spectrum resistance from Reds as well.

Only until Abbott, DeSantis, and their supporters end up in prison or dead.

Keep that up, and it's entirely possible that Federal authority loses all credibility

They don't need credibility, they just need to send armed FBI agents to do pre-dawn no-knock raids on enough of those who oppose them to deter the rest.

...A quote from a recent conversation seems relevant.

I am pretty confident that people can't do much better with a torture regime than we've seen them do in the past. That is to say, I think the problem is pretty well bounded by irreducible limits on human agency and capacity, and I do not expect this to change in the forseeable future.

The core of our disagreement comes down to whether there are practical limits to the exercise of power. You don't seem to believe that such limits exist, or are so distant that they cover all plausibly survivable spaces. I disagree. I don't think the Enlightenment revolutions of the 1800s - 1900s are repeatable, and I think the social systems that produce similar regimes are observably dying. That does not mean we are heading for utopia; there is no utopia. It does mean that humans are moving away from centralized control as the default organizational principle of society. Attempting to assert control through the naked exercise of force is less practical now than it was previously, and it grows less practical over time.

For a long time, castles were the defining paradigm of force. When gunpowder arrived, one might argue that it should benefit castles, since it allowed faster mining and quarrying of stone with which to build them. One would be wrong.

That does not mean we are heading for utopia; there is no utopia.

Agreed.

It does mean that humans are moving away from centralized control as the default organizational principle of society.

Disagree. Where's your evidence of this? The internet and computers are only making centralization of control more effective than ever.

Attempting to assert control through the naked exercise of force is less practical now than it was previously, and it grows less practical over time.

Also wrong. You cite the invention of guns removing the power of castles. Yes, there was a trend, for centuries after the invention of gunpowder, that made "the naked exercise of force less practical," gave power to "the people" and drove the rise of democracies. Such trends of labor-over-capital in military effectiveness peaked over a century ago, and the trend has been back toward high-capital "knightly" military elites, leading "government versus masses" conflict to look less like the French Revolution, and more like the German Peasants' War.

We're seeing in Ukraine the failure of "war of movement" and "hordes of expendable replaceable meat" of the past century, and to elite battlefield drone operators as the new knights:

Hordes of expendable replaceable meat just are not working very well. One very good drone operator is responsible for a significant proportion of all recent Ukrainian casualties — we are drifting towards early iron age warfare where a single very good warrior with very good and very expensive equipment can make the difference between winning and losing, and tenth century warfare where men fought largely as individual heroes.

We are moving towards aristocratic warfare, with the likely result that we will return to aristocratic governance.

You've already called me a liar and and stated that I should not be listened to. Why are you still trying to talk to me?

The purpose of debate is not to convince the other side, it's to convince the audience. It is to their benefit that I address the claims you make, rather than allowing those claims to sit un-rebutted.

You're wrong, and I'm not going to stop pointing out when you're wrong.

Do what you need to do, sir.

The Obama administration's decision to let the states do an end-run around federal drug laws that marked one of the biggest swings in favor of state power away from federal power seems like a very important but under-examined swing from state power to federal power, a huge erosion of the federal power norm.

If the US government issues visas for a hundred million inhabitants of the third world to come to the US, Texas can’t do anything about it other than secede.

Issuing visas would, at the very least, include an enforcement mechanism for finding and deporting people who don't meet their visa conditions. This would put the lie to either "Republicans don't like immigrants, 'illegal' is just a fig leaf for hate" or "Democrats don't want any border security, they just want new voters, either this generation or the next."

Is the only principled position either zero immigrants or infinity immigrants?

No. The principles involved might include numbers, which would require a measurement of some sort to have a min and a max, but there are a few other qualifications which should be considered. For example, is it known that this person was freed from prison in their home country to get a visa to the USA? No visa.

Irrespective of who is receiving them, what's the number of visas that could be issued within the foreseeable future for which shaking your fist at couldn't necessarily be considered evidence of xenophobia? Would a billion do it?

I don’t know as I haven’t done the math, but the current flow rate of migrants, refugees, and immigrants are being cited by economists as being good for the economy by depressing wages. Fewer than that.

I think a (the?) big elephant in the room with secession is that whichever side successfully cons the other side into jumping first keeps the Presidency for the next 50 years.* Get one of the Big Four states to bail, and suddenly there are 30 - 50 EC votes that your side never needs to worry about again. Now all of a sudden you get a massive leg up in domestic politics and implementing whatever pet domestic agenda you had in mind.

Right now, the echo of Lincoln still rings loudly in our years (the last American Civil War vet died in '56 and the last veteran bride just passed away in 2020). Every single President has been a combination of too much of a true believer in the American project and too much of a realpolitik pragmatist to give away a US state, even if there was internal support for it (there hasn't been.)

Ideologically, I think younger Americans (left and right) are less inclined to have a patriotism or nationalism towards their country as a motherland/fatherland. Some of them might see it merely as a tool to achieve their preferred policy ends (and indeed that's a common attitude towards government these days!) Combine that with an intense focus on maintaining domestic political power, a lack of pragmatic understanding** and a world where there is some native demand for a national divorce and I could see a future where a sitting President goes "besides millions of taxpayers, tens of thousands of servicemen, dozens of vital military installations, four or five different priceless natural resources, and one really nice vacation spot, what have those 40ish Electoral College votes ever done for us?" (Technically this even sort-of happened the first time; the feds did ~zip to stop secession until Lincoln took office.)

I'm not sure such a situation is likely per se, but I think it will be something that will be on the radar in the minds of future politicians in a way that it isn't of most currently serving ones.

An interesting barometer here is Brexit and the Scottish independence question. Obviously Brexit went through, and from what I can tell there's zero English interest in even something relatively mild (like sanctions) if Scotland actually votes to secede. I don't think that this rules out punitive actions or even military action against seceding states, but after a clear referenda I think it is politically trickier.

*In reality I suspect this is a mirage, actually, but a tempting one.

**I'm not actually sure if future governing generations will be worse at pragmatic understanding, to be clear. Certainly many younger people seem less pragmatically-minded, but I'm not sure that's ever been otherwise!

An interesting barometer here is Brexit and the Scottish independence question. Obviously Brexit went through, and from what I can tell there's zero English interest in even something relatively mild (like sanctions) if Scotland actually votes to secede. I don't think that this rules out punitive actions or even military action against seceding states, but after a clear referenda I think it is politically trickier.

On the other hand, there's the Catalonian independence referendum that got declared illegal by Spain and people arrested for voting, while the rest of the EU gave zero fucks.

There's the ethnic cleansing of Artasakh, 200k people ran away. Russian peacekeepers lost iirc 10+ soldiers. Allegedly a few massacres too.

No one gives a fuck, somehow. Azeris are 'reliable allies'.

People only give a fuck if there's a lobby group.

Armenians have been staunch Russian allies for decades and are close to Iran, they were screwed over by their allies. On /r/europe the attitude is typically ‘it sucks, but that’s what you get for trusting Russia’.

They snubbed Russia in 2010s and tried to cozy up to the West. Also Russia is very much occupied at the moment, which is likely what let Azeris get away with the ethnic cleansing.

I have strong doubts Russians would have just eaten getting their troops killed like this if they weren't engaged in Ukraine.

Yeah, @hydroacetylene is right. We are so many steps from Texit. That’s precisely why it makes a good fringe position.

Actual successful secession would result in, more than likely, the collapse of U.S. hegemony because losing a major core province is a pretty big failure and whatever you can say about China’s weaknesses, they’re not about to face that problem.

I agree, but none of that means Germans and British and French are likely to recognize a hard-right independent Texas without the approval of the rUS. The Union was much less powerful internationally and up against a stronger foe in the civil war and even then no other country officially recognized the CSA.

Really the only optimistic case for Texas secession is a full breakup of the US with limited hard feelings and no large and powerful bicoastal blue bloc, which seems unlikely.

You think Texas is gonna care about the alzheimer states of EU?

Lmao. TX is going to care whether they can trade with China.

Yeah, and the United States could close shipping traffic to the Gulf (which in any case requires ships from China to take the long way around) and could block imports from California.

Yeah, and cause a shooting war between Texas & China and the United States in which obsolete weapon systems would encounter new weapon systems.

Chinese would be merely defending freedom of the seas there and preventing an illegitimate blockade.

You're changing the scenario from "pariah state" to a full-blown war with this.

Like I said, it wouldn’t come to it. Chinese trade isn’t enough to keep Texas alive. It all comes back to the fact that secession without a comprehensive, EEA-style free trade and movement treaty would be suicide. A single sanction prohibiting US-domiciled corporations from doing business in Texas (which would be a day-one emergency bill through congress) would be enough to kill the Texan economy. The US couldn’t survive the loss of 10+ states for long, but Texas? Yeah, it would be weakened, but it probably could.

The question is ‘how much is the average Texan prepared to suffer for independence?’ After all, unlike Russia, Texas is a democracy. The US would gladly welcome back smart refugees. The average Texan is not ethnically or culturally discriminated against by the rest of the United States. They share the majority of their culture, religions and values. How badly do they believe in independence, how much is the average car mechanic in Fort Worth or defense attorney in Dallas prepared to sacrifice to live in broadly the same kind of state they already live in?

broadly the same kind of state they already live in?

The Free State of Texas is going to have MORE gun freedoms, more free speech, no abortions, no homos, no blacks, no woman votes, and no troons. It will be paradise.

This is far too negative of secession or blue tribe power. It would lead both sides to be poorer and likely the end of the US global empire. Texas and red would also control the blues by the balls with their authority over energy and oil. Sure controlling banks are nice but an energy embargo by red shuts blue down completely. Texas would also have Elon Musks who isn’t leaving and at this points it’s probably fair to say that Elon views blue tribe as a death cult.

Elon retweeted my favorite LDS twitter fundamentalist due to the guy's good speech on fertility.

Incredible event. What the hell?

Honestly incredible if Elon and a few people like him start to support these sorts of initiatives.

Probably right. Of course, if Texas and the South broke away…not sure there would be sufficient strength by the rest of the US to enforce pariah state status.

That scenario isn’t really in the cards. Even an actual and not just threatened Texas secession probably doesn’t want to bring the south with it- Texas doesn’t want to be Germany and the Netherlands combined for a neocofederate EU. The rest of the south is largely nonproductive before the breakup of the hegemon causes a financial crash.

I don’t think that is right. Georgia and Florida are not unproductive. Florida has a massive economy. The Carolinas are quite productive.

Parts of Alabama are productive.

Louisiana controls the Mississippi river chokepoint, which is pretty strategic. Just as an exercise in good geopolitics it would be smart to secure it if you could, I think.

Similar deal with Florida (gives you much more control over the Gulf). I think you'd also (with TX + FL) scoop most of the US' space launch infrastructure (although Vandenberg is in California) and that could pay off considerably down the road.

Security benefits can be a bit hard to quantify at times, so whether or not that would "pay off" or not, I don't know. Given some sort of national breakup, from Texas' POV it seems like the smart thing to do might be to pursue a security/diplomatic alliance with other states that secede without committing to financial support, which would increase mutual safety without dragging Texas down in a negative financial spiral.

I have a theory that if some states broke off from the US of A without a wholesale US collapse, it might cause some very interesting fiscal effects that would bolster the long-run standing of the breakaway states, but I think in the short term even with a mutually amicable separation it would cause a considerable financial shakeup in the best-case scenario.

Oh, paying the bills for southern Louisiana- albeit a not-as-nice as current southern Louisiana- makes strategic sense for an independent Texas, because the mouth of the Mississippi is very important. The place is basically run by engineers from A&M anyways and cutting the local elites down to scale is pretty doable and cuts admin costs drastically by reducing corruption.

But Texas accepting responsibility for the fiscal health of everything in the south that has to be subsidized seems unlikely. And while Florida, Georgia, North Carolina might be able to pay their own way, on a fiscal basis they’re not there to subsidize others.

The PMC would leave, the media (both domestic and international) would frame it as a racist restoration of Dixie, the demographics of the seceded states would be terrible, the European countries and likely all of Latin America (which is either leftist or allied with Washington, neither of which are sympathetic to a free conservative south) would sanction it to hell, all national and international businesses would leave, unemployment would skyrocket, a lack of federal subsidies would make programs that keep the underclass in these states under control and pliable impossible, what would be left?

A small population of true believer white elites; middle class people of all races who would suffer tremendously; some Hispanics; a vast population of poor black people who would be no fans of the new arrangement. Little viable industry or commerce. The only way states are seceding is a peaceable National Divorce with an explicit and structured economic union between the new countries, a neutral court of arbitration, something like the European Union pre-1994. Even that would be tough for the South.

would sanction it to hell, all national and international businesses would leave, unemployment would skyrocket, a lack of federal subsidies would make programs that keep the underclass in these states under control and pliable

Sounds just like what was supposed to happen to Russia, yet here we are.

has no real need not to keep trading with both parties.

If Texas wasn't sanctioned by China, what problem would they have? Chinese sell everything.

If Texas wasn't sanctioned by China, what problem would they have?

The Panama Channel, possibly? Though I guess if Europe didn't really notice the detour around Africa to avoid the Houthis, it shouldn't really matter.

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