Thanks as always to The Other McCain, Whores and Ale, Pirate’s Cove and Bacon Time for the Rule Five links!

I found this interesting; Salvaging Secession is a treatise on the history of, and future prospects for, secession in the United States.  Suffice it to say that the issue didn’t originate with the War Between the States, and it didn’t die with the end of that horrendous conflict.  Excerpt:

Would a President Biden or a President Trump order a federal invasion of a breakaway state? Dropping the 82nd Airborne into the Green Mountains to put down Vermont’s peaceable disunionists seems preposterous, though in other instances one can easily imagine the corporate media preparing the ground for a Biden-ordered assault.

If, say, a libertarian-tinged state of the Rocky Mountain West should seek to leave the Union, the rebels surely would be smeared as meth-manufacturing, child-abusing white supremacists. Or if Portland, Oregon, taking a cue from Fernando Wood, the Civil War–era mayor of New York City who proposed making Gotham a free and independent city-state, should declare an independent Portlandia, President Trump might well introduce those angry-faced white girls throwing Molotov cocktails and hissy fits to the M1 Abrams Tank.

Unlike in 1861, there is no sectional fault line along which the union could cleave. A likelier scenario is the fissioning of states, as mammoth entities such as California and New York, whose rural and small-city populations are powerless outlanders, fracture into more comprehensible units. Lose the Last Frontier and the Aloha State, gain Alta California and Upstate New York. You don’t even need to redesign the flag.

Note that author Bill Kaufmann just kind of assumes that in this scenario, Alaska and Hawaii (referred to as the “Cold War states”) either leave on their own or are cut loose to go their own way.  That’s not too unlikely; both states have significant independence movements within their borders.  Alaska could possibly go their own way, with great fisheries, plenty of oil and gas, a good shipping port at Anchorage and a surprising amount of excellent farmland in the Matanuska and Sustina valleys.  Were I in Hawaii, I’d be a little concerned about China; Pearl Harbor is too excellent a port to be left in the hands of a tiny island nation whose economy runs largely on tourism.  Maybe the U.S. would make an arrangement with the new island nation to continue hosting the Pacific Fleet at Pearl; who knows?

But what I find interesting is the idea of breaking some of the big states, like California, up into more easily-manageable and culturally cohesive units.  Having driven around the “State of Jefferson” region of northern California and spent some time gassing with the locals, I can tell you that would be a popular move with plenty of folks.

This kind of thing may be the best solution all around.