In Reply to: The west should secede posted by CoastalBruin on October 02, 2025 at 19:30:44
It doesn't come easy, so bear with me.
Social change is not easy. What we saw in the last decade is social change that sat on its laurels, got complacent, self-indulged, self-righteous, and self-centered getting a full on reactionary backlash that's been pent up for decades.
One fundamental rule of social change is that it takes a long time to achieve. We should not confuse the dialectical qualitative leap that occurs at the end with the totality of the change. So yes, the country seemed to have turned on the issue of gay marriage very quickly, but the change that brought us there was a gradual, grinding grueling groundwork that took decades, generations to make the conditions just right for that last push. That was the fundamental miscalculation of the trans community. They thought the change itself was rapid and that it would be a short hop from there to their liberation. It never works that way. We were actually at the grueling groundwork required for that next phase of change and extending individual liberty to people who felt they were in the wrong body. We were at the start of that process, but being so blissfully unaware of how history worked, we decided to skip to the end.
Now, let's not underestimate the leverage that trans issues gave to the right. I see that as the spark that blew up the right's long simmering anger. But that anger had its own long process of dialectical quantitative accumulation, i.e., the continual increase in pressure.
The pressure I speak of is the blend of racial resentment and economic realignment that took place since the 80s. The civil rights change of the 60s was the initial state for race resentment (whites no longer being the masters of the nation) and economic opportunities beginning to create its own black "upper crust" (technically middle to high middle class) that gradually began to do better than the white bottom in visible ways (thanks to the spread of mass media in the second half of the 20th century). As the myth of economic fluidity became more and more untenable (which eventually got shattered in 2008) lower end whites saw that their efforts were not being rewarded by the system (the death of the American Dream) while they were getting left behind by a handful of nonwhites who were playing their hands well, including some black dude with a funny name who got to be the president of the US in 2008. So that also brought things to their breaking point.
During this process, the biggest mistake liberals made (which the Democratic Party amplified) was to think that if non-white folks are doing better, then this was surely a good sign that everyone was doing better. So being on NAFTA, being in the dot.com boom and its reign of venture capitalism. Sure there were some economically low level white folks in the country (for some reason, West Virginian coal miners are the poster boys), but that also points at racial equality at the lower wrungs of the society, so that's a healthy sign. For a brand of liberalism that takes capitalism is its core morality (a version that I very clearly do not subscribe to), it was all hunky dory, obviously.
That fell apart in 2016 with (a) that orange dude who came down from the elevator and talked directly to those white folks and called out the establishment's lies, and (b) Democrats giddily putting up a women as the next presidential candidate, and not just any woman (which they could've in principle been ok with) but a woman they had grown to despise during the 90s for any number of reasons,deservedly or undeservedly. And then, of course, the said woman went ahead and told them that if they were not doing so well economically, they should all become programmers or something. (Will the eternal condescension of self-righteous liberal ever die? And by the way, this is not just a US phenomenon. I've seen it in other societies too. It's like the original sin of the left.)
So what I'm saying is, the liberal establishment, organized around the Democratic Party made a series of huge mistakes (not the trans stuff, they were fortunately dragging behind that trend as usual, though that really didn't help at that point) and we are now where we are: in the initial stages of a reactionary backlash that's promising to be a generatonal shift towards a fascistic rule.
Sure, secession, letting states or regions go their own way, etc looks like an immediate solution. But to what end? A republic of the west coast will not be able to go on for a single day before the mainland descends on us with their military migjt, something that the fascists in the current administration are itching to do anyway.
The real long term solution, on the other hand, is to do the hard work for a long term future:
1. Understand that change will take generations to achieve.
2. And use this time to start building the theory of what should replace the current US of A: it's constitution, its administrative organization, the foundations of its confederation, the relationships between its administrative units as well as the state and its citizens... All that stuff.
3. Form alliances small and big, national and international.
4. And then organize nationwide. Create the minimal concensus on what this current pile of debris needs to be replaced with.
IOW, we are far better off, not only as a nation, but as taking our old, 18th century spot as a beacon for humanity (before we flushed that all down the toilet in the cold war years, and likely by our own questionable domestic race politics before that) by simply aiming for a Second Republic. And this time building it correctly.
But that's not gonna happen if we keep trying to fix things for now just so that we can enjoy the fruits of the previous generations' labor that we ourselves spoiled. Nope. We will need to accept that we blew it in 2016, 2020, and 2024, and that you don't often get a fourth chance to fix it all. (If Democrats win 2028, somehow, I'm afraid it will be another Bidenesque admin who will be totally ineffective, handing the reins back in 2032.)
So those are my earnest thoughts as to where we really are and what our goals need to be. I've been through authorative rules, I've been through military coups followed by various juntas, I've seen vibrant, promising nations descend into generations-wide despair and decline, and I know what I'm looking at right now. An eerily familiar picture.
And that's where I am in the deepest corners of my mind.
That said, I can always switch back to my cynical, nihilistic side and go "hell yeah! Left Coast Forever!" I generally find that a more fun, more easily tolerable, and easier place to be anyways.