Most of my friends and acquaintances look at the teabaggers and the actions of individuals like Ted Cruz, and ask "are these people insane?"
And i tell them -- perhaps. Perhaps they are. But there is a method to their madness. You have to delve into their thinking and see the big picture that exists inside their mental minds! It goes something like this...
We hate America as it is. We desire a new America. We long for a massive structural collapse or other catastrophe to completely snap the spine of the nation. If such an event happens, Washington DC will simply go away. The President and Congress and the Joint Chiefs of Staff will all get on planes and fly away to France and the states will be left to fend for themselves. The Red States, being full of fertile farmland and virtuous people, will thrive. The Blue States, which have no natural resources and are populated by moochers and leeches whose only occupation is to "move money around" and fiddle with weird technology that no one really needs, will become impoverished hellholes. And any smartypants losers from those states who escape the hordes of looting blacks and rioting Mexicans will have to beg our forgiveness before we allow them to enter our Red Utopias. Ha, ha, not so smart now, are you, city man? Who's your daddy!
Am i exaggerating? Hardly. They sit around their little blogs and daydream of exactly this, and they say things like...
"My secessionist energies are devoted to a free Cascadia. From San Fran to British Columbia on the Western side. More than enough food and resources. Ports for trade, travel and fish, and the natural protections afforded by mountain ranges. Politically, farther left than blue could ever hope to be – bioregionalism at its finest. I’m getting to this late – but why would redtopia not sell food to bluistan? Pre-schism trade relationships would likely still exist, and trade is probably a better deal than economic/social isolationism."
"When the alternative is to sell to people who have nothing but demands, and those funny green pieces of paper, I think they would sell to anyone who actually has the money. The blue areas won’t have that money, because they will have no wealth to back it up. Wealth is not those little green pieces of paper, that’s just money, useful for trade, but not backed by anything but the promises of a government that is about to collapse. Wealth is arable land. Wealth is energy. Wealth is potable water. Those blue areas are notoriously short on all three. You keep thinking that US currency will be worth anything by that time. I imagine the Weimar Republic thought the same thing."
No matter how many times i read such slop, i never stop being amazed at it.
Glossing over the ridiculous simplicity of reducing states to geographic stereotypes, let's imagine the other more plausible scenarions that would occur before this daydream could materialize.
-- If the US does indeed suffer an economic collapse on some unprecedented scale, we'd see some sort of default/bailout in the international arena. While i'm no American Exceptionalist, i do recognize that there are nations -- China, for one -- who can't afford to see the US reduced to a bucolic farming community. The US would limp on, worse than before, but it would remain intact.
-- If ever did get past some point of no return, Washington DC and the central power structure would not "go away," and more than Moscow did after the fall of the USSR. If the presidency and the Constitution became null and void, they would almost undoubtedly be replaced by some sort of regime that would exercise even MORE dreaded Federal authority than the government we have now. The impulse to hold the nerve center together at the cost of extraneous limbs is hard to overcome. We would not have pure freedom, we'd have true tyranny for the first time.
-- There would be no hand-to-hand Civil War that the gun nuts and NRA boosters dream of. Government agents would not go house-to-house to try to seize your ramen and your bullets. No, we'd have more of a situation where the General in Charge of the Interior would demand that the North Dakotan oil would continue to flow as it should, else suffer some light bombing runs. Just because the Constitution trumpets the virtues of a "well-armed militia," this doesn't mean that hunting rifles and shotguns will ever be the deciding factor in any intranational conflict.
Honestly, is this not the same sort of logic that made the Confederacy to believe they'd win in the first Civil War? They're hitting all the same notes -- we're better people, we have farms and stuff, factories and railroads won't make a difference, and God is on our side anyway.
Is that really at the heart of this all? Do they want to fight the Civil War all over again so they can triumph this time?
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