Replies

First, Dr. Williams is stretching the truth in his examples of peaceful splits. Panama seceded from Columbia without war because Columbia didn't want to face Theodore Roosevelt's Navy and Marines. The United States wanted Panama to be a separate country that would easily give the United States terms we wanted in creating the canal zone. History has vindicated what we did to build the canal, but the split was coerced. Likewise, West Virginia split from Virginia as part of the War Between the States. Nothing about that split was peaceful, and if the Confederacy had taken Washington DC and forced the Union to surrender, a likely term of that surrender would have been return of the West Virginia counties to the state of Virginia.

On the substance of his idea that the United States could split, the problems would be huge and costly. Maybe the cost would still be less than the cost of constant bickering, but the split would not be easy. Until someone finds a way of distributing the costs, people will not willingly make that split.

The first big problem is that even though the country can be seen as "red states" and "blue states," plenty of individuals live and work in areas where they do not fit the state are region politics. Technology has resulted in many of us having specialized education and working in small job fields. If the country splits and we find ourselves in an area that is completely opposite our views, we must choose between living the rest of our lives without any hope that our views will be represented in the smallest way in our government or giving up our careers and taking the lowest jobs in a country that is closer to our views. The idea that the conservative in Massachusetts can simply trade houses and trade jobs with the liberal in Texas sounds nice, but on a practical level, the cost would be huge. Most people still don't see the cost of bickering as worse than the cost of making this kind of move.

A second problem is that very few companies are local anymore. Most companies have some kind of facilities around the country, and a split would put offices that used to work closely together in different countries. The previously domestic flight from Boston to Atlanta would now require a passport and passing through customs. Each of the countries would likely have different laws around export control and other intellectual property issues. The change would have a huge cost to many businesses, and businesses would try to stop the split or force both governments to ignore the split.

A third problem is setting the new borders. I've also contemplated this idea, and some borders at first seem fairly easy. I can see a border at the Potomac River between a liberal country to the north and a conservative country to the south. A connecting land border could stretch to the Ohio River where there would again be a split. Again, the northern states would be in liberal land and the southern states in conservative land. In the west, one could say that the states on the West Coast would go with the liberal country while those in the interior go to the conservative country, but many of the eastern counties in these states are conservative. Maybe all three of these states would split along north to south lines so that only the coast to the first mountain range would be in the liberal country. Setting a western border for the northeastern part of liberal land would also be hard. Would Iowa and Minnesota go with Illinois into the liberal side or would they go conservative?

If these lines are set, both countries would have logistical problems. The liberal country would have a problem being non-continuous from east to west. Anything moving by land would have to cross through either Canada or the conservative country in order to reach the other side. The conservative country would be without a seaport on the Pacific Ocean. If Alaska came with the conservative side, we'd have seaports, but we'd not have land transportation. Both countries would have about the same amount of border that the United States currently has, but each would have fewer resources for maintaining border security.

I realize that some of Dr. Williams's answers to these issues would be based on the libertarian idea of free trade and movement across borders, but those answers are not realistic. The reason that he's having to propose a split country is that libertarian ideas have little traction beyond a temporary backlash against Obamaism. If the country splits, many things that we take for granted now will be lost.

Another big issue is that the liberals have no incentive to split. Margaret Thatcher described socialism's biggest problem as running out of other people's money. The liberals have no incentive to let go of huge numbers of hard-working Americans who have been fleeced for years to pay for liberal programs. The reduced costs of having elections every two years would not be enough for them to offset the loss of tax dollars.

I would love to see a time when we no longer had to fight over these things. I agree that we spend a great deal of time, energy, and money having to fight to save our rights and our prosperity. If we didn't have to spend this time fighting, we'd have a higher quality of life. I just don't see this solution working.

Bill