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I agree. If anything, American culture is becoming much more homogenous than it has ever been as we share a national media that shapes mainstream attitudes and as more and more people travel/move to different parts of the country.
What area of the US today could rationally be considered significantly different from the rest of the US in its culture?
There are diffeerences, but smaller than a mountain, more a valley.
What would really disrupt and leave vulnerable would be the isolation of areas from each other by taking out the grid or other acts of the same effect. People would think of themselves first, especially when food was running out or there was no water (most systems require electricity to pump uphill). If sufficently isolated, the differences in areas would come to mean a great deal more than they do now.
We are also heavily dependent on our technology for the things that make simply living in some areas possible. Even suspend it for some significant time and those places will empty and where they go they'll have to compete for the scarce resources of a disconnected connected world.
I agree. If anything, American culture is becoming much more homogenous than it has ever been as we share a national media that shapes mainstream attitudes and as more and more people travel/move to different parts of the country.
What area of the US today could rationally be considered significantly different from the rest of the US in its culture?
Having lived and traveled around the country (and the world) American culture is far from homogenous. There's really nothing about the US that's homogenous. It's even printed on our money - E Pluribus Unum.
Just on a regional level we come from different ethnic backgrounds, different religions, different political orientations, we speak the language differently, we don't know all that much about each others states and most of us don't care to know and we usually look on neighboring states with some degree of derision, scorn, contempt or all three and that's only in proportion to how we feel about other regions.
One just needs to read through these pages a bit to confirm what most of us already know.
Here's a pretty good analysis of the socio-cultural differences. One can quibble over whether it should be 10 or 11 or 15 but the point remains . . . we are quite different. Tufts Magazine / fall 2013
The US has always been held together by force or by crisis. I would hope at this point that we're evolved enough politically to move on from that and finally go our separate ways.
Severe Economic distress would be the most likely cause of a breakup of the Union, if it were to happen.
Economic distress will at least contribute to it, along with the division caused by social issues like gay marriage and abortion. These kinds of things will be the trigger issues, just as slavery was in the 1860s.
The real cause of the breakup will be the failure of our government to operate within the constitution. The larger more populous northern states/ west coast states continue to use the federal government to push the socialism and progressivism on social issues against the wishes of southern and western states. The 10th amendment giving states the power to make their own laws is being ignored, federal courts are issuing edicts (look at Utah gay marriage issue) and congress is passing laws that violate states rights. Sooner or later its going to be too much for us to take any longer. How long will it be?? Who knows but I do believe unless the current trend of runaway federal power is checked it is very likely that our union will not survive. In short it may be the very same issue that breaks up the union that it was in 1861, states rights. If we follow our constitution and respect the states authority to govern themselves according to the will of the people then we may have a long period as a unified nation ahead of us.
Chances are higher (and arguably real) that a nuclear war during this century would cause the loss of our soveriegnty and rule of law then the United States under its own direct doing causing a split of sorts.
Severe Economic distress would be the most likely cause of a breakup of the Union, if it were to happen.
Actually, during the Great Depression and in all the recessions since, both Americans and citizens in general have looked to the federal government for assistance. Why would that change now or in the future?
Jericho presented that kind of scenerio, except a series of smaller bombs on the ground in twenty three major cities. Suddenly isolated, the grid collapsed,food not being delivered, everything became local.
Our point of view is a small town in Kansas, but there the gangs take over the highways, and within the year they are at the point of war with the nearest town over food.
Of course there is more to the why, but I think their portrayal of the world which comes when the US shuts down is pretty on target. Today, with our intricately connected world let alone nation, cut the flow one little place and its effects are repeated down the line. Especially food, which is no longer warehoused but produced and shipped. What do people eat if nothing shows up to fill the shelves after its been ransacked? What happens when the hospital runs out of drugs? What do you do when its icy cold and you can't turn on the heat?
We'd get back to a sort of frontier, eventually, but minus an awful lot of population. Long before it would be new nations it would be purely local. The first place to have enough of an army to take over wins all the cookies.
I'm not going to get into the doomsday scenarios thought up by Hollywood screenwriters, but I think that if there were some kind of disaster of that magnitude, your last statement would be true: it would come down to the local level, and it would be about survival first.
People wouldn't just chuck their American identities, either. It would take at least several generations of isolation from all other areas of the country to shed their loyalty to their country, and again, in the modern world, that's not likely to happen.
There are diffeerences, but smaller than a mountain, more a valley.
What would really disrupt and leave vulnerable would be the isolation of areas from each other by taking out the grid or other acts of the same effect. People would think of themselves first, especially when food was running out or there was no water (most systems require electricity to pump uphill). If sufficently isolated, the differences in areas would come to mean a great deal more than they do now.
We are also heavily dependent on our technology for the things that make simply living in some areas possible. Even suspend it for some significant time and those places will empty and where they go they'll have to compete for the scarce resources of a disconnected connected world.
While I agree that isolation of areas from one another would be the only way to foster separatism, I think that it has to be a long-term, ie, generational thing. I don't think that the loss of part of the electrical grid would be long lasting. Electricity is simple technology.
Having lived and traveled around the country (and the world) American culture is far from homogenous. There's really nothing about the US that's homogenous. It's even printed on our money - E Pluribus Unum.
Just on a regional level we come from different ethnic backgrounds, different religions, different political orientations, we speak the language differently, we don't know all that much about each others states and most of us don't care to know and we usually look on neighboring states with some degree of derision, scorn, contempt or all three and that's only in proportion to how we feel about other regions.
One just needs to read through these pages a bit to confirm what most of us already know.
Here's a pretty good analysis of the socio-cultural differences. One can quibble over whether it should be 10 or 11 or 15 but the point remains . . . we are quite different. Tufts Magazine / fall 2013
The US has always been held together by force or by crisis. I would hope at this point that we're evolved enough politically to move on from that and finally go our separate ways.
I didn't say the US was homogenous. I said it was becoming more so, and that is a fact.
Sorry, but historically, Americans are much more alike today than they have ever been because the cultural differences that exist tend to exist broadly, in varying degrees, across all sections of the country rather than being distinctly identified with a single section of the country.
The US has only been held together by force during the Civil War, and even in the Confederacy, there were numerous Southerners who remained loyal to the Union (which is how West Virginia came about). If you want to ramble on about secessionism, there's a long, boring thread on that right here in this forum.
Economic distress will at least contribute to it, along with the division caused by social issues like gay marriage and abortion. These kinds of things will be the trigger issues, just as slavery was in the 1860s.
The real cause of the breakup will be the failure of our government to operate within the constitution. The larger more populous northern states/ west coast states continue to use the federal government to push the socialism and progressivism on social issues against the wishes of southern and western states. The 10th amendment giving states the power to make their own laws is being ignored, federal courts are issuing edicts (look at Utah gay marriage issue) and congress is passing laws that violate states rights. Sooner or later its going to be too much for us to take any longer. How long will it be?? Who knows but I do believe unless the current trend of runaway federal power is checked it is very likely that our union will not survive. In short it may be the very same issue that breaks up the union that it was in 1861, states rights. If we follow our constitution and respect the states authority to govern themselves according to the will of the people then we may have a long period as a unified nation ahead of us.
Nonsense. You are speaking for yourself and other whiney social conservatives who want to continue to their bigoted ways. Get a clue, if you don't like it here, you can always go somewhere else, but you can't take a part of the country with you.
Chances are higher (and arguably real) that a nuclear war during this century would cause the loss of our soveriegnty and rule of law then the United States under its own direct doing causing a split of sorts.
I agree. Americans are notably attached to their American identity.
IMO, the idea of the US breaking apart has absolutely no traction in the real world, ie, the world beyond the Internet. Secessionism lives on sites like C-D because the few thousand real advocates of it think that because all their internet buddies are pro-secession that everybody else who isn't a "progressive" is, too.
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