What America Would Look Like If Everyone Who Wanted To Start Their Own State Got Their Way
Sixteen places that want to become the 51st state.
posted on November 13, 2013 at 5:42pm EST
11/14/2013
On Buzzfeed, Hunter Schwarz has a post making fun of the idea of state secession — not secession from the United States, but one part of a state seceding from anothor:
What America Would Look Like If Everyone Who Wanted To Start Their Own State Got Their Way
Sixteen places that want to become the 51st state.
posted on November 13, 2013 at 5:42pm EST
The current state boundaries aren’t fixed by natural law, they're the result of historical negotiation. In the book Lost States, Michael J. Trinklein writes
Everyone knows the fifty nifty united states — but what about the hundreds of other statehood proposals that never came to pass? Lost States is a tribute to such great unrealized dreams as West Florida, Texlahoma, Montezuma, Rough and Ready, and Yazoo. Some of these states came remarkably close to joining the Union. Others never had a chance. Many are still trying.
VDARE,com emphasis. This is something we've been covering for years: Steve Sailer wrote Yeah, Yeah, Diversity Is Strength. It’s Also Secession., and I wrote Nothing Succeeds Like Secession — A VDARE.com Secession Roundup last November.
The point is that the states no longer represent genuine communities, and in many cases they yoke together extremely disparate groups.Immigration has exacerbated this — whole sections of the border states now look like Mexico, and Dearborn, Michigan looks like an Arab colony.
Pat Buchanan wrote recently that
Folks on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, bordered by Wisconsin and the Great Lakes, which is connected to lower Michigan by a bridge, have long dreamed of a separate state called Superior. The UP has little in common with Lansing and nothing with Detroit.
Michigan’s Upper Peninsula has, famously, a largely Finnish population. Detroit, on the other hand, is 82 percent black.
Eugene Kontorovich, who always has something interesting to say, has suggested on the Volokh Conspiracy that instead of trying to become a 51st state, communities that don’t like the state they're in should petition to join a neighboring state:
These secessionists have an advantage over those seeking outright separation from the Union — and a big disadvantage. On one hand, they don’t have to deal with the Confederacy/slavery baggage that tends to confound discussions of secession in the U.S. On the other hand, the Constitution, Art. IV, sec. 3 clearly forbids the creating a new state in the territory of an existing one without the latter’s consent, and the consent of Congress. That is a high bar, practically insurmountable.
But there may be an easier way for those who seek to secede from their state — instead of creating a new “51st” state, secede to join an existing state. The Constitution’s requirement of home-state and congressional consent only clearly applies to the creation of a “new state” …
How Best to Secede from a State, October 11, 2013
As you can see, in the case of Michigan, it would make more sense for the Upper Peninsula to be part of Wisconsin, and in The California Crisis: Divide And Prosper?, Brenda Walker explained that some of California’s problems could be solved by "slicing up this giant dystopia into two or three parts", along basically ethnic lines.
It’s all part of the blessings of diversity.
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