From Kulak Girl's Anarchonomicon, March 29, 2024:
world for many centuries, first under monarchical rule and then under
democratic auspices, must be reversed.
-Hans Herman Hoppe
Every time the subject of a possible US civil war or national divorce comes up I hear the same micron deep takes. America couldn’t break up because the division isn’t by state, its Urban Vs. Rural. Or that Urban vs. Rural isn’t the divide, even then people of different politics are mixed up together. Or that for every clear red or blue state there’s a purple state. None of which is in any way relevant to anything until you recognize the naïve mental model many of these people are working on...
These takes betray a belief that a second civil war would be some kind of conflict between coherent independent states who’ve started identifying with/against the idea of union such as happened in the 1860s… or that somehow there’d be a series of tidy Quebec style referendums resulting in a clean division such as exists in so many meme maps:
The truth is any post-breakup map of America would not resemble an electoral map following state lines, nor even a redrawing of state boundaries, such that the fantastical greater Idaho or Free State of Jefferson might exist as part of a wider Confederation of Constitutional Republics, or a Breakaway Philadelphia city-State join a Union of Progressive Democracies…
No. It’d be nothing so comprehensible or easily mapped to modern politics.
A post breakup America would probably look closer to this:
If you’re a sane person and your immediate reaction is: WHAT THE HELL AM I LOOKING AT!?
….Well that’s kinda the point.
(I really do apologize for all I’m going to have to digress)
For our purposes we can broadly divide history into 2 types of period… Periods of Centralizing trends, and periods of Decentralizing trends.
Centralizing Eras
You almost certainly know the history of Centralizing trends: The Macedonian Empire, The Punic Wars, The Roman Civil Wars, 7 years war, the French Revolution and Following wars, All the stories and heroes of the British and other Colonial empires , The American Civil War, WW1, WW2….
Centralizing Eras are consistently defined by big Heroic (classical sense of the word) figures that lead great armies or great nations and either win and centralize control under themselves or lose and get centralized under another. Alexander, Hannibal, Scipio Africanus, Julius Caesar, Agustus, Wolfe, Horatio Nelson, Napoleon, the Duke of Wellington, Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Grant, Lenin, Trotsky, Woodrow Wilson, Mussolini, Hitler, Rommel, Churchill, Montgomery, FDR, MacArthur, Stalin, Zukav, Mao… On and on we could list the names.
Even relatively unimportant Generals or political figures in centralizing Eras, People who rank closer to 10th or 20th in the list of influential/powerful people within an Alliance, themselves wind up defining entire nations and eras. Figures such as Charles De Gaul or Ptolemy who really were not mission critical at all to their respective wars (very little would have changed if either had died suddenly at 20, they’d have just been replaced) and wielded relatively little power within their alliances, they become amongst the most important people in the history of entire nations… France and Egypt respectively.
What you may have noticed is there’s really just two great centralizing eras in the history of western civilization… the 300-350 years from the start of Alexander’s conquests til the final centralization of the Roman empire under the Caesars… And the 250-300 year history of modern empire: From approximately 1700-1945.
There are mini centralizing eras: the Spanish conquest of the new world, Cyrus the Great’s founding of the Persian empire, the Mongol Conquests, the Qin Dynasty and the first Chinese empire, the rise of the Tokugawa Shogunate… But the fact I’m giving individual dynasties or empires as “the era” kinda tells you how much these were one offs… indeed the largest of these conquests in terms of territory and cultural impact wasn’t really the effect of the Spanish but rather disease.
Mind you the importance of these “lesser” stupendous conquest takes a hit not from any stature of their own, but just the scale of the latest one. Nothing in history approaches the total all 7 continent conquests of the imperial era and world wars, and a great part of the Significance of the Mediterranean Conquests 2000 years ago is due to the import they held in the imagination of these global conquerors.
Yet these periods are anomalous.
The reason the great ancient states, and the 8th to 20th century empires were able to conquer so much wasn’t because of some natural course of human nature and civilization, it was because in those periods great technological and social gaps had opened to allow for conquest.
Why Centralizing Eras Exist....
....MUCH MORE
