It was a bit of a surprise to read tweets from Lanny Davis, the famous attorney and associate of Bill and Hillary Clinton, detailing the possible secession of the blue states from the rest of the country.  You can read portions of the sequence of tweets here or here.

This may be Lanny's way of venting Democrat frustration. Despite every dirty trick the left has employed, Trump is still president and may continue to be through 2024.  Okay, if you red-state rubes will not kneel before us, we will pick up our socialist toys and create a country of our own!

To be clear, this is not a threat of civil war.  It is more like a family law attorney telling the unappreciated wife what she can expect out of the divorce.  For example, Davis claims that the new country will get the following states:

Hawaii, Oregon, California, New Mexico, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, and all the Northeast ... including Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, and Washington D.C.

He then claims that his new country will also get the following:

We get the vast majority of the major shipping ports ... Costco, Starbucks, and Boeing ... stem cell research and the best beaches ... the Statue of Liberty ... Intel, Apple, and Microsoft...85 percent of America's venture capital and entrepreneurs ... 90 percent of the high tech industry, most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal ... Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you.

He also mentions they get:

... all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools — Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, the Penn, Princeton, and Yale; and Mount Holyoke, Vassar, Smith, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Barnard, and Radcliffe colleges; plus UCLA, UCB, Stanford, Cal Tech, and MIT.

He finishes it off by saying:

... 61 percent of you crazy bastards believe you are people with higher morals, th[a]n we lefties.  Oh, and you can have all the new COVID-19 cases since you're too dumb and self-centered to wear masks.

Nice, Lanny.  Tell us how you really feel.

Clearly, Mr. Davis did not study geography while in college.  There are several major ocean ports in the southeastern and gulf states from Norfolk, Virginia to Corpus Christi, Texas, including Charleston, Miami, New Orleans, and Houston.

I sort of get his point about Costco, Starbucks, Boeing, Intel, Apple, and Microsoft, due to the location of their corporate offices, but they and the rest of the high-tech industry are not rooted in the ground.  I am sure all of them will want to continue doing business with red-state America, and considering how blue states like to raise taxes, many of these businesses may decide they are better off moving to a red state.  In fact, this is already happening.  Tesla, among others, is moving some of its operations from California to Texas mainly because of taxes.

Seriously, dude, the best beaches?  Ever heard of Florida?

Hate to lose the Statue of Liberty and Yosemite.  Maybe the liberals will let all of us deplorables come see them.  Sorry to lose Cal Tech and MIT, too.

Lanny, you can keep Hollywood and all of the arrogant posturing actors who think pretending to be someone else makes them experts on politics, the attitudes and religious morals of the working class, the Second Amendment, and climate change.  You can also keep the Ivy League and all of the other elitist college training centers for the theory and practice of socialism.

Oh, and once we get readily available vaccines, the whole mask controversy will die out.

The one major flaw in Mr. Davis's plan is that state boundaries are not absolute and inviolable.  They are political in nature and can be changed.  During the last episode of secession in 1863, the state of Virginia was divided along political lines.  The eastern part, old Virginia, remained Confederate until the end of the war, and the western part became West Virginia, a Union state.

This same scenario will present itself if blue states decide to secede.  Many blue states are already highly polarized politically between the liberal cities and the conservative rural areas.  Illinois, for example, has one massive liberal city, Chicago.  The rest of the state, which is roughly four times larger in terms of area, is fairly conservative.  I cannot imagine rural Illinois would be willing to follow liberal Chicago out of the Union, no matter how the state Legislature votes.

Illinois is not the only one.  Would the rural areas of Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania blindly follow the lead of Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia?  What about upstate New York and New York City, California east of the Sierra Nevada mountains versus the western coastal cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco, southern New Jersey outside the Philadelphia sprawl?  The list goes on.  If we follow the Virginia–West Virginia precedent, there could be anywhere from three to as many as ten new red states created if blue-state secession occurred.

This would leave the seceded blue states a lot smaller than Mr. Davis originally envisioned, perhaps the size of several counties each.  Red states would be left with most of the farmable land, plus most of the energy and other natural resources.

Still, this may be the solution to a lot of our problems.  Blue-state secession will solve the issues of who runs the majority of the country; if the government is going to socialist or more traditional center-right; and the ongoing political fights over abortion, policing, immigration, and most of the more recent appointments to the Supreme Court.

Many countries have broken apart in the past thirty years.  The Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia all separated into smaller countries, and there are separatist movements in other places, such as Spain and Belgium.  Even Britain has devolved some of the central government's power to Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales.

Will secession occur in the U.S.?  Unlikely.  The blue states would get a lot more trouble and a lot fewer benefits than they expect.  If it does happen, I am perfectly willing to let our blue-state brethren leave, just as long as we do not end up with a Chinese military airbase at LAX and a Russian airbase at LaGuardia.