The era of deep economic, security and military ties between Canada and the United States "is over," Prime Minister Mark Carney said Thursday, after President Donald Trump announced steep auto tariffs. "The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over," Carney said.
The US will have to crawl through the door on the right if they ever want to have any kind of decent relationship with other countries again. And we will NOT be getting our favored status that we’ve enjoyed since the end of WWII back. As the British Empire went, so too does the American Empire.
The US shouldn’t even continue to exist as the single entity it is today. I think five to eight large states is probably ideal. Cascadia, Rocky Mountains, Great Plains, New England, the South, the Great Lakes region, and something needs to be done with the Alaska, Hawaii, and our various non-state territories like Puerto Rico and American Samoa.
It’s simply too big and diverse to effectively govern.
The problem is that the cultural divide is largely urban vs. rural, which is spread out all over the country.
That’s one level of the divide, yes, but it’s reinforced by the rest of the structure. “Bioregionalism” suggests that cultures are more stable when they are contained within bioregions of climate and geography. People are more invested in what they perceive as their local environment and they are more likely to “feel heard” by others with that same stake. The current political borders, arbitrary as they are, push people to seek that connection in either protective isolation or a broader social identity.
It’s a relatively new idea (1970s) as far as political science goes but I find it compelling.
The other problem is that we let a right-wing propaganda apparatus operate unchallenged that began with the Nixon fallout and accelerated with Rupert Murdoch’s creation of Fox News in 1996 and that’s gonna take a few generations to unfuck no matter what else is going on.