[increment_i]

It's hard for me to see a scenario where a Calexit doesn't mark the end of American hegemony and quite likely the United States itself. A successful Calexit would without doubt lead to a New York exit. Now there's no way Texas is sticking around. And the Carolinas and Florida want to make a go of it too, etc. Once the pillars have fallen, the house collapses. Isn't that basically how all great empires slowly crumble?

So the stakes do seem quite a bit higher than outlined in this article and others I've read like it.

[gremlinsinc]

Would it really be so bad? Cultures/beliefs/values vary tremendously from region to region, and smaller country subsets would be able to iterate faster to support their own value/belief systems.. Texas and related states that join it's new union could be as red as they want, California and those who join w/ can be as blue, and have things like Single-payer healthcare, no public prisons, no anti-immigration laws and open borders. -- U.S. as a super power has been waning for awhile now, and will continue to do so. Rome conquered the entire world, yet somehow a group of germanic tribes brought it to the ground. -- Every empire in history has fallen, America is no different.

[spootnik]

Putting everyone into echo chambers is the stupidest idea. You'll get such radical agendas pushed. Balance and variety is good.

[helthanatos]

Too bad that's what we've done... If you look at America's history, political parties have been divided by a few issues and that's it. For the most part, the political parties until the 1900s followed Washington's wish of not being divided. Sadly, these modern political parties have decided that issues must be divided by party. This has lead to pretty much every issue we face today to be voted against by one party simply because the other party thinks they can't support it because it's somehow a partisan idea. The media has also made this worse by not documenting things objectively. Citizens think one party is pure evil and the other one is magically full of saints. Unless you ask a libertarian about which party is better, you'll probably get a terribly slanted view. I don't understand this. Both parties have some rotten people, but why is it expected of the American public (it is expected) to vilify one party? Issues about whether the government should be small and whether agrarian life is best have left to be about whether the government should tax its citizens into submission and whether it should be a police state. The much more rigid divide in beliefs is good for no one. I can't vote for anyone without them contradicting some of my beliefs because I don't follow the awkward divide in political ideals.