In his future, the current US has split into two countries: the United American Counties and the United American Cities, based on the misleading observation that in the past two elections the map clearly shows oceans of red areas surrounding islands of blue. The author just decided that two countries, red and blue, would congeal along these (lines?) and form independent political entities that are thoroughly intertwined economically, and interdependent in every aspect of life. They just hate each other, a bad reason for a revolution, and want to govern themselves without interference from pushy neighbors, a slightly better reason.
Setting aside the fact that those oceans of red are sparsely populated and, though resource rich, have as much say in blue region governance as any banana republic, the blue areas hold the winning card: Power. Some might point out that governments have worked this way since Hammurabi. Point taken.
Professor Trenchard creates the ridiculous scenario where forces of the UAC (Counties, that is,) disrupt the flow of critical resource through ‘sabotage,’ aka terrorism. This forces the extremely well-armed forces of the UAC (Cities, that is. Why don’t we just call them Reds and Blues?) to acquiesce to the Reds’ ‘List of Principals’ and create two states that are as intertwined and interdependent as the contents of a lava lamp.
Great idea. Now discuss, giving historical precedent, why this is ridiculous.
Well, there were the Bolsheviks and the Whites in crumbling Tsarist Russia. The Bolsheviks represented the blue-collar workers and happened to call themselves the Reds (no relation to our red states in the proposed UAC.) Their most memorable and feared symbol was the hammer and sickle representing factory worker and farmer united against the parasite class. The opposition were the Whites (no relation to our blue states in the proposed UAC,) who supported the entrenched power of state in the form of the monarchy.
Their civil war was not resolved in five years. It went on from 1917 to the 1940s where thousands of White Cossacks defected and fought for Nazi Germany on condition that they would only fight against the Red army. They had no quarrel with the West, nor did they support Nazi ideology, they just were at war with Stalin and the enemy of my enemy...
When the war was over, so were the Cossacks. Eisenhower sent them all back to Stalin, who sent them to his eerily familiar gulags, which suddenly were not a problem for us. At the beginning of the war, back in the teens and twenties, the US fought alongside of the Whites, choosing to side with the aristocrats over the farmers and steel workers that time. Now we were fighting for the reds. It appears that we just don’t like uprisings against the established order, no matter what they stand for. You don’t want to encourage that sort of thing. Our aristocrats knew a threat when they saw one, whoever they were.
I never studied the Chinese revolution, but I suspect it went a similar way. And today’s China seems to be communist in name only. Both China and Russia have their emperor and their tsar, and their governments seem to be functioning as well as any other. What goes around comes around.
Which is to be preferred? Popular revolt by the working class inevitably turned self-destructive or iron fisted self-preservation of the aristocracy? Revolutions are one thing, but counterrevolutions always have a way of putting things back to where they were before or worse. Circles always join and dragons always eat their tails. And Humpty-Dumpty always comes back, angrier than ever.
Maybe Hammurabi would have something to say about that.
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