I think you have it exactly right, that there are about as many different preferences for where and how to live as there are preferences for ice cream, and that is a very good thing because it takes a lot of different people doing different things to keep the modern world going. The activist class is a modern fundamentalist cult, asserting there is but one proper way to live, their way, and seek to make everyone conform to that. You see it in many realms: what kinds of jobs are acceptable, what kinds of foods, what kinds of hobbies, etc. It is essentially using political power to demand people stop liking what they don't like because they can't handle the diversity and multitudinous variety of the non-primitive order. These are the same people that, with a straight face, will claim there are too many types of potato chips for sale because it hurts their brains. From their perspective, this is a true statement.
One complication is how exactly you draw the boundaries of the American empire. I'd argue that the informal boundaries - the large collection of vassal states - make the imperial system much larger than just the borders of CONUS ... which doesn't make administrating the beast any easier.
Redrawing state boundaries to e.g. split apart red counties from blue cities might help keep the peace. On the other hand, resistance would be significant. Redrawing the map in such a fashion would result in red states vastly outnumbering blue states, meaning the Senate would be perpetually dominated by red team; blue team won't go for that.
The other issue is that Congress ends up ballooning in size. It's already dysfunctional with hundreds of members; what does it look like with thousands?
I think the boundaries of the American empire are, at this point, irrelevant, as the official core of the empire is seeing the rise of problems. The outlying bits don't help certainly, but they don't seem to be the key problem, and if we spun them off it wouldn't likely help the situation in the 50 states much. Puerto Rico isn't threatening to secede any time soon, and while one might argue that Puerto Ricans moving to the 'States contribute to the dysfunctions we see, it seems to me that it is extremely minor compared to our home grown issues.
The redrawing of states would get pretty tricky in terms of agreeing to it. As you say, expanding the Senate to include a lot of "red state" senators would be unpopular. One would probably have to pay a lot of attention to how the states got divided up. If I were to, say, divide up PA I would probably try for 4 parts with roughly equal population, something like Pittsburgh, Philly, then East PA and West PA. The goal is to keep the ratio of senators the same, although one might have to look at the country as a whole and balance that way instead of state by state.
But even then, going by population, it would probably be impossible to keep it perfectly even. My suspicion is that such a reordering of states will be politically impossible without a serious breakdown of order (mini-civil war or significantly one sided election where the winner can just make it happen), or as a decision by the would be new blue state regions that they want to split for their own reasons (perhaps after a significant decrease of federal power such that controlling the senate is less interesting?) My general sense is that the left does not do so well creating institutions, and prefers to take over existing ones, and as such is less interested in secession to do their own thing than taking over their neighbors and forcing them to do what the left wants.
Regarding a bigger Congress: I don't know how much size matters. It is possible it would be as big a mess with half the members, or twice as many. I just don't know. One thing that does worry me a bit is that too many constituents per congresscritter means they don't need to care as much about the preferences of their constituents. So my guess is that increasing the total number of Congressmen such that the people per seat is much smaller would probably be a bit of a good thing, but I don't know if the size of the chamber being a lot greater would outweigh that benefit.
Re: footnote 6. Yes, there is probably a more gradual gradient between deep blue and deep red, but there is probably more red than the map shows. Take, for example, San Bernardino County, CA. (It's not hard to find--it's the largest county on the entire map.) Most of the population (and most of the blue population) is in the extreme southwest of the county. The rest is desert sparsely populated with red-teamers. So Southern CA is much redder than the map shows (by area, not population, of course).
Thank you.
I think you have it exactly right, that there are about as many different preferences for where and how to live as there are preferences for ice cream, and that is a very good thing because it takes a lot of different people doing different things to keep the modern world going. The activist class is a modern fundamentalist cult, asserting there is but one proper way to live, their way, and seek to make everyone conform to that. You see it in many realms: what kinds of jobs are acceptable, what kinds of foods, what kinds of hobbies, etc. It is essentially using political power to demand people stop liking what they don't like because they can't handle the diversity and multitudinous variety of the non-primitive order. These are the same people that, with a straight face, will claim there are too many types of potato chips for sale because it hurts their brains. From their perspective, this is a true statement.
One complication is how exactly you draw the boundaries of the American empire. I'd argue that the informal boundaries - the large collection of vassal states - make the imperial system much larger than just the borders of CONUS ... which doesn't make administrating the beast any easier.
Redrawing state boundaries to e.g. split apart red counties from blue cities might help keep the peace. On the other hand, resistance would be significant. Redrawing the map in such a fashion would result in red states vastly outnumbering blue states, meaning the Senate would be perpetually dominated by red team; blue team won't go for that.
The other issue is that Congress ends up ballooning in size. It's already dysfunctional with hundreds of members; what does it look like with thousands?
I think the boundaries of the American empire are, at this point, irrelevant, as the official core of the empire is seeing the rise of problems. The outlying bits don't help certainly, but they don't seem to be the key problem, and if we spun them off it wouldn't likely help the situation in the 50 states much. Puerto Rico isn't threatening to secede any time soon, and while one might argue that Puerto Ricans moving to the 'States contribute to the dysfunctions we see, it seems to me that it is extremely minor compared to our home grown issues.
The redrawing of states would get pretty tricky in terms of agreeing to it. As you say, expanding the Senate to include a lot of "red state" senators would be unpopular. One would probably have to pay a lot of attention to how the states got divided up. If I were to, say, divide up PA I would probably try for 4 parts with roughly equal population, something like Pittsburgh, Philly, then East PA and West PA. The goal is to keep the ratio of senators the same, although one might have to look at the country as a whole and balance that way instead of state by state.
But even then, going by population, it would probably be impossible to keep it perfectly even. My suspicion is that such a reordering of states will be politically impossible without a serious breakdown of order (mini-civil war or significantly one sided election where the winner can just make it happen), or as a decision by the would be new blue state regions that they want to split for their own reasons (perhaps after a significant decrease of federal power such that controlling the senate is less interesting?) My general sense is that the left does not do so well creating institutions, and prefers to take over existing ones, and as such is less interested in secession to do their own thing than taking over their neighbors and forcing them to do what the left wants.
Regarding a bigger Congress: I don't know how much size matters. It is possible it would be as big a mess with half the members, or twice as many. I just don't know. One thing that does worry me a bit is that too many constituents per congresscritter means they don't need to care as much about the preferences of their constituents. So my guess is that increasing the total number of Congressmen such that the people per seat is much smaller would probably be a bit of a good thing, but I don't know if the size of the chamber being a lot greater would outweigh that benefit.
Re: footnote 6. Yes, there is probably a more gradual gradient between deep blue and deep red, but there is probably more red than the map shows. Take, for example, San Bernardino County, CA. (It's not hard to find--it's the largest county on the entire map.) Most of the population (and most of the blue population) is in the extreme southwest of the county. The rest is desert sparsely populated with red-teamers. So Southern CA is much redder than the map shows (by area, not population, of course).