Could America break apart? #NationalDivorce #CALEXIT
UCSB expert explores the possibility
In a new book, political economist Benjamin Cohen considers the forces driving nations including the United States toward fragmentation. Benjamin Cohen begins his new book his 20th, if you are counting with a fictional news dispatch from the year 2035.
After years of festering discontent with the direction of politics in Washington, California today formally declared its independence as a sovereign nation, it reads. President Vance has threatened a military takeover of state government in Sacramento, backed by National Guard troops from nearby red states. Armed conflict looks increasingly possible.
A provocative scenario, all the more plausible coming at a time when California’s governor is furious at the president for ordering troops into the state to keep order at immigration protests. But for all our partisan acrimony and political polarization, America isnt really headed towards a second Civil War right?
“I wish I could be that sanguine about it,” said Distinguished Professor Emeritus Cohen, who spent 30 years as the Louis G. Lancaster Professor of International Political Economy in the Political Science Department at UC Santa Barbara before retiring from teaching in 2021. “I’m not. It seems to me we cannot ignore the risks of the current fissures and…
Hopefully. It's too much of a landmass to be one country without the government being tyrannical.