Dissolving The Union: The Central States Of America

My series on how the U.S. could dissolve the union and form several independent nation-states now moves to a more difficult and near-and-dear region for me: the Midwest. The states that make up this new region, given the horribly unimaginative name "The Central States of America" (CSA herafter, which I know also used to mean the Confederate States  )  includes the states where I have lived most of my life: Ohio, Michigan and Indiana. We also lived for several years in Kentucky and a short stint in Wisconsin so this is my homeland.

The CSA would stretch from the eastern borders of Cowlandia to the western borders of the Yankee States of America and to the northern borders of the as yet to be named new Southern nation.

It would include by far the most politically diverse mix yet thanks to the vast swaths of deep red rural and suburban areas surrounding the deep blue cities like Chicago and Detroit.

The CSA includes the industrial heartland of the U.S., the so-called "Rust Belt" that runs along the top of Indiana into Ohio and Michigan. The amount of manufacturing in places stretching from Gary, Indiana to Toledo, Ohio is incredible as anyone who has lived in this area knows.

It also includes a lot of the most productive agricultural ground in America. While Cowlandia has a lot of wheat, the CSA is home to the corn/soybean states of the U.S. plus some of the biggest dairy states around in Wisconsin and Michigan. While Cowlandia has the lion's share of cattle feeding production, the CSA is king of hog production with six of the top eight states for hog raising including the granddaddy of pork Iowa which has triple the production of the next closest state.

Add in the coal grounds of West Virginia, Kentucky and SE Ohio and you have a very economically vibrant and independent area. The big issue I have tried to avoid is a very 19th century preoccupation with having access to the sea, which the landlocked nation I propose would at first blush not seem to have but that doesn't take into account the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes have a ton of ports and thanks to the Saint Lawrence Seaway you can get from the ports of Chicago, Detroit and Toledo to the Atlantic Ocean.

I originally carved off the northeast corner of Ohio, including the city of Cleveland, and put that in the Yankee States of America. I am not sure that makes sense now as culturally Cleveland is very Midwestern.

Chicago is by far the largest city in the CSA, has a huge airport and rail system and is centrally located so it would make sense to be the capitol.

The CSA would have around 65 million people if you leave Cleveland out of the mix. That is 20% of the population of the U.S. so one in five current citizens would find themselves in this new land which is about right. It is rich with large cities: Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Des Moines, Kansas City,  St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, Columbus, Cincinnati,  Louisville. From high tech to farming to manufacturing, there is a lot of economic activity. Infrastructure is powerful with criss-crossing interstate highways, major airports, seaports and railways. Perhaps most importantly of all, the CSA sits on the greatest treasure in America, the vast fresh water reserves of the Great Lakes. When you include the plentiful cultural and educational resources, including the research schools of the original Big Ten, I think the CSA could very easily thrive as a nation.

Sounds great, right! Not so fast. Look at an electoral map by county from 2016 focused in on the CSA:

While you see a lot of red, as is true in most of the US, there are a lot of pockets of blue and even deep blue. Those happen to include a lot of the most populous areas like Detroit and Chicago. Trump carried the entire CSA except Minnesota and Illinois but that can be a little deceptive. Trump won Michigan by around 10,000 votes and Wisconsin by 22,000 votes. On the other hand Hillary won Illinois by almost a million votes. While you can drive around where I live for an hour and not run across a Hillary voter (Trump won my county 71%-23%), in terms of total population the people of the CSA are very divided. Just four years earlier Obama won half of the ten states that make up the CSA.

There is more to life than politics. The people of the CSA, for the most part, are joined together by a lot of threads from our sports rivalries to our common Midwestern culture. Having lived in the Northeast and the Mountain West in addition to the Midwest I can tell you that the culture of rural northern Michigan is a lot more similar to Midwestern large cities (except maybe Chicago) than those cities are to the big urban enclaves back East. We tend to be more down to earth, more religious, we call it pop instead of soda. We like fishing and mowing big yards.

We also have our issues here in the Midwest. Many factories are idled. The CSA is ground zero for the opiod epidemic. There are a lot of dying small towns as farms keep getting bigger and the jobs move overseas. Racial animosity is still very strong in many parts of this region. Some states, especially Illinois, are a fiscal trainwreck. So this is not all just taking our Big Ten schools and quietly leaving the Union.

As I said initially, I started with the two easier new nations, the Yankee States of America and Cowlandia, because they were the neatest two regions in an inevitably messy process. Creating a new nation out of the Midwest would be challenging but I also believe that thanks to our willingness to work together and our shared values that transcend politics, we would survive and thrive on our own. That leaves me with the Pacific West and the Southeast and those have some issues of their own.

Dissolving The Union: Cowlandia

As part of a series, in a prior post on my other blog (I am moving this series to my main blog), I took a stab at my first new nation to be formed from the dissolution of the United States, a combination of the northeastern states into an independent nation I called The Yankee States of America.

As I said in that post, that one was probably the easiest because the Northeast is so homogeneous in terms of it's political and cultural attitudes and it would even allow them to keep their bitter sportsball rivalries intact. The Y.S.A. is the cleanest and neatest of the new nations to create.

As you move away from the Northeast, things get more complicated because of the stark difference between the urban and suburban/rural areas in the rest of the country. Even seemingly monolithic California has 53 Congressmen and of those 39 are Democrats and 14 are Republicans, so over a quarter of California's delegation is Republican. But there are other considerations beyond strictly political considerations, specifically cultural connections between regions. Thus I present for your consideration..

Cowlandia!

The first thing you might notice about Cowlandia is that it is HUGE in terms of land size. These 11 states, not counting the parts of states like Nevada, Washington and New Mexico, combine for over 1.1 million square miles. Since the entire U.S., counting Alaska,  is about 3.5 million square miles, Cowlandia would be almost a third of the entire U.S. landmass and at that size would be the sixth largest nation in the world in area, slightly ahead of India and well behind Russia, China, Canada, Brazil, and Australia (as the U.S. would no longer exist at number 3).

What it is not is super densely populated, unlike the YSA. The great state of Texas stands out among the rest of Cowlandia. Texas currently has two of the top ten most populous U.S. Metropolitan Areas (Dallas-Fort Worth #8 with 7 million people and Houston at #10 with 6.3 million people.). Overall the state is number two in the country in terms of population with over 27 million people, well below California's 39 million but well ahead of number 3 Florida's 20 million. However the rest of Cowlandia as a whole includes some of the least populous states in the present United States, states like Wyoming with the smallest population in the U.S. at barely half a million and both Dakotas with less than a million people each.

State	Size in sq miles	Population
Idaho	83,570	1,654,930
Montana	147,040	1,032,949
North Dakota	70,700	756,927
South Dakota	77,116	858,469
Wyoming	97,814	586,107
Nebraska	77,354	1,896,190
Utah	84,899	2,995,919
Colorado	104,094	5,456,574
Kansas	82,277	2,911,641
Oklahoma	69,898	2,911,338
Texas	268,581	27,862,596
	1,163,343	48,923,640

With almost 49 million people scattered over 1.2 million square miles, Cowlandia has a population density of around 42 people per square mile, similar to nations like Finland and Paraguay. The current United States has a population density of around 86 people per square mile and ranks 182nd in the world on that basis, while Cowlandia would register around 201st out of 240 some odd nations

Cowlandia is also rich in  natural resources, from the agricultural breadbasket that extends from north to south to the oil and natural gas in Texas, Oklahoma and Wyoming, Cowlandia's strength is not in high tech but in raw materials. Texas has the second largest gross state product in the U.S. with a staggering $1,648,077,000,000 GSP. With a GSP of well over $1.6 trillion, Texas by herself would be in the top ten nations in the world in terms of GDP, just ahead of Canada, so Cowlandia as a whole would have plenty of economic strength to go it alone.

With a northern border of Canada and a souther border with Mexico plus a large Gulf of Mexico coastline, Cowlandia has lots of access to international trade. Obviously with Texas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, etc. Cowlandia has a great deal of oil, natural gas and other mineral resources plus the vast grain acreage in Kansas, Nebraska and others. A sizable amount of the beef you consume is finished out in the giant feedlots in Colorado and elsewhere in Cowlandia. Of course Cowlandia also includes a number of important parks like Glacier, Yellowstone, Rocky Mountain, Zion, and many others. But it is not all wheat and cows and parks. Cowlandia has a number of urban centers in Houston and Dallas, Salt Lake City and Denver plus a bunch of colleges and universities in Boulder, Provo, Lincoln and all across Texas, so Cowlandia would have ample access to the creative class.

What it does not have is an overabundance of fresh water and that could be a problem. Perhaps Cowlandia could trade with the yet to be revealed new home of the upper Midwest, oil for water?

Cowlandia broadly speaking is the American West. Having lived in Cheyenne, Wyoming I can tell you there is a huge difference between the West and the Midwest. People in the YSA probably assume anyone west of Pittsburgh is a redneck or cowboy or both but the Western culture is very different from other areas in the country. While South Dakota is not Texas, they are both in my opinion far more similar to one another than they are to people in Boston. While there are exceptions in urban areas and Colorado is a lot more "blue" than the rest, much of Cowlandia is deep, deep red.

Many people who live in Cowlandia are resentful of people "back east" telling them how to manage their own lands. The fight over the reintroduction of the gray wolf a number of years ago was a perfect example. A rancher in Montana is going to have a very different understanding of the utility of bringing back an alpha predator than a wealthy urban housewife in Manhattan that contributes to the Natural Resources Defense Fund. Even Texan suburbanites are very different from people in the suburbs of Boston or Philadelphia or even places like Atlanta and Nashville.

Some other questions. Where would the capitol be? Probably in Texas, and probably somewhere like Dallas. Denver is another option as it is fairly centrally located in Cowlandia and might keep some of the power from being overly concentrated in Texas. Westerners would probably prefer a Dallas capitol to a capitol in D.C. but would like decentralization even more. What about the sizable Hispanic population? I would assume many would stay and be welcome in the new nation, many others might move to Arizona or California as I would assume that the government and culture of Cowlandia would change quite a bit. Part of dissolving the Union would be to allow enough time for people who wanted to move to do so freely before the new nations are formed.

What about the nukes? Between Strategic Air Command in Nebraska to NORAD in Colorado to the nuclear missile "farms" in the prairie states to air bases like Minot (N.D.), Malmstrom (MT) and F.E. Warren near where we lived in Cheyenne, Wyoming that house both nuclear capable B-52's and our land based nuclear strike force, Cowlandia holds a major percentage of the present U.S. nuclear deterrent. As an aside, it was kind of weird to drive around Cheyenne and see nuclear missile facilities seemingly randomly scattered around the otherwise empty prairie. Like most of the military, the nuclear forces would need to be split up. Although places like California and the YSA might not want nukes, they probably wouldn't want to give them all to new neighboring nations. A mutual defense treaty between the newly independent countries is a topic for another post.

Cowlandia for me was the second easiest new nation to carve out. From here on out it starts to get more difficult.

#DissolveTheUnion

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

President John F. Kennedy, 1962