The red/blue divide very closely tracks the slave/free divide at the time of the Civil War

Just a coincidence, I'm sure.

https%3A//sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-snc7/293809_10151138179569072_1175739218_n.jpg



• For a long time now, I've maintained that Lincoln should have let the South secede. Their ingrained conservatism, bigotry, and backwardness has been pulling the country to the right ever since, and has kept us from true greatness. We were wrong to keep them.

• chilling

• Would we really have been better off to wash our hands of slavery rather than end it? I'm not so sure. However, today I have long believed that we should let them go off and form Jesusland.

• r1, do you realize what you are saying? Do you realize the pain and misery that would have ensued? Do you realize that without the end of slavery, the birth of reconstruction, and the ability of black Americans to freely move throughout the U.S., we would never know if the civil rights struggles of the last 150 years might ever have occurred?

• I'm sure our black President would be thrilled that his supporters would revise history to allow the prolongation of North American slavery simply because they find it difficult, in the 21st century, to live in a democracy with people who don't think exactly like them. Some of you should really just kill yourselves. Now.

  An%20actual%20liberal

• Yes, r4, we could have annexed Canada.

• Slavery would have ended one way or the other regardless of the Civil War. I think the war was justified and necessary because of slavery, but it accelerated the inevitable.

• They'll never get over themselves. Most of them think they're rich white folk but the truth is they're just trash. Their color and sexuality is the only thing they have to show for their self-proclaimed "superiority". That breed can't die off fast enough.

• It created a victimization dynamic among southern whites that we're still living with. See also: Mormons and their persecution myth.

• Interesting that Virginia, which was the home of the capital of the Confederacy, has turned blue in the past two elections, while West Virginia, which split from Virginia during the Civil War to join the Union, is red. I think the real red/blue divide is between educated/uneducated, and religious/secular.

• They do not refer to it as the civil war in the south. They call it the war of northern aggression.

• 'Cause the North really wanted to take over their backwards-ass lives.

  yeeeah

• If the South had been allowe to secede there would be a lot fewer problem blacks and Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Phillly, Baltimore, and DC would never have become a black cities. Freeing the slaves brought about more problems for the North and West than it did for the South. Surely the conditions for the slaves would have become better over time and the concept of welfare would have been a Confederate concept to keep slaves under control. The North took on a lot of "no benefit" problems by keeping the South in the Union. We should go a step further back and allow the South to be separate and the rest of the US could become part of the UK again.

• [quote]If the South had been allowe to secede there would be a lot fewer problem blacks and Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Phillly, Baltimore, and DC would never have become a black cities. Freeing the slaves brought about more problems for the North and West than it did for the South. Well, at least you cop to your prejudice with black folks, unlike so many of the "let the South secede" people.

• I forgot, my pussy stinks!

  R13

• I don't think the number of blacks in Northern states would have been much different if the South seceded. Their reasons for migrating would have been the same. Most of that migration took place in the 20th century long after slavery would have ended.

• I know the word 'cop' is a drug term, does it have other meanings? The druggies on TV were always going to cop more drugs. I presume they were getting more chemicals.

• r16 - it's unlikely Southern blacks would have been allowed to migrate to the north if the north and the south had become their own countries. In any case, the migration patterns of blacks since the 1960s have been southward, not northward; here's just one article about it.

  http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/opinion/columnist/wickham/2005-06-06-wickham_x.htm%3Fcsp%3D34

• [quote] it's unlikely Southern blacks would have been allowed to migrate to the north if the north and the south had become their own countries. I disagree. The North needed the labor.

• The Confederate States would have proven folly that building a wall would keep people IN.

• You have to admit, the entire civil war was waste of money and lives. The only ones who got anything out of all the death and distruction were a few of the slaves. Sure, with defeat the slaves were free, but that didn't educate the poor souls so many were worse off with freedom than under slavery. Those young enough to have a future were not provided training and education to cope with freedom, most remained as free people doing what they were doing before the war. If the North had really been fighting a war to free the slaves, they would have indepted the confederate states by holding them liable for the education and day to day support of the slave families for at least 50 to 75 years. This never happened because the North never really cared about slavery except when they were in church.

• Much of that failure was due to the assassination of Lincoln and his replacement with the pathetic Andrew Johnson, R21.

• "They call it the war of northern aggression." Well, around here we call it the War of Southern Pure Evil, which is a rather more accurate description.

• You have to admit, the entire civil war was waste of money and lives. The only ones who got anything out of all the death and distruction were a few of the slaves. As with many wars, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. Some Northern business tycoons were made far wealthier by the war.

• I often feel the same frustration about the perpetual backwardness of the south, but it's more complicated than that. Obama carried Virginia, once the heart of the Confederacy, and if you look at southern states where Obama lost, he still got 40/45% of the vote. Are you willing to write off all those people? I don't think we're where we could have been without the Confederate states, but I think their invincible ignorance is eroding, year by year. By the time Obama leaves office, there will be a generation of whites in the south who only know a black president. Think about that.

• R1, if the south and successfully succeeded then they would have become in the next century the very closest foreign ally of the National Socialists in Germany, then instead of bombs just raining down on London, they would have likewise on NYC and Philadelphia.

• [quote]many were worse off with freedom than under slavery. I don't even know where to start with this.

• [quote]I often feel the same frustration about the perpetual backwardness of the south, but it's more complicated than that. Obama carried Virginia, once the heart of the Confederacy, and if you look at southern states where Obama lost, he still got 40/45% of the vote. Are you willing to write off all those people? Howard Dean wasn't, but the current Democratic Party seems to be. Anyway, it's an old argument, usually advanced by white "progressives" who are totally comfortable jettisoning black and poor folks. The states in the Midwest are just as red -- in fact, out of the five states with the highest number of GOP voters, none of them are in the South (see link) -- but the people there are overwhelmingly white.

  http://www.gallup.com/poll/156437/heavily-democratic-states-concentrated-east.aspx

• It tracks almost exactly with states that allow unionization and those that don't. The Union project was not just about the moral evil of slavery, but also the economic evil of slavery in its theft of the labor of human beings. Thus, the abolition of slavery was the first minimum wage. And then when you look at what the Northeast and the West and the industrial Midwest have in common nowadays, and how Indiana has fell out of things, it's all about the modern-day Union that supports workers rights to organize and fight for economic dignity in the face of greedy employers.

• R25, there's another thing to consider. The Southern redneck lifestyle is very unhealthy so the worst of that culture die young. They drink rotgut, smoke heavily, shoot and stab each other, and eat the worst diet imaginable. Some rednecks are kind of cute when they're in their teens and early twenties, but they age fast and hard. Last I knew, the father of a friend from Pegram, TN was in prison for the third time for the same crime, killing one of his friends in a drunken fight over a toothless barfly.

• I honestly don't know what the fuck is wrong with some of the people on this board. Obama was re-elected President with support from all portions of the country, and yet you have people on here for whom apparently this is not good enough, because EVERYONE did not vote for him. Therefore, in their mind, the Civil War was not worth fighting for, because the South - or rather, the electoral college that represents the South - did not support Obama, and the blacks should have had to endured slavery a little bit longer simply because yesterday, not everyone voted for Obama. Someone actually THOUGHT this. They seriously THOUGHT this, and did not see anything wrong with what they were thinking. You know what else, OP? The majority of Americans over 50 did not support Obama. How long before you advocate a national euthanasia policy? The majority of men did not support Obama. Let's castrate them, shall we? Obama would be ASHAMED if he knew you supported him.

• that's just a bit over the top, r31. Mary!

• OP here's one even better. A map of the county by county breakdown of the 2008 results compared to 1860 cotton production. The places where the cotton production was the highest (and thereby the slave population highest) were the areas where Obama did best.

  http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/11/17/662103/-Correlation-of-1860-Cotton-Production-Map-to-2008-Voting-Map-and-more-maps

• It's an urban vs. rural divide. You'll see that even in red states, the Democratic areas are in the cities.

• The "liberal" part of Florida (except Key West) was virtually uninhabited at the time of the Civil War.

• Jon Stewart announced on election night that the Daily Show projected that Mitt Romney had won "most of the Confederacy."

• Sally Field for Best Supporting Actress!

• best>

• We need to split Florida in two.

  Elroy

• Someone on this board is totally unaware that slavery existed in Europe. England just outlawed it before the US did but it just made way for indentured servantry.

• That map fails to show the slave state that exists in San Francisco's Castro area. And the many trains for those slaves.

• [quote]We need to split Florida in two. Ouch! You'd do that to America's Wang? It would be like an adult circumcision.

• totally relevant:

  http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/nov/09/mapping-racist-tweets-president-obama-reelection