In the light of recent events I’d like to promulgate a proposal:

I remember reading in The Nation some years ago, after Dukakis’
defeat, that really we have to come to terms with the fact that
there’s two countries here, a scary reactionary fundamentalist
country called America and a relatively sane area which should
properly be referred to as Southern Canada. This most recent
election has made clear that the cultural and moral gap between these
two countries is simply unmaintainable. We are literally living in
different universes. Therefore I propose that the blue states all
immediately secede from the union and join Canada. Let’s make
it legal. There is, I think, a potential legal precent: if I am not mistaken the Turks and Caicos (sp?) islands are negotiating to join Canada even now. The results would be a contiguous nation. And the
advantages - even apart from the obvious one of freedom from
Bush and everything Texan -are endless. Consider:

* we’d all have health care
* we will be more, not less, economically viable as
the red states leach off our tax money anyway
* we would no longer have to lie and say we’re from
Canada when we go overseas; it will actually be true
* Canada can give up Quebec and it won’t really
matter much
* the new, scarier rump America will find it much
more difficult to terrorize the world since it will have half
the resources and population

with as far as I can see only one possible drawback:

* the (admittedly not inconsiderable) possibility of civil war

The other obvious problem with this plan is the resulting country -
the present vast expanses of Canada plus two fang-like
and densely populated extensions - would instantly
become the largest and wealthiest state on earth, in a
position, eventually, to become yet another predatory super-power.
For this reason it might be preferable to adopt an alternative
strategy, one I would dub the "deconstruct America" approach. California
and the southwest could go back to Mexico. It wasn’t legally annexed anyway.
(Texas in theory could too but I wouldn’t wish Texas on anyone.) The Great Plains are a disaster anyway, economically unviable, supported by massive welfare, and steadily losing population; I’d say give them
back to the Native Americans. This would mean a much smaller, relatively harmless rump America roughly equivalent to the former
Confederacy (minus Louisiana, if that’s fused onto Quebec, but
all that’s of course negotiable, and possibly Florida, which might
be better as an independent Caribbean-style state of its own, perhaps
something along the lines of Cuba.) The details of course can be
worked out. The point is that continent-sized super-states are simply
a thing of the past. The current election has demonstrated that they
are not viable, and are intrinsically, threats to world peace. Just as huge multi-ethnic empires like the Ottoman Empire or USSR have been breaking up over the last century in the name of democracy, the time has come that empires based on extirpation, rather than colonization, should really follow suit. A fundamentalist-dominated, aggressive, and militaristic rump USA could perhaps become a dangerous rogue state for much of the 21st century, particularly if ended up with most of the nuclear missiles - however as an anti-intellectual theocracy, it would probably, like the former USSR, soon loose the ability to successfully keep up with military technologies and become, effectively, containable. But one
thing is certain: this state would be a far smaller threat to world peace, or indeed human survival, than the current, obviously untenable, United
States of America.
David Graeber