Red States Talk of Seceding from the United States

All the talk about the Republican-leaning states’ seceding from the United States gets one thinking:

Some say that Lincoln should have simply let the Confederate States of America leave the union, allowing them to wither and die, as the CSA would have been so repulsive to the north and the rest of the world that it would have been completely isolated, not to mention devoid of technological innovation. After a few years the CSA would have been so debilitated that the Civil War, were there to be one, would have been over in a month with very few casualties, cities burned, etc.

What about today?  The people of Kentucky or Mississippi may think it sounds like heaven to be rid of the elitist snobs of California and Massachusetts constantly ridiculing them and dictating policy on things like abortion, creationism taught as science, the reality of climate change, and the like.  But how blissful would it really be?

Imagine that the red states were contiguous. as they were in 1860, all south of a certain line, and decided to leave.  Assume that the United States would protect it against armed invasion, just as the union could have done with the CSA under the “hands off” policy that had been put into place at the turn of the 19th Century.

What would become of such a nation?  When we think about it, the situation is not altogether different than it was for the prospective CSA of 160 years ago.  In the first place, it would be incredibly poor; 97 of the 100 poorest counties in the U.S. are in Republican states, and would experience mass starvation if it weren’t for federal money.

In addition, it would be highly uneducated, technologically backward, racist to the point of segregation, unhealthy, and deeply but hypocritically Christian.  All this would add up to an impoverished nation, shunned by the developed world, soon to become scarcely more relevant in the global marketplace of the 21st Century than Chad or Laos.