plainoldme wrote:Actually, I have always thought that this would have been a better country had part of it remained New France and New Spain and had the Swedes kept their port in New Jersey. Richer. More diverse. Not so conformist. Not so shallow.
Hard for modern people to picture Sweden ever having been a serious country, and apparently it was before Poltava. Thank you, Tsar Peter, wherever you are....
France actually was a serious country for a long time in a sort of a cultural sense, but you ultimately get back to what the authors of the West Point military history series say about the place i.e. that France always had the agricultural base to support twenty times the population of any of its immediate neighbors and that if she had ever had competent leadership (instead of all the intrigue and debauchery) for even one generation she should have totally dominated Europe after the fall of the Roman empire in the West.
Spain had three whole centuries to try to settle California before the Anglos got there. I mean, English being the language and culture of North America is not by accident.
Then again the situation with colleges and universities in the "Jesusland" part of whatever happens to the US is easy to underestimate. We'll still have schools like West Point, VMI, and Norwich along with the serious parts of schools which split up (You'll get to keep the "ethnic studies" and arts/crafts sections of many of them), and there'll be a lot of kids who prefer attending the Jesusland schools without the "gun-free zone(TM)" thing simply for the better chance of survival.
Then again, there will be at least one pretty major school (Duke) which, under the new ownership and management and in the new location after all the lawsuits this summer and without all the leftist trash which it will have been forced to jettison, will clearly be a part of Jesusland and not of Demokkkistan. A number of others could easily have had enough of political correctness at that point and follow suit.
Other than that, the picture which Joe posted is not terribly realistic. Nobody's going to let Demokkkistan keep every inch of the west coast and most of the land mass of Canada is empty tundra, lakes, and woods etc. suitable mostly if for anything for redneck sports and activities like hunting and fishing.