Breaking large countries up into smaller polities

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What is wrong with the idea of wanting the large countries like U.S., China, Russia broken into at least 2 smaller political entities? I think that might help solve a lot of our divisions as people or at least different people can organize in any like-minded way they want. What is anything inherently wrong or evil about that idea?

I distrust the trifecta of big government, big business, and big pop-culture. I assume the USA still has a monopoly consumption and production share on world media content.

Territory means buffer zones against invasion, and it means population to tax. Small countries are economically and militarily weaker.
The solution to that would ve defense agreements and free trade zones and such, but the more countries you have the harder it gets ro find a common set of rules.
And if you try to copy something like the EU, you might find that though they found a common set of rules, it is now borderline impossible to change things, because too many interest groups have to agree on things, and they might have very petty and national reasons to disagree.

And a nation like the US with states and state legislation isn't that far from individual countries in a free trade zone. I mean, you have Texas and Maine living largely peacefully under one umbrella, that's quite an achievement. ...

It's a very complicated topic.

As a gut reaction I quite like the idea. One attraction is that it may be easier for a small group to self-manage in a fully democratic and fair way, a more natural, "human" entity than a bureaucratic and somewhat heartless nation state. But there are disadvantages to a world of small independent communities, e.g. you lose the economy of scale when you try to produce anything. And cunning narcissistic individuals can spoil the whole democratic thing so that the group becomes more of a repressive dictatorship, or there's a constant battle between the narcissist and the other people, though you could argue it's no worse than what we have now. Not that it's always as simple as some authoritarian jerk proactively forcing their way to power. Humans seem to have a habit of creating leaders and then smashing them down.

The most hopeful plan I've seen is a pyramid structure where each small group elects a representative, then those representatives collect together in small groups, each group of representatives elects a "representative of representatives," and so on until there's one small group at the top of the pyramid, and each tier is controlled by the tier below it. But I really don't know if it would work.

And I don't know any practical way of making it happen. The incumbent authority ruling a nation state can turn very nasty when they think a part of "their" territory is moving towards splintering off. And even if one nation managed to unilaterally divide itself into small groups, they'd be wide open to invasion from some big country or other.

https://youtu.be/ozlzeflmfw4


Outer Baldonia

^
I love the bit about the one that started off communist and then turned fascist so they wouldn't scare the neigbours so much.

There's really an extremely fine line between most communist/Marxist-oriented regimes and fascistic tendencies.

Also: There's a fair amount of liberals in so-called "red states," and a fair amount of conservatives in even such "liberal" places as New York City.

Does one think that Salt Lake City, say, should secede from Utah?

I think the best model is small-ish democratic polities that collaborate closely with each other. The federal government should be relatively weak, acting as a backstop.

The US is a pretty good example of this. The EU is another. And within the EU, Germany would also qualify.

Russia and China are both imperialist empires that need to break up and democratise. The first step should be losing their colonial possessions. China should lose Tibet, East Turkestan, Outer Mongolia, Hong Kong, and Macau. Russia should lose the Finnish border areas (particularly Karelia), Tatarstan, Chechnya, and far more.

Even following that, those two countries would still be too large to function as democracies. They'd either need to grant very high levels of autonomy, or better, entirely break up. "European Russia" would be a large and prosperous state under good democratic governance. The Asian part of Russia has different priorities, and it's nuts that people from East Asia are being recruited to fight for European Russia to seize Ukraine for itself.

As for China, once the colonial possessions are stripped away then my (uninformed) view is that there are basically three regions with their own interests - the West, North East, and South East. Each of them should have their own foreign policy, defence policy, and so forth. I imagine SE China would become an "Asian tiger", trying to imitate Singapore on a larger scale. It's very connected to the wider Asia-Pacific region, and places like Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou would benefit from more "openness".

If it weren't for "Manifest Destiny," and the push to cover a decent amount of land from the Atlantic to the Pacific, it is quite possible that the United States wouldn't have become as powerful as what actually occurred.

Also: the sheer distance from the "old world" probably contributed to the US, for all intents and purposes, not being invaded during World War I and II.