You Say Tomato, I Say Disintegration of the United States
An observation regarding Americans' use of language in referring to U.S. separatism.
Just a quick note tonight on something I've been observing on social media recently:
For a few weeks, I've noticed a trend among Americans. In particular, around the use of language describing intra-U.S. separatist mobilizations supported by various political camps (no matter how unseriously). For whatever reason, "secession" appears to have become a term of the right. In fact, there seems to be such a strong association among left-of-center liberals in America with federalism that the idea of breaking apart the country is perceived by many as a far-right notion. On the other hand, the center-left tends to refer to a split-up of the American states as "Balkanization."
I haven't dug deeply into what is behind this apparent trend. In fact, without running data analysis on Twitter (for example), I won't have any definitive proof that there even actually is a trend here. Since Friday, following the Supreme court's decision on the Dobbs case, I even noticed a sharp uptick in center-left use of the word "secession." So, who knows?
I wonder precisely how much American politics' identity/brand-centric approach drives any divergence if there is one.
It's an interesting phenomenon, and as soon as I figure out how to use gephi, I'll be digging into it a little deeper.