Well some have tried. There was a civil war about it.

Exactly. Many of the people who make civil war/anti south jokes are the same people who want California to secede, which makes no sense.

In its simplest form, the civil war wasn't fought because the north thought slavery was bad. It was fought because several states tried to leave the United States.

Why did they try to leave, again?

Hint: Most of the secession declarations include language like this:

> But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution.

Sigh, I never made a claim as to why the south left. Slavery is not the reason for the war, secession is. You can easily make the case that slavery was the reason for secession, which isn't wrong, but a moot point. If states had seceded because they didn't like tea, we'd still have had a war.

> Many of the people who make civil war/anti south jokes are the same people who want California to secede

Citation needed.

Even if it was made legally possible for states to secede, I doubt it would help much - we're all too mixed up with each other. The Bluest states all have a lot of Red in their more rural areas, and the Reddest states all have a lot of Blue in their biggest cities.

If such a thing were to happen, the states that ended up on each side would probably end up doubling down on the oppression of those in the other tribe who are still in their state, to encourage them to move to a state that's on their side.

It's not a democracy, it's a federal republic.

It's a constitutional republic / representative democracy. Republics and democracies aren't mutually exclusive. It's certainly not a direct democracy, but that doesn't make it not a democracy.

In a pure democracy there is no such thing as a constitution, as in the underlying principles can be changed by the majority in power. Having a constitution leads to more stability.

It’s curious that the country/federation that introduced the concept of self-determination doesn’t allow self-determination for its constituent states.

> country/federation that introduced the concept of self-determination doesn’t allow self-determination for its constituent states

Individual self determination.

If a local majority secedes every time it wants to trample on a minority, or in the case of the civil war, an oppressed majority, two things happen: one, politics devolve into fractured feudalism. Local elites have a mechanism for wresting absolute control. That, not the Constitution or a Bill of Rights or elections, becomes the basic unit of power.

Two, our two-plus century record of peace on the homeland shatters. Every election or court case found unseemly by a contiguous local majority prompts a Twitter and existential crisis. Foreign adversaries hammer the wedge and split the nation into warring vassal states and too-small-to-matter opposing countries.

It sort of does, in theory anyways. The constitution states that the government can be dissolved when the people feel it's necessary. That's not based on a single state though. But, the states should have a lot of power within their boarders, but it seems the 10th ammendment is often ignored and the judiciary fails to check the legislature on its overreach.