"Secession is a deeply American principle. This country was born through secession. Some felt it was treasonous to secede from England, but those 'traitors' became our country’s greatest patriots. There is nothing treasonous or unpatriotic about wanting a federal government that is more responsive to the people it represents."
That's hard to argue -- in essence. However, he further wrote:
“If the possibility of secession is completely off the table there is nothing to stop the federal government from continuing to encroach on our liberties and no recourse for those who are sick and tired of it."I'm going to spend three paragraphs doing a brief history lesson; then I'm going to spend the rest of this post explaining the utter shortsightedness of the secession fever.
The United States was formed through secession, indeed, from the British Empire. However, the main sticking point with the Americans was not necessarily the power of the British government -- it is the fact that American colonies had no representation in Parliament. This is where the historical moniker "no taxation without representation" erupted from. Combine this with the American Enlightenment and the influence of classical liberalism and its offshoot republicanism, the monarchy and aristocracy became points of resentment. The rest, as they say, is history: the American colonists, through grit, guerrilla warfare, and the French, successfully wrested independence from Britain in a revolution that was, ironically, led by political and economic elitists mainly out of the Northeast.
The utopia first that was conjured up was the Articles of Confederation where each state was a sovereign state. Unfortunately, the lack of cooperation and consistency among states, thanks to an absence of a central government worth a damn led to it successor document, the United States Constitution. The strange thing about the Constitution? The Constitution created a stronger central government, then left quite a few things very wide open in regards to interpretation, and depending on the tradition that you'd want to follow -- either the Hamiltonian tradition of a strong central government or the Jeffersonian tradition of strong state governments. This would lead to an issue a little more than 70 years later that would take nearly a century to completely resolve.
The antebellum period of the Civil War, which included the industrialization of the northern states, territorial expansion, a strong abolitionist movement, and a social and political dichotomy between Northern and Southern, Slave and Free states, came to address the supremacy of state governments versus the supremacy of the federal government. While historians would argue that the Civil War established the supremacy of the federal government, it was undermined by a lack of social and state cooperation, and aside from slavery, the states that seceded actually achieved more of their objectives after Reconstruction than they did when they tried to bolt from the Union thanks to a mobilized then-white supremacist Democratic Party. The supremacy of the federal government was not firmly established until the New Deal era and Civil Rights Movement which culminated with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Great Society programs under Lyndon Johnson.
The root of today's secession movement, more of a political fad than anything truly meaningful, is not an indictment against the federal government, but an indictment against the constituency.
While often people want to note that the whole point of the secession movement is the second quote above, that quote, as passionate as it is and as much as it tugs on romantic, patriotic sentiments, is an illustration of the whole shortsightedness of this movement. It is fueled by political emotion that is an end in itself -- in this case, a desire to develop conservative and libertarian paradises in the wake of a hefty federal government.
When a state secedes, it is up to that state to come up with a comprehensive and sustainable plan to develop a self-sufficient state; failure to do so will guarantee that the seceded state will crumble. The perfect example of that would be the nascent United States under the Articles of Confederation: the Continental Congress resented a strong central government due to its issues with Britain and thus developed a form of government out of that resentful emotion. However, Congress found itself in (little) control of a country that was on the brink of collapse when there was no strong central government to enforce cooperation among states.
The Confederacy continued the fallacy: it resented the federal government for enroaching on states' rights, so one by one, the Southern states seceded from the United States. Focusing too much on states' rights and the guarantee of slavery, each state fairly had its own agenda and barely cooperated with the central government in Richmond. Unsurprisingly, the Confederacy was crushed by the Union Army, despite the Confederacy nearly having the entire white male population mobilized and being highly successful in the early stages of the war.
More often than not, as evidenced by development of the United States Constitution, the emotional drive ends up being undermined by the ultimate grand bargain -- the things that secessionists or revolutionaries rail against ending up adopted because it is realized that it is a necessity for the survival and success of the given state. For the United States, the grand bargain ended up being the Constitution.
The root issue, as noted above, is the desire for a libertarian and conservative state that rejects a government that forces everyone to, well, cooperate with one another. Coerced cooperation is derided as collectivism suppressing individualism and voluntary association. However, cooperation became the global rule of human concert through the genesis of administrative divisions, national identities, and growth of urban areas throughout history, culminating into the one event that would legitimize the position that cooperation holds to this day: the Industrial Revolution. While I'll be the first to advocate for the value of individual and for the right to voluntary association, I'm also a realist -- this world is pretty damn small and this country even smaller.
Yet, I'll include this footnote: just because we, as people, have to cooperate with one another does not mean that we have to completely sacrifice personal individuality, personal choice, individual rights, and individual liberties -- however, we have to remain mindful of those above things with each other. At the same time, the issue in regards to whether or not the federal government is inhibiting the aforementioned things is not an issue with the institution itself, but it is personnel that man that institution, something that the public can have an effect on every two years.
In truth, the bottom line is that it is completely irresponsible to fully believe that a state that is completely banks on an unrealistic level of human altruism to survive can even exist. Political moves fueled by emotion and tunnel visioned worldview can only yield positive results for a short period of time, but never anything beyond that; none of this more true in a post-industrial, globalized world.
So how does this turn into an indictment against the constituency? It is an illustration that Americans focus too much on any divide that can be created -- liberal, conservative, progressive, libertarian, anti-gay, pro-gay rights, pro-life, pro-choice, etc. We want to take positions that we can see and run with it, hold on and and ingrain in ourselves connotative meanings instead of at least acknowledging any denotative meanings or observations to be seen. The secession movement continues the tradition of trying to find patches to solutions, instead of critically investigating why we are where we are today and constructively develop solutions to the issues of today and not just finding things that are convenient to blame because our ideology tells us to.
No comments:
Post a Comment