For the past few months, a long-buried idea has been creeping from the fringe into mainstream Republican discourse: secession. Following President Joe Biden’s victory in November, GOP officials from Wyoming to Florida to Mississippi have floated the idea, claiming that the time for a national fracturing may be near. While there’s something of a seasonal flavor to this injection of rhetoric — Republican honchos like former Texas Gov. Rick Perry openly discussed secession following Barack Obama’s rise to the presidency, for instance — the recent rounds feel qualitatively different. As journalist and author Richard Kreitner, an expert on American secessionism, recently wrote, it’s time to “take secessionist talk seriously.”
While there’s something of a seasonal flavor to this injection of secessionist rhetoric the recent rounds feel qualitatively different.
And it’s not difficult to see why. In the wake of the failed pro-Trump insurrection in Washington, far-right American […]
Virtually every partnership agreement comes with a mechanism for equitably dissolving the partnership should the parties so decide. How long would the USA have lasted with a constitutional clause like that?
Not long.
Would it be disastrous now?
Would the world be a better place?
Would your opinion change if Trump is re-elected in 4 years?
A case can be made that peaceful secession (call it divorce over irreconcilable differences) would con balance be a plus. First, the U.S. is too strong militarily, wasting enormous wealth and killing untold numbers in endless wars, while enriching a parasitic military industrial complex, as in Stephan’s post about the F-35.
Second, after well over 100 years the civilized parts of the country have failed to integrate the South, poisoned as it was by the culture of slavery and religions devoted to legitimizing it, into the Union. Their presence has prevented the rest of the nation from responding to modernity as intelligently as Western Europe and Scandinavia. It has also prevented the South from having to honestly address the deformations in its own society. We would be better off without them.
Third, with secession, as populations moved from one to the other, the red states might get the homogeneity needed to create genuine democratic instituions and the Blue states could build on what we already have. There has never been a war between two (loosely defined) democracies, even when they dislike one another. Each would likely be glad to be rid of the other.
Fourth, we can then govern ourselves.
Fifth, as a nation founded on consent of the governed, there is a deep contradiction between the inner logic of the constitution and having a basically disloyal sizeable minority regionally defined.
Sixth, all this assumes it an happen peacefully.