Is Secession Possible?

 Stephen Marche launches an incomplete analysis of the viability of secession. He talks about the constitutionality of secession, which is...stupid? The legal questions can be resolved. He uses Texas as an example. Texas had a brief run as an independent country, a fact that some Texans will happily remind you of. Marche focuses on things like the presence of US Military bases and so on, some of the questions that the country faced in 1860-61. Would an independent Texas acquire a proportional share of the national debt? What about NASA?

The problem is that Texas would not secede. Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Missouri, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Idaho, Wyoming, Kentucky, West Virginia and Indiana would secede. Hell, maybe Ohio. 

The Red/Blue dichotomy is not as clear as the secession crisis that led to the Civil War. Daniel Webster's Seventh of March speech and Lincoln's First Inaugural both made the case that secession was a geographic impossibility. That logic is even more clear today. The divide in this country is not "sectional" in the sense of North vs South. It's Rural vs Urban. 

I've been reading Sean Wilentz's The Rise of American Democracy, and his analysis of the coming of the Civil War is really interesting and perhaps illuminative. The democratic forces unleashed in the Age of Jackson posited the inherent equality of all White Americans. However, it wasn't a huge stretch for people like Lincoln or Henry Seward to extend that legal equality to the enslaved. The idea of human equality, as opposed to White equality, is right there in the Declaration, staring people in the face.

The White South instead embraced a theory of Master Race "democracy" that effectively became a form of oligarchy, especially in John C. Calhoun's South Carolina. Poor and middling, non-slave owning Whites elected planter elites to run the South (and really the country) to preserve their system of racial prerogatives. White elites in the South and parts of the North were horrified at the political philosophy that permeated the rest of the country. 

That's effectively where we are now: two very different forms of "democracy." Two different political cultures that really start from such a fundamentally different conception of what it means to be American, that it's hard to see a way clear. Just as the South saw Lincolns election as illegitimate, so Trumpistan sees Biden's election as some form of "fraud."

It is also clear that secession in 1850-60 was a minority movement pushed by a coherent political cadre known as the Fire-eaters. These pro-slavery secessionists had been consistently pushing for separation for a decade before Ft. Sumter.

I think we are basically in the early 1850s, in this regard. There are Fire-eaters in our midst, but it's unclear whether they have anywhere close to majority support, even in Trumpistan. Of course, both sides see themselves as the True Americans, so neither side feels a need to accommodate the other.

Of course, this is somewhat the exact problem that Federalism should solve. If you REALLY hate the liberals, then move to Mississippi! If Alabama disgusts you, then move to Maryland. Of course the problem is if you live in Henry country Georgia, you would simply move to Atlanta. But what happens if Georgia secedes?

I totally get where the Soft Secessionists are coming from. Think about the politicization of vaccines. We are all sick of the fucking pandemic. Masks are a hassle. One side says, get your damned shot so we can stop wear masks; the other side says, take of the masks and let natural immunity take care of things. I think the second position is insane, many think the former position is too. How the hell do those two basically oppositional world views persist in the same polity?

In 1860, the fracturing of the United States held portentous omens for the future of "government of the people, by the people and for the people." If secession had succeeded, democracy would have been discredited as a form of government. Slavery would have persisted. Secession today would not carry that same freight, and though a new Confederacy would be horrible for women, minorities and the LGBTQ community it would not be the same as slavery.

If Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma alone wanted to secede and a we had a free exchange of citizens, then...sure. But that isn't what will happen. We will see the US break into at least three different countries, a situation that would delight China and Russia. 

It's all a mess. But it's our mess, and maybe we should just get to work cleaning up our existing house rather than thinking of burning it down.