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Anti Federalist
10-31-2008, 09:16 PM
This is longish, but good, published in Pat Buchanan's American Conservative mag.

Untied States (http://www.amconmag.com/article/2008/nov/03/00019/)

If at first you don’t secede…

By John Schwenkler

Whoever wins on Nov. 4, few Americans will harbor any illusions about their national unity. No matter which pairing one chooses—red and blue, Right and Left, coastal elites and flyover salt-of-the-earthers—there is no getting around our status as a country divided, a people set apart from one another as much by regional culture as by religion or political ideology.

A perfect time, in other words, to talk about secession—which is what will happen when the Middlebury Institute’s Third North American Secessionist Conference convenes in Manchester, New Hampshire a week and a half after the election. Thomas Naylor, whose Second Vermont Republic is one of the country’s most active secessionist organizations, is candid about the motive for the scheduling: “The date was set,” he tells me, “on the assumption that Hillary Clinton would be elected—and of course that’s not going to happen.” Nevertheless, the post-election timeframe is “looking more and more important every day” as popular outrage against the Wall Street bailout and anxiety over impending recession continue to build.

The Manchester conference brings together secessionists of all types. Writing in Orion, Bill Kauffman described the crowd from 2006 as “ponytails and suits, turtlenecks and sneakers, an Alaskan gold miner and one delegate from the neo-Confederate League of the South who wore a grey greatcoat, as if sitting for a daguerreotype just before the battle.” Despite—or perhaps because of—their ideological differences, they all share a common cause: to regionalize, to decentralize, to debunk the myth of a nation indivisible and replace it with a story that gives difference its due.

That story is by no means a new one. The idea of political separatism is, as Middlebury Institute founder Kirkpatrick Sale puts it, “as American as America.” From the 13 colonies declaring their independence from the British Crown in 1776, to the rash of state-splittings that took place during the early years of the Republic, to Norman Mailer’s secessionist 1969 campaign for mayor of New York City, the aura of divisibility has long been a part of the American tradition.

Throughout the years, the causes of such division have been as varied as the makeup of the American tapestry itself. Consider the movement that sprang up on the border of California and Oregon in 1941, when a group of disgruntled miners and loggers stormed the courthouse in Curry County, Oregon, brought several counties from Northern California on board to form a provisional government, and established the mining town of Yreka—pronounced “why-REE-kuh”—as the unlikely capital of the even more unlikely State of Jefferson. (The state’s name, which recalled the independent streak of the most rebellious of the American founders, was settled on only after such proposals as “Orofino” and “Mittelwestcoastia” were mercifully rejected.) The rebel flag bore a pair of X’s to indicate that the region had been doublecrossed by the governments in Sacramento and Eugene, and storekeepers put out change buckets for shoppers who wanted to redirect their sales-tax pennies from the state treasuries. Local men armed with hunting rifles set up roadblocks along the Klamath River Highway, distributing copies of a Proclamation of Independence that explained that they were in “patriotic rebellion against the States of California and Oregon” and planned to “secede each Thursday until further notice.”

The State of Jefferson turned out to be short-lived—the sudden death of its first governor was followed quickly by the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, which sent the country into a fit of patriotic fervor that left little room for rebellion. But the spirit of ’41 lives on in men like Leo Bergeron, a 70-year-old former rancher and 17-year resident of California’s Siskiyou County. He wears a loosely-hung bolo tie with his golf shirt and shows no signs of losing the energy that once made him president of the state Grange and led him to run for county supervisor earlier this year. He’s working to revive the State of Jefferson. “There’s becoming a state, becoming a territory, and becoming our own country,” he tells me. “The first two are the hardest because you need all sorts of approval from the legislators, but with the third option you can just tell ’em all to go to hell. It’s really all about independence—we know this place, and we know how to govern ourselves. We don’t need some a--holes from Washington or Sacramento telling us what to do.”

A dreamer? Sure, but no doubt they said that about the original Jefferson, too. And it’s not as if Bergeron and his crew don’t have their own King George in the form of the state and national administrations. Back in 1941, the uprising was the product of poor road conditions and a distant government that seemed more intent on exploiting the area’s resources than attending to its residents and their livelihoods. Today, the Jefferson secessionists are motivated by that same distant government, which now imposes a staggering roster of environmental and other regulations that threaten the jobs of local farmers, miners, loggers, and even Klamath River medical marijuana growers. One way or another, these northernmost Californians and their Oregonian neighbors plan to find a way to put control of their communities back in their own hands.

Thomas Naylor insists that the ideological diversity that brings together the environmentalist-bashing, property-rights activists of Yreka and anti-globalization leftists like Sale and himself is a feature, not a bug, of the push for political self-determination. Asked whether we should be concerned about independent governments tossing out state or federal protections for the environment and civil rights, he tells me, “It’s hard to imagine anyone doing a worse job of solving most of our problems than the U.S. government, and over the long run these problems are best dealt with in the hands of small groups of people who’ve got a stake in them. Maybe the way that people in Northern California deal with the environment is not exactly the way that Vermont tree-huggers would embrace, but it’s their way.”

Sale, whose impeccable leftist credentials—he was a founder of Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s and remains a contributing editor of The Nation—have not kept him from being accused, like Naylor, of being a crypto-racist because of his willingness to associate with the League of the South, takes a similar tack. Such diversity is “the reality of America today,” he tells me. “It’s more than just blue states versus red states, it’s all kinds of states wanting different things. So I say—let them. And if it turns out that the state I’m in does things that I don’t like, then I can go somewhere else nearby where an independent republic is to my liking.” It’s really none of his business, he says, what might go on in an independent South; all that the Vermonters want is the authority to keep the ever-encroaching Leviathan from continuing to entangle itself in their own corner of the woods.

To the extent that all this sounds at once deeply radical yet strangely familiar, things are exactly as they should be. The “so-called American Revolution,” Sale observes, “was in fact a war of secession, not revolt.” What’s more, the early years of the Republic established a tradition of states seceding from one another when they reached a certain size: Maine from Massachusetts in 1820, Tennessee from North Carolina in 1796, Kentucky and (more controversially) West Virginia from Virginia in 1792 and 1861. And as for the other events of 1861? Those “were not so successful,” he admits, “but they failed only because corporate America, becoming strong and expansionary in the North, found a dictator who could crush them.”

It’s here, of course, that things get tricky, since in many quarters the merest whiff of Civil War revisionism is enough to bring the discussion to a screeching halt. And not without reason: most historians still treat the traditional narrative of the Civil War as largely unproblematic, and the history of the American South with regard to slavery and race relations is nothing short of appalling. But then, the Northern states have their own repulsive history of racism, slavery, and the abuse and extermination of native populations. And there’s no disputing that the broader history of American territorial expansion—Hawaii, anyone?—has often been every bit as lawless and imperial as Lincoln’s worst critics accuse him of having been. These historical crimes do not belong only to one region. Moreover, even a negative assessment of the Confederate question does not disbar one from remaining open to the possibility that other secessionist movements might be rooted in more legitimate grievances.

Donald Livingston, an Emory University philosopher who has been similarly maligned over his distaste for Lincoln, suggests that the roots of America’s conflicted understandings of secession and states’ rights run deep. According to Livingston, who is at work on a book-length philosophical treatment of secession, present-day Americans are the inheritors of two “incommensurable Americanisms.” On the one hand, there is the Jeffersonian model of political order, which locates sovereignty in the small scale and thus treats secession as “a lawful act of a natural political society.” In contrast, the Lincolnian conception regards America as one nation indivisible—a “perpetual” and “indissoluble union,” in the language of Texas v. White —in which case “secession then would be revolution; it would be incompatible with government as such.” It was the dominance of the Jeffersonian conception that explains the success of the early split-state movements listed by Sale, while the rise of the Lincolnian one led to the crushing of the Confederacy and dearth of later secessionist movement.

The Jeffersonian view, Livingston notes, is similar in many important ways to the theory of human society put forward in Aristotle’s Politics. Aristotle not only holds that man is a “political animal”—that is, a creature suited to life in a polis, or city-state—but also claims that there are natural limits to the extent of a polis: “the best limit of the population of a state,” as he puts it, “is the largest number which suffices for the purposes of life, and can be taken in at a single view.” And what exactly is this number? Livingston points to Athens, Venice, and Florence, each of which had populations in the tens of thousands, as political communities large enough to have attained the Aristotelian values of “life and high culture.”

The modern American empire, which Naylor eagerly compares to the Soviet Union in its declining years, may simply be too large for the good life—and it’s not only the outright separatists who chafe against the strictures of centralized federal authority. The Free State Project, for example, aims to recruit enough liberty-minded citizens who are willing to move to New Hampshire to turn the state into a libertarian haven. At present, five years into their drive, over 8,700 individuals have committed to head to the Granite State once FSP reaches a critical mass of 20,000 members. The FSP agenda is a decidedly non-secessionist one: the goal is simply to carve out a corner of America where it is once again possible to live free.

Back in Yreka, the prevailing sense is that an arrangement more like what the Free Staters are after would be good enough, if only the powers that be would allow them to give it a try. The odds of that are slim, though, and as Jefferson activist Brian Peterson shows me around the five-acre plot that he and his family recently bought on the south end of town, the frustrations of a rural resident in a state dominated by voters from coastal cities become apparent. The landowners and area environmentalists have “really been starting to work things out on our own,” he says, “People have been finally sitting down and talking, and really beginning to make some progress.” Ultimately, though, they’re all subject to regulators living hundreds or thousands of miles away, whose standards for a reasonable compromise are likely to be quite different. That independence that Bergeron talked about seems a long way off.

Peterson, who grew up in San Francisco and then skipped town as a teenager to move in with his grandparents in Yreka, was instrumental in reviving the push for secession during the Clinton years, and he laughs as he talks about the number of phone calls he gets from reporters who want to interview him. Thanks to Bergeron, he says, the Siskiyou County Grange has made consideration of Jefferson statehood an official “project.” But much of what that means is that they’ve formed a bunch of committees and rested content with that. “Now and then I ask myself if it’s all worth it,” he admits, “but then I ask myself, Who else would do it?” And so he finds the time, in between his gardening and his couple of jobs, to update the Jefferson website, respond to queries, and fill orders for dark green T-shirts with the double crossed logo on front.

“Sometimes it feels like we’re back in the 1770s or 1780s,” he muses, “sitting around at the Constitutional Convention or something like that.” No doubt Thomas Jefferson would have been proud.
__________________________________________

John Schwenkler is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.

Anti Federalist
11-01-2008, 07:47 AM
break away bump

ChaosControl
11-01-2008, 08:23 AM
I 100% support their efforts.
I may in the future join such efforts in a more serious manner myself.
Jefferson for the win!

mediahasyou
11-01-2008, 08:50 AM
Secession is the root of libertarianism. Once, states secede from a larger government, that government has less legitimacy. Governments cannot grow without legitimacy.

torchbearer
11-01-2008, 09:09 AM
bonnie blue.

ShowMeLiberty
11-01-2008, 10:09 AM
I 100% support their efforts.
I may in the future join such efforts in a more serious manner myself.
Jefferson for the win!

Also.

Anti Federalist
11-01-2008, 11:51 AM
More on the subject over at World Net Daily:

Time for 2 Americas
to part ways for good? (http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=78574)

Exclusive: Joseph Farah believes U.S.
'can't live freely as 1 people any longer'

By Joseph Farah

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
The Declaration of Independence

I've lived through some turbulent years of American history, but I have never seen our country more polarized, more divided, more ripe for – dare I say it? – breakup, dissolution, a secessionist movement.

I admit I'm unafraid of radical ideas – if those radical ideas are just, righteous, moral and godly.

I believe it's time for radical ideas – just as it was time in 1776.

Frankly, I don't see a way to unite a people as divided as Americans are today. We are trying to pretend we're one nation when we are really two.

One of those two nations clings to the promises and covenants of the past, the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, as the guiding principles. The other believes in and lives with no immutable standards.

It's not a Republican vs. Democrat split – as the current election illustrates. I know many Republicans would find themselves more comfortable in the country of no standards. I also suspect many Democrats would actually find themselves more at home in the nation of the Bible, Declaration and Constitution.

Isn't it time for separation? Is the breakup of the union really such a difficult thing to consider? When there are no new lands to discover, what choice do we have?

My vision of the world is one in perfect harmony with the Bible, the Declaration and the Constitution. But these standards have been run over, obscured, distorted, demolished, nullified, undone, vandalized. Since, historically, it was the Bible, the Declaration and the Constitution that held us together, what binds us today? Shouldn't those of us who upheld the commitment to those standards have the right, in fact, the duty, to separate ourselves from those who have gutted them?

America was founded as a sovereign, independent nation. The vandals want to yield sovereignty to global authorities and make America interdependent.

America was founded with a federal government that was to be constitutionally limited in scope. The vandals have already succeeded in obliterating the enumerated powers.

America was founded as a nation of self-governing free people and sovereign states with significant authority reserved to them. The vandals have placed America under the shackles of a central government to which the states and people are subordinate.

America was founded as a nation of people "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." The vandals deny the Creator, invent man-made rights and deny life and liberty are sacred values.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea.

We already are two peoples with irreconcilable differences sharing one nation. It's time for an amicable divorce ( LOL - Farah must be reading my posts here (http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?t=160958) - AF) - – with each people free to pursue their own way.

I don't know how to make this happen. But I think it's time to start talking about it – start working toward it. I don't want to live under the consequences of the actions of the vandals. I don't want my children to do that. There ought to be a choice. Maybe we can live side by side in peace as two nations, but we can't live freely as one people any longer.

The moral justification for secession was found in our Declaration of Independence. It says governments are created to protect our unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It also says, "Whenever a government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it."

I know it's radical. I know it's not a topic being discussed on the Sunday morning talk shows. I know it's not a subject of op-eds in the New York Times. But, the more I think about it, the more I agree it's the only political solution that makes sense for an America that has lost its sense of mission and the original intent of those who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

What choice do we have but to break the bands that tie us together? Actually, to be honest, those bands have already been broken – by those who have, over time, grabbed control of our lives in a thousand insidious ways over the last 200-plus years.

It's time to move this debate forward – front and center. It's time to begin asking the real questions. It's time to restore liberty to America.

There's only one way to recapture the greatness of America. That is to start over – with only those willing to play by the rules. Let those who don't believe in rules have their own country to destroy.

nate895
11-01-2008, 01:33 PM
Good article. I remember driving between Portland and my hometown in California the massive sign on a barn that said "State of Jefferson." Eastern Washington wants to break away from the Western part of the state, and they propose a bill every legislative session, but it never goes beyond committee.

tpreitzel
11-01-2008, 05:44 PM
Ultimately, the decision will narrow itself to this point: Who wants secession the most? Eventually talk has to be backed by action beyond the tongue.

porcupine
11-01-2008, 08:53 PM
Bump for the article's mention of the Free State Project

ChaosControl
11-01-2008, 10:06 PM
Good article. I remember driving between Portland and my hometown in California the massive sign on a barn that said "State of Jefferson." Eastern Washington wants to break away from the Western part of the state, and they propose a bill every legislative session, but it never goes beyond committee.

You betcha we do. :)

nate895
11-02-2008, 12:00 PM
bump