The states
with the most active secession movements are progressive and want to escape
from a federal government they think too conservative
The
United States is ripe for secession. Across the world, established
states have divided in two or are staring down secession movements. Great
Britain became a wee bit less great with Irish independence, and now the Scots
seem to be rethinking the Act of Union (1707). Czechoslovakia is no more and
the former Soviet Union is just that: former. Go down the list and there are
secession groups in nearly every country. And are we to think that, almost
alone in the world, we’re immune from this?
Countries
threaten to split apart when their people seem hopelessly divided. I’ve seen it
already. Before moving to the United States, I lived in a country just as
divided, without the kind of fellow feeling required to hold people together.
Canada was an admirably liberal country, yet it came within a hair’s breadth of
secession. America is headed the same direction today, and without the reserve
and innate conservatism that has permitted Canadians to shrug off differences.
We’re
less united today than we’ve been at any time since the Civil War, divided by
politics, religion and culture. In all the ways that matter, save for the naked
force of the law, we are already divided into two nations just as much as in
1861.The contempt for opponents, the Twitter mobs, online shaming and
no-platforming, the growing tolerance of violence — it all suggests we’d be
happier in separate countries.
That’s enough to make secession seem
attractive. But there’s a second reason why secession beckons. We’re overlarge,
one of the biggest and most populous countries in the world. Smaller
countries, as I’ll show, are happier and less corrupt. They’re less inclined to
throw their weight around militarily, and they’re freer. If there are
advantages to bigness, the costs exceed the benefits. Bigness is badness.
It
might therefore seem odd that we’ve stayed together so long. If divorces are
made in Heaven, as Oscar Wilde remarked, how did we luck out? The answer, of
course, is the Civil War. The example of Secession 1.0 in 1861, with its
750,000 wartime deaths, has made Secession 2.0 seem too painful to consider. In
my book, American Succession,
I explode the comforting belief that it couldn’t happen again. The barriers to
a breakup are far lower than most people would think, and if the voters in a
state were determined to leave the Union they could probably do so.
To
begin with, we’re far more likely to let it happen today than we were in 1861.
John Kerry had a point when he said that Putin, by invading Crimea, was
behaving as if it were the 19th century. While the secretary of state was
mocked for what seemed like naivety, public attitudes have in fact changed
since 1861. We are now less willing to take up arms in order to maintain the
Union and readier to accept a breakup instead. Next time, we’re likely to find
a President James Buchanan in office and not an Abraham Lincoln.
Second,
a cordial divorce might be worked out through the amending machinery of a
convention held under Article V of the Constitution, if all sections of America
were good and tired of each other. Secession cannot be unconstitutional when
there’s a constitutional way of making it happen, through a constitutional
convention.
Finally,
the Supreme Court might revisit its denial of a right of secession. The
originalists on the Court would recognize that the Framers had thought that
states had the right to secede, while the more politically minded members of
the Court might hesitate before ruling secession illegal and permitting the
president to make war against a state. Instead, the Court could be expected to
look northward, to the more nuanced view of secession rights taken by the
Canadian Supreme Court, which rejected both an absolute right and an absolute
bar to secession.
So
it’s not difficult to imagine an American breakup. The reasons why a state
might want to secede today are more compelling than at any time in recent
history. Slavery isn’t on the ballot, and there would be no undoing of the
civil rights revolution anywhere. Indeed, the states with the most active
secession movements are progressive and want to escape from a federal
government they think too conservative. Were secession to happen today, it
would be politically correct.
So
it might happen. I see us on a train, bound for a breakup. The switches that
might stop us have failed, and if we want to remain united we must learn how to
slow the engine. That will take things that have been in short supply lately: a
greater tolerance for ideological differences, thicker skin to imagined
slights, a deeper repository of confidence in and sympathy for our fellow
Americans. These are things we used to have, and can learn to have again if we
recognize that the alternative is secession.
Federalism
used to allow for greater differences among the states, and that permitted us
to sort out our differences by settling among people with like beliefs. And
while federalism was discredited when it sought to excuse racist Jim Crow laws
in the South, we’ve left that world long behind. That is why I propose, as a
solution to our divisions and an antidote to secession, a devolution of power
to the states — not mere federalism, but the alternative that the British
presented to the Continental Congress in 1778 after it had decided upon
secession through the Declaration of Independence. It was what Gladstone and
Charles Stuart Parnell sought as an alternative to Ireland’s outright
secession. The solution was ‘home rule’. Adopted in America, this would return
more power to a seceding state than it possesses now, or ever possessed under
American federalism.
F.
H. Buckley is a law professor at George Mason University. American
Succession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakupwill be published in January (Encounter
Books).
