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Secession Is Bad For Several Reasons (A Compilation) [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-09-27
Exhibit A: The Hill:
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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is far from the only politician interested in secession, which has been discussed by the Wyoming GOP chairman and is already part of the Texas GOP platform.
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Secession, however, is a really bad idea. Let me tally the ways.
First, there’s no legal way to opt-out of our union. When a writer queried the Supreme Court on this point, former Justice Antonin Scalia wrote: ”If there was any Constitutional issue resolved by the Civil War, it is that there is no right to secede.”
Perhaps we could have a 50-state referendum. But if swing state politics look ugly now, imagine the divided and heavily armed populations of Michigan, Arizona and Pennsylvania trying to decide whether to stay or go. The likely assaults, voter intimidation and guerrilla warfare would give Bloody Kansas some company.
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Suppose the right took most Southern states, including Texas — one of America’s youngest states, its second biggest economy and one of the top oil producers in the world. It’s unlikely Texas would be allowed to just walk away, especially in the midst of the Ukraine war, which is challenging global oil supplies.
Even if the remaining states were willing to abandon these resources, there would be the moral conundrum. Texas conservatives would happily forgo progressive pressure on climate change or inclusivity. Progressives might be happy to see them leave and move forward with their own policies in the remaining states. But letting Texas walk away would mean abandoning a series of communities whose plight is core to progressive’s democratic distress. Women seeking abortions would have to cross international borders. Supportive parents of trans kids would be without any federal recourse if charged with child abuse.
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And what of foreign policy? MAGA Republicans have been cozying up to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Would they allow Russian intelligence operations and drone launches from their side of the border? Or let Russia stage “defensive” weaponry, much as the United States has done in NATO countries bordering Russia?
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Perhaps that is why Russia has been the biggest supporter of secession talk in the United States. Californians who wanted out might be surprised that one of the Republican operatives leading the referendum had deep, longstanding ties to Russia and returned to live there before California’s referendum was even complete. The most popular Texas secession page on Facebook was created not by Lone Star defenders but Russian trolls.
The Kremlin has supported secessionist efforts worldwide to weaken democracies — from the Catalans in Spain to Scottish independence. In 2016, it sponsored a conference for global secessionist movements — including Texas, California and Puerto Rico.
Putin should be a more uncomfortable bedfellow for a movement that professes to want to make America great again. He certainly shouldn’t be supported by progressives who stand in opposition to Russia’s export of anti-gay, patriarchal and white supremacist values.
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Exhibit B: Democracy Journal: Secession: “Still a Bad Idea”
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Cathartic venting for shellshocked leftists is, it apparently bears repeating, not about politics. Successful democracies require a willingness among citizens to accept losses today in order to preserve the same forum of contestation that makes victory possible tomorrow. Democracy is poorly served by a “take my ball and go home” attitude, since democratic citizens have to assume shared responsibility for the political system under which they all live.
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Contemporary sociologists note that, in contrast, today’s citizenship discourse is rife with the language of contracts—indicating that we’ve moved away from the idea that all citizens, qua citizens, should enjoy meaningful membership in society, in favor of a market-oriented conception that asks citizens: “What have you done for us lately?” Normally, these changes map onto right-wing politics, but Baker (in a left-wing magazine!) chides “you red states” for not “pulling your weight” while reserving plenty of self-congratulation for what he calls “self-supporting America.” (That this latter phrase could have come from the mouth of Bill O’Reilly or Newt Gingrich is just one example of the essay’s bizarro-world quality.
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Writing off people who voted for the other party as irredeemable or no longer worthy of engagement is bad enough from the perspective of the democratic ethos; as a political strategy for a party (who didn’t control White House nor Congress at the beginning of the Trump Era).
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These assembled arguments for Baker’s (only partly sarcastic) Bluexit proposal have, in totality, a strange quality. First, there’s the contemptuous language of contractual citizenship. (Perhaps the most cringe-inducing passage, which would rightly be regarded as morally horrid if it were directed against an underdeveloped country, reads: “Take Mississippi (please!), famous for being 49th or 50th in just about everything that matters. When it comes to sucking at the federal teat, the Magnolia State is the undisputed champ.”) Add to that the inward political turn, giving up on the project of persuasion in favor of ideological fortress-building. A political movement that amounts to saying “to hell with you” to about half of the country cannot avoid the stain of what amounts to undemocratic populism: the designation of certain fellow-citizens as not really part of our political concern, not really partners in our democratic life. And is it surprising that this should be paired with mockery of the disadvantaged and dispossessed? (As other critics of the piece have noted, the piece’s half-in-jest tone doesn’t excuse its basic nastiness.)
In other words, this amounts to little more than inverted Trumpism. The left ought to be resisting, rather than assisting, attempts to reduce citizenship to the language of contract. It should be choosing the hard work of argument and persuasion over the temptations of ideological bubbles. Above all, it should never sneer at the poor, the sick, and the left behind, whatever their politics. In other words, we should oppose what the modern conservative movement has become—not refashion ourselves as its left-wing mirror image.
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Exhibit C: A Surprising Share of Americans Wants to Break Up the Country. Here’s Why They’re Wrong.
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Substacker David Reaboi wrote a post the other day titled, “National Divorce Is Expensive, But It’s Worth Every Penny,” urging “Red America to think about economic and cultural autonomy for itself, and what it would take to get there.” Texas state Rep. Kyle Biedermann has been agitating for so-called Texit, and Allen West, the former chair of the Texas GOP and now a candidate for governor, has talked of secession.
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That said, a National Divorce has nothing to recommend it. The practical obstacles are obvious and insuperable, and the likely effects would be very unwelcome to its proponents. If an insufficient patriotism is one of the ills of contemporary America, National Divorce would prescribe a strong dose of arsenic as a cure. It would burn down America to save America, or at least those parts of it considered salvageable.
The deleterious effects of a breakup would be enormous. A disaggregated United States would be instantly less powerful. Indeed, Russia and China would be delighted and presumably believe that we’d deserve to experience the equivalent of the crackup of the Soviet Union or the Qing dynasty, respectively. Among the catastrophes you wish on an adversary, secessionist movements potentially leading to civil conflict are high on the list.
The economic consequences could be severe. The United States of America is a sprawling, continentwide free trade zone, creating a vast domestic market that makes us all better off. Exchanging that for what might be a market Balkanized by state or region would be a major loss.
Finally, the United States foundering on its domestic divisions would be a significant blow to the prestige of liberal democracy. Abraham Lincoln worried about this effect the first time around, and it might be even worse now. This wouldn’t be a fledgling democracy unable to hold it together, but what had seemed a stable republic with the most durable political institutions on the planet.
Then, there’s the question of how this is supposed to work exactly. Lincoln warned of the physical impossibility of secession when the Mason-Dixon Line was a more-or-less ready line of demarcation. How would it play out now, with conservatives and progressives amply represented in every state in the Union? Even a county-by-county map of California’s presidential election results has swathes of red, and even Alabama’s has blotches of blue.
(Perhaps there isn’t ample representation in every state, but even Texas isn’t pure Red, nor is Florida.)
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Some proponents of National Divorce say not to worry — it can all be worked out amicably without any unpleasantness, like, you know, the war that killed roughly 700,000 people the last time a region of the U.S. tried to secede. But if we are going to split up because we are irreparably divided and can’t even agree on bathroom policies or pronouns, how are we going to agree to divvy up our territory and resources — the kind of things real wars are fought over all the time?
It would matter, by the way, who gets control of the federal government, the most powerful organization on Earth. It has 1.3 million people under arms and a stockpile of 3,800 nuclear warheads. Whether this, not to mention federal lands and other assets, accrues to red or blue America would, to understate it, be a matter of considerable haggling.
On top of all this, red-state secession would be self-defeating. Let’s say Texas actually left. That’s 40 electoral votes off the national map for Republicans. In 2020, with no Texas, Trump could have won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, and still fallen short of an electoral-vote majority. In other words, Texit would bequeath control of the rest of the country to Democrats.
(HOWEVER)
On the other hand, Texas isn’t quite as ruby red as it used to be. It could go to the trouble of seceding and then one day find itself governed by the very Democrats it hoped to leave behind in the rest of the former United States. /
(Assuming, you know, Texas plays fair and doesn’t… “Do away” with said Democrats.)
Besides, would the rest of the country really be willing to watch a state of 29 million people that represents the ninth-largest economy in the world go its own way? Simply say goodbye to a place that accounts for almost 40 percent of the country’s oil production, about 25 percent of its natural gas production, 10 percent of its manufacturing and 20 percent of its exports, more than any other state? Bid adieu to the country’s largest transportation network and 11 deep-water ports, including the Port of Houston, one of the largest in the world and the busiest in the U.S. in terms of foreign waterborne tonnage?
No country that retains an ounce of rationality and self-respect would let such an economic jewel and powerhouse slip away.
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Secession, of course, isn’t close to going mainstream yet, thankfully. The real impetus for the talk of a breakup is despair. It constitutes giving up — giving up on convincing our fellow Americans, giving up on our common national projec...
This is an impulse to be resisted. Breaking up is hard to do, and quitting on America is — or should be — unforgivable.
This diary’s getting long so I’ll stop there. I decided to use the words of several authors to explain my arguments better than I ever could. But here’s my perspective now.
I am a Red State Democrat living in one of the states considered by many to be a political dead end even as it turns more blue with each election… Supposedly. Hopefully those results turn out come 2024. But to argue for secession is to agree with our enemies, both domestic and foreign. It’s to think as our enemies do in terms of pulling our weight. And to argue for secession is the same as arguing for throwing the land into chaos.
Alongside what I’ve said, and all the arguments made by others above, I don’t trust America to escort every single American who wants to stay in America off of seceding states. I don’t trust that I wouldn’t be left in the dust. I don’t trust that I wouldn’t be rounded up just about immediately and murdered for being LGBTQ+. Because the villains move swift and deadly. While it feels like the wheels of justice seem to never turn when its target is someone rich and powerful. I mean look at all the people on here waiting for Trump to get a single second of jailtime. Why should I trust it to be the opposite now? But I’m just one person on Kos.
How many red state Democrats are on this site? How many would make it? How many fellow humans in general would make it? There are those that say they’re just venting, that they don’t actually want secession. Well you know what they say. Hurt people hurt people.
But that’s about what I say every single time someone advocates for secession on this Progressive Democrat platform. So like I said above, let’s not agree with our enemies. Let’s think about the future and the consequences of our potential actions, our potential ideals and what they could bring in regards to the topics of this diary.
(This is a bonus Point… Because of the word choice of the first The Hill article, Daily Kos wouldn’t let me save the draft of this diary until I removed the title. Maybe, just maybe, the upper heads of the site don’t approve of secession either to the point that they don’t let people write diaries obviously calling for it in the content itself. Maybe they consider it along the same lines in far right talking points as limiting abortion and, you know, all those other ideals they want. Consider this pure speculation though unless direct confirmation is given. At the very least I considered it amusing.)
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