Wednesday, July 13, 2022

Civil War, Surrender, or Secession

 

I am often criticized for being a secessionist. I believe that states should be allowed to leave the United States. For that matter, I think it is a person's right to stand on their roof, raise their flag and declare that their house is now an independent country with the right to not pay taxes or obey regulations on the gambling, drug, and medieval surgery den in operation inside. Granted, there are all sorts of practical problems with actually doing this. I am talking about what a person has the right to do, not whether this is really a good idea. 

What most people miss is the extreme moral price to be paid for not accepting the moral and legal right to secede. Mississippi and California are both states that greatly differ from the rest of the country. Take the state that you sympathize least with. Imagine that the governor of that state got on national TV and declared that unless the Constitution was rewritten to suit them, they will secede from the United States. This would leave us with three options; we could fight a civil war, surrender to their demands, or accept their secession. 

The civil war option becomes deeply problematic if the secessionists have managed to seize military bases, gained the backing of elements of the military, or even the recognition of foreign countries. It is important to keep in mind that the American Civil War was made possible because the South had three months from December 1860, when South Carolina voted to secede, to March 1861 when Lincoln became president, where they could act with complete impunity. Not only did the lame-duck Buchanan administration not begin to call up troops to invade the South but they allowed the South to seize federal forts and armories. This would become important for the coming war as the South lacked the industrial capacity to manufacture the weapons it needed. 

Even if the state had no weapons with which to fight but simply blocked the roads with kindergarteners, could such a one-sided civil war be justified? Are we prepared to call a soldier who ran over a kid with a tank, an American hero who saved the Union? Note that if our opponents know that we have moral qualms about killing children then they will not hesitate to put their kids in danger with the confidence that we will back down and they will win even though they are outgunned. One thinks of the example of the Palestinians, who offer a master class on how to cynically put children in danger in the hope of a propaganda win. 

If we are not prepared to commit mass murder, we can surrender and give the states what they demand in order to remain in the Union. Mississippi might want an end to gay marriage and for abortion to be made a federal crime. California might want to make it a federal crime to misgender someone or impose a green plan on the rest of the country. Are you willing to consent to whichever one you find most distasteful? 

At a practical level, it is absurd to hear liberals and conservatives complaining about what the other side has just done. Take the example of the Dobbs decision. You liberals knew for years that conservatives were the kinds of people who would do such a thing and yet you agreed to be part of the same country as them. By not seceding, you signed a Faustian bargain in which you agreed to allow for the end of Roe in exchange for conservatives not breaking up the Union. If you had threatened conservatives to either pass an amendment to protect abortion or you would leave, would you have been confident that conservatives would have given in? 

By not openly demanding secession, you supporters of abortion demonstrate that your protests are nothing more than political theater. You do not really believe that women are going to be turned into baby-making slaves. If you honestly thought this was the case, you would be demanding secession and threatening total Hobbesian civil war if your demands were not met. 

Extreme anti-abortion antics, while insincere, pose their own risks as conservatives might come to take them seriously as opposed to merely an opportunity to raise money and allow activists to feel good about themselves. If conservatives conclude that civil war with the left is inevitable, they might decide that their best chance of winning lies with starting the war with a preemptive first strike.    

If you find it implausible that states would threaten secession as a weapon to blackmail the rest of the country with in order to get their preferred policies enacted, it is important to recognize that early American history was dominated by the widely recognized fact that the South would only stay in the Union as long as slavery was protected. As such abolitionists operated under the limitation that they could not deny the fact that, if they ever were able to come close to turning their ideals into actual policy, the South would simply secede.

As the North and South developed very different trajectories regarding slavery, the South started demanding that the federal government not only refrain from eliminating slavery but actively work to advance it. For example, the Fugitive Slave Act made a mockery of state's rights when it came to the right of states to not tolerate slavery. Finally, with the victory of Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party in 1860, the South decided that they would not even accept being subject to a party that merely claimed to oppose slavery in the territories and they seceded.

The United States was founded on a Faustian bargain to tolerate slavery in the South. Considering this, what is so implausible about imagining that either allowing red states to ban abortion or allowing blue states to protect it might be a modern version of such a Faustian bargain that is necessary to keep this country together? If you are not willing to openly support secession then you cannot play innocent as to the price you have to be willing to pay in order for there to be a United States. The only America you can expect to have is one run according to the values of your opponents. Any attempt to balk on this reality leads, in practice, to secession if not the truly nightmarish possibility of civil war.     

Once we recognize that the options of civil war and surrender are so morally reprehensible, we are left with only one option, secession. I am not saying that secession is going to be easy. To be clear, my ideal situation would be for the country to remain whole under my terms. As a matter of pragmatism, I am willing to make some concessions to my opponents. That being said, there are people out there whose vision for society is so markedly different from mine that we can make no pretense that they ever will be able to make the necessary concessions to have a united country that would be mutually acceptable. This would leave, as the only options, fighting a civil war or allowing for the United States to be divided into a collection of new countries from the diverse groups, from the left to the right, that currently make up this deeply divided nation. 

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