21st Century Secession: Torn Asunder
Although some of my students might have argued otherwise before I retired, I wasn’t around in the decades before the Civil War so I don’t know if I can compare the polarization witnessed in our electorate today with what it was then. Both John Adams and John C. Calhoun saw the polarization of the nation over slavery as a rip in the fabric of the nation, albeit from opposite perspectives. Prescience or good guesses?… obviously they were correct. While there were numerous events leading up to nullification and the subsequent attack on Ft. Sumter, it was the contradictions swirling through the Dred Scott decision of 1857 which set the national agenda on a downward spiral toward secession and the near destruction of the adolescent nation. Similar cyclones are turning now, and it may be just a matter of time before secession once again threatens our nation.
Abhorrent as it was, slavery was an institution built into the Constitution, baked into the language; involuntary servitude was given its full blessings by the Founding Fathers. Because it had the power of the Constitution as its foundation, any changes to the institution would require amendments. Nature abhors a vacuum; the political vacuum left by the imploding Whigs was filled by the agendas of the various Know-Nothing parties. The Know-Nothings eventually morphing into the Republicans. At the base of all this were the competing regional economic models of industry and agriculture. All things considered, amending the Constitution would have been impossible.
The new Republican Party presented the nation with the radical idea that slavery should be abolished. However the institution of slavery had created its own economic infrastructure. This model was heavily dependent upon the continued expansion of agriculture, primarily cotton, into the western frontiers. Abolition would, therefore, doom the economy of the South. Lesions like ‘Bleeding Kansas’ and the raid on Harper’s Ferry festered just beneath the surface of an otherwise growing and prosperous nation. Political intransigence during the Buchanan administration, combined with Buchanan’s convoluted views on the issue of slavery, precipitated civil unrest in the southern slave states. With Lincoln’s proclamation that states admitted to the Union as it expanded west would be free of slavery, secession became the only option the South could see from their perspective. To accept a different outcome would be to accept a complete economic collapse, an implosion which would affect every facet of every town and hamlet in the entire region.
There are today many issues polarizing the electorate: The 2nd Amendment, Islam and Islamic fundamentalism, voting rights, abortion, immigration… the list is epic. Any one of these issues could explode into a true constitutional crisis: identification papers or coding for all Muslims, including citizens, banning all immigration or banning all immigration from certain middle-eastern nations. Again the list is epic, with no one being more or less volatile than another. The geopolitical lines are vaguely similar; although information technology has displaced much of the manufacturing sectors in the north and west, the South has remained heavily agrarian. It’s largest economic engine, Texas, produces only two-thirds that of California. Additionally, western states admitted in the Union since the1850’s such as California have become powerful economic engines in their own right and are currently driving much of the nations growth. These states more closely mirror the politics and cultural diversity of the northeast rather than of the south or southeast. And while the dynamics of contemporary polarities do not include slavery, they do include the vestiges of slavery such as overt cultural and regionally institutionalized racism.
New geographic forces have emerged such as mankind’s exacerbating, if not actually causing, rapid changes in climate, changing demographics both regionally and nationally, and the globalization of manufacturing, leading in turn to the dilution of middle class incomes. in America Each of these has lead, or is leading to, other complex issues such as immigration, desertification, and international distribution of food and medicines. These issues, besides being complex, are interconnected; these complex interconnections often need complex solutions requiring interdisciplinary coordination and focused intellectual reasoning. Most of these issues should, and for the most part are, receiving international acceptance. However regionally, especially in the midwest and the Old Confederacy, these and other intellectual values have been shunned. Science such as evolution and The Big Bang, long accepted as viable scientific models, have been rejected by large segments of the electorate living in these regions; their basis for rejection is religious dogma based upon Christian fundamentalism.
All of these issues, as I’ve said, are volatile, yet the fundamentalist Christian belief that a zygote or embryo should be vested with human rights appears to be the issue most capable of devolving into the secession spiral experienced by the Confederate states. This is because the issue of abortion has the greatest potential of becoming national policy through legislative action. Further, restrictions on voting rights in Republican states, the effects of gerrymandering upon the House, and the position of 23 contested Democratic senate races in 2018, means there is a possibility- incredibly small to be sure but a possibility non the less- that an amendment banning abortion could find its way through Congress. With the addition of only a single Republican-dominated state legislature, it could conceivably meet the 34 state threshold to enactment. Even without enactment, state laws seeking to overturn Roe v. Wade would find a friendly ear in a Trump-appointed and reconstituted conservative Supreme Court. With shades of Drew Scott in convoluted supreme court decisions, and the historically horrible shadow of Buchanan falling over Trump, the liberal coastal states would find themselves bound by policies and legal precedent which they would find both odious and unconscionable.
This presents the possibility that California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, and Hawaii in the west might see no alternative but to secede; and Illinois, Maine, Vermont, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, Delaware, Connecticut, and perhaps Virginia might chose follow suit. Whether they decide to join an existing nation such as Canada or Mexico, form a new bicoastal alliance or nation, or remain independent is beyond consideration of this essay. What will be considered is the nature of the secession: Would it be a Velvet Revolution like the separation of The Czech Republic and Slovakia? Or would it model Syria or our own Civil War? What would the rump United States look like, consisting as it would primarily of an agricultural south and midwest and a modest industrial state like Texas that has about two-thirds the economic clout of California alone. Should the western states alone secede and become a new nation in their own right, it would immediately become the fourth largest international economy. Should all 17 states form a new nation, the economy of the rump states remaining would fall behind the EU while the new nation would edge out China to become the third largest economy, behind the EU and the still economically powerful rump United States. The entire world economy would be in chaotic meltdown however, so in reality all bets would be off.
Of certain concern to the rump United States: more than half of those remaining states receive more in Federal tax benefits than they pay in Federal taxes; this largess is paid almost entirely by the liberal coastal states. It is conceivable that their economies would fall to third world levels: low wages based primarily on agriculture and low-skill production industries such as textiles.
Antebellum America was, to be sure, a very different place. It considered itself little more than an amalgam of unified sovereignties. The northern states contemplated secession in the 1830’s; this was a full generation before the south took action. Since 1865 however, we have been a united state, the United States. The psychological and cultural perceptions of most Americans is that the nation is impervious to the insidious nature of mere politics; the people will always rise above it all. That is, until they don’t, or until they can’t. Geopolitical realities are forever changing, and nothing lasts forever- else we’d all be speaking Latin. Would the separation be peaceful? Would one nation surrender a significant portion of its economic clout without raising a sword? Or would it destroy a good portion of its economy in order to revenge the act or prove a point? Would the new nation or nations receive diplomatic recognition in a manner which might prevent war? Or would nations withhold recognition until the dust settled, just as it did for the Confederacy after the British looked at Lee’s loss at Gettysburg? And what would be the political consequences to all the actors involved? The old shibboleth, “be careful of what you wish,” is as much a harbinger as it is a conservative Republican and evangelical Christian goal. The unpopularity of their agenda should give them a long, hard pause to contemplate the true nature of what they wish.