Most Likely to Secede: What the Vermont Independence Movement Can Teach Us About Reclaiming Community and Creating a Human-Scale Vision for the 21st Century, Ron Miller and Rob Williams, eds., Chelsea Greeen. 272 pages

I presume to review this book, even though I am a contributor to it, because it is a fine representation of an increasing tendency across this land of resistance to a federal government grown inept, corrupt, overreaching, overlarge, and overintrusive. That tendency may be labeled, for convenience: nullification.

It doesn’t matter that the word does not appear in this volume, for its spirit does. The volume is called Most Likely to Secede, and it grows out of a secession movement in Vermont that has been active, off and on, for a decade now. But I don’t think secession really is in the immediate future. Instead the subtitle comes closest to what this book is all about – state independence. It is a collection of essays from a magazine called Vermont Commons, which started publishing in 2005, and they deal with every aspect of what it takes for a state to assume unto itself all the processes that have been ceded to (or seized by) the federal government over the years: money, business regulation, energy, health, education, democracy, food safety, information, the commons, and social policies such as abortion and marriage.

Obviously, every attempt to increase or establish independence on the state level will eventually run up against laws and regulations on the federal level. Take food, for example. One essay here points out that Vermont will not be able to have food produced “locally and regionally … until we openly name and then dismantle the tyranny of our corporate-industrial food system – which is supported by our government.” It goes on to look at federal regulations that have grown and grown in the 20th century, which “did achieve a certain level of food safety” but at the cost of “creating a system where small abattoirs and locally available meat are scarce because of the capital investment required to comply with all of the safety standards.” So, too, with milk, which the federal government has long required to be pasteurized and produced and bottled in expensive settings with expensive processes that make it very hard for a small farmer to comply.

So if the food movement in Vermont – which has done a lot in recent years to promote local farming and marketing – is ever to set up a truly independent and truly local agricultural system it will have to find a way to push back federal regulations and practices: that is, nullification.

Or take education. Another essay here lays out all the ways in which Vermont could have schools that develop independent thinking, regardless of grades and testing, and gives examples of this being done in a few places in the state. But it is hard to expand these models when the state government is obligated, by state and national laws, to have standardized education. “One vital goal of Vermont independence,” writes Ron Miller, a founder of the “holistic education” movement, “is an educational culture that respects and encourages learning on a human scale, that supports caring and loving communities of learning.” But it runs up against “authoritarian educational policy” and federal “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top” requirements. “National educational policy is one more reason why we need to challenge the burgeoning power of the American empire,” he writes. “We ought to decline the Federal government’s inducements to participate in any ‘race to the top’.”

But declining that means more than a polite “no thank you.” It needs a deliberate campaign to nullify federal laws. That takes courage, but that’s what a surprising number of state legislatures are now displaying.

Nullification acts have been introduced in state legislatures all across the country, particularly in the last few months: no fewer than 10 states took up proposals in the last week of February. According to one estimate at the Tenth Amendment Center, which tracks such things, there are more than 70 proposed bills to nullify federal laws and practices now in state legislatures, sometimes consciously labeled nullification, sometimes not.

For example, 12 states have introduced proposals for state marijuana laws in defiance of federal regulations under the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, joining the 15 states that have already passed various decriminalization provisions, including most recently Washington and Colorado. (Interestingly, they are not confined to blue or red states but stretch across the land: Alaska, Washington, California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, Michigan, Arkansas, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Maine.)

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I cannot overemphasize how essential this wisdom is to any comprehension of America today, or tomorrow, or how powerfully Morris Berman (an academic historian who has emigrated to Mexico) makes his case. It is not a long book (196 pages, plus backmatter), but it is replete with overwhelming evidence to support the thesis, as he puts it on his first page:

The principal goal of North American civilization, and of its inhabitants, is and always has been an ever-expanding economy — affluence — and endless technological innovation — "progress." A nation of hustlers, writes [Walter] McDougall, a people relentlessly on the make.

From the very start, from the Puritans' shining "city on a hill" and the Jamestown settlement's conquest and exploitation of Indian lands, this country has been about making and taking, a business culture with a commercial orientation, devoted to growth and power, wealth and property, private advancement and profit, militarism and materialism, expansion and empire. John Adams saw it at the beginning: the U.S. was "more Avaricious than any other Nation that ever existed." Or as de Tocqueville was to say later: "As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?"

Let it be acknowledged that, given this as its goal and ideal, this nation has done pretty well. It is in most terms rich and powerful (let us discount the fact that we are $16 trillion in debt and wiped out $14 trillion in household wealth in the last crash), full of comforts and conveniences, food and shelter and plumbing and heat for most, high-tech gadgetry and systems, a developed (if crumbling) infrastructure coast to coast, the largest military in the world, the world's fall-back currency, an unmatched service industry, and all the rest of what makes up a modern industrial capitalist nation.

But what Berman shows, in fascinating detail, is that with all that concentration on hustling, which makes up our entire lives for our lives, is that we have lost a sense of the public good in the face of private interest, an understanding of community in the face of aggravated individualism, a sense of spiritual well-being in the face of material pressure and stress, an appreciation of the simple life in the face of technological complexity, even a true sense of republicanism and the political commonwealth in the face of manipulative and intrusive oligarchy and political individual wealth. Much of what we still think of as in some way valuable — stability rather than progress, face-to-face instead of on-line, family and friends instead of networks and "friends," craftsmanship instead of mass production, virtue and tradition and honor and simplicity rather than egotism and modernity and self-interest and multi-tasking, gemeinschaft instead of gesellshaft — much of that has been quite lost in the dominant hustling culture.

Not only that, but we have acquired a host of evils and sorrows along with material prosperity. Berman compiles a whole raft of rather depressing facts that show what the downside of the technocommerial society is: mass unemployment, foreclosures, increasing poverty for the many (with corporate bailouts and bonuses for the egregious few); a criminal culture with the highest rate of homicide in the world and a corrections system that contains 25 per cent of all the world's prisoners; a high incidence of violence throughout the culture, including crime, domestic violence, and warfare, along with movies, TV, and video games; a social numbness and clinically diagnosed "empathy deficit disorders"; consumption of two-thirds of the global market in antidepressants with at least 164 million users; a rank on the worldwide Happy Planet Index in 2009 of 150th; fully 25 per cent of American households had only one person, a rate of aloneness probably the highest in the world. Or, as Berman puts it at one point:

The culmination of a hustling, laissez-faire capitalist culture is that everything gets dumbed down, that all significant questions are ignored, and that every human activity is turned into a commodity, and anything goes if it sells. What we have is domination by corporate media, politics via poll-driven sound bites, a foreign policy based on unilateralism and preemptive strikes, a failing newspaper industry, a poorly informed citizenry, the unemployed winding up destitute, weak (or no) mass transit systems, and a health care system that ranks thirty-seventh in the world.

The emperor, and the empire, have no clothes.

Berman spends a good deal of time talking about the "alternative culture" to all this, including "a commitment to craft, community, the public good, the natural environment, spiritual practice, and the "simple life," and he shows that its adherents and champions have existed all along, though of course overwhelmed by the dominant culture. He cites, for example, Thoreau, Melville, Henry Adams, Veblen, Sinclair Lewis, Henry Demarest Lloyd, Ruskin and Morris and the craft movement, Eric Fromm, Lewis Mumford (on whom he justly spends many pages), the Southern Agrarians, Robert Redfield, Vance Packard, William A. Williams, Marcuse, Ellul, Roszak, Schumacher, Lasch, Wendell Berry, and more recently Jerry Mander, Langdon Winner, Neil Postman, and somewhat surprisingly Ted Kaczynski. This is a distinguished bunch, and they are known today because the work they did was careful and trenchant and exposed powerfully the ills of a material society, but, as Berman notes when talking about Mumford, in the end "you can't get taken seriously if you point this out." How well I know.

And so the alternative culture, though it has always existed on the fringe, and still does even now, has never seriously derailed the steamengine of the hustler civilization nor in fact even slowed it down perceptively. In fact that civilization will always take steps to marginalize it, even destroy it if necessary, a fact that Berman illustrates in a chapter on the antebellum South. He shows how the South was "the one example we have of an opponent of [the dominant] ideology that had real political teeth," and blatantly opted for a life premodern (indeed "neofeudal"), agrarian, slow, conservative, and honoring tradition, honor, chivalry, and hospitality more than making a buck or inventing a gadget. This ultimately the increasingly industrial and expansive North could not stand and so began a war to destroy it. "The treatment of the South by the North," Berman says, "was the template for the way the United States would come to treat any nation it regarded as an enemy: not merely a scorched earth policy, but also a u2018scorched soul' policy'" that it would use in Hawaii, the Philippines, Cuba, Japan, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and anywhere else it could achieve it.

Which is why in the end Berman concludes that nothing will ever change our hustling civilization and all attempts at trying to replace it are fruitless: "I regard the fantasy of a recovered future as pure drivel." He sees, instead, that it is headed toward inevitable collapse, and not too many decades away. He quotes a U.S. intelligence report from the Washington Post that predicts "a steady decline" in American dominance in the coming decades, the country eroding "at an accelerating pace" in "political, economic and arguably, cultural arenas," to which he adds, "Nothing could be more obvious."

In a rare moment of optimism he goes on to say, "Collapse could be a good thing" if it could ultimately "open the door to the alternative tradition," a process he admits is "a long shot." And here he suggests, and wins my heart as he does so, that one means to that is secession, which holds promise precisely because it has given up on trying to change the industrial society as a whole, across the nation, and picks instead smaller places (such as Vermont) where some version of the alternative tradition might be realized.

At the present time, he says, "this project doesn't have a hope in hell," but "in thirty or forty years, it may not seem so far-fetched."

Well, it may take a generation, but I don't think so. The collapse will come sooner than we realize — I have predicted within a decade — and it will open up secession (or some equivalent such as city-states or medieval walled cities) as the only possible opportunity for a new society with new human-scale alternatives. I'm not predicting it, mind you, I'm just saying it's the only way to go.

Kirkpatrick Sale [send him mail] is the author of a dozen books, including Human Scale and Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution, and is the Director of the Middlebury Institute for the study of separation, secession, and self-determination.

What brings this to mind is the reactions around the country this past May to the announcement that U.S. Special Forces had assassinated Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. At so-called Ground Zero, in front of the White House, at stadiums across the country, on college campuses and village greens coast to coast, those who happened to be up late on a Sunday night, a number fortified by alcohol, burst out in wild flag-waving celebrations and raucous yoo-ess-ay cheers.

It didn't matter that this was an achievement that for some reason took intelligence agencies a full ten years to bring off, that its significance in the actual putting down of Islamic terrorism would seem to be uncertain, or that it had and would have no effect soever on the bogged-down war in Afghanistan. It didn't even matter that this kind of killing — assassination of political leaders in foreign lands — is generally regarded as contrary to an international law that in general discourages people going around offing bad guys they don't like, and contrary indeed to an American regulation that operated for nearly three decades until overturned in the heat of 9/11.

President Ford, following recommendations of the Church Committee, in 1976 issued Executive Order 11905 saying, "No employee of the United States shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination," which was understood to mean the killing of foreign leaders, and that was endorsed by every succeeding President because it just seemed a sensible and intelligent — and perhaps moral — policy. That was changed in September 2001 with a law that then allowed the President to use "all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organization, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided" the 9/11 attacks. That apparently gives Obama the legal cover he needed to go after Osama, but it still carries a bad odor — which is why the word "assassination" still has negative connotations the world over.

Yet none of this seemed to operate in an American public that quickly adopted the Wild West mentality of Wanted-Dead-or-Alive that George Bush used to stir up. You don't bother to capture and try the Devil — you shoot him down in cold blood. And any sidekicks that go down with him, that's collateral damage, not killing.

I'm not saying that bin Laden was anything but a dangerous enemy of this country's, even though it was clear his influence was waning and his army shrinking. I'm saying that assassination of a political leader on foreign soil is a reprehensible practice and a moral trangression, and that's why for three decades it was taken as a given in this country that it was impermissible and is more or less outlawed in international codes. And I'm saying that those who unblinkingly and reflexively approve of it with wild public demonstrations are guilty of the worst of patriotism, the last refuge of a scoundrel nation.

And that last refuge is sought perhaps most desperately when that nation is entangled in the morass of at least four foreign wars (including Libya and Pakistan, leaving Somalia aside), that are not being won and are not winnable, and are costing many trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of casualties, military and civilian. Which is an indication of the depth of that unthinking and unreasonable sickness of mind that supports America unreflectively and stands in the way of any sensible contemplation of the virtues of secession.

Thinking about the hold of this sickness I began to reflect why it was that the movement, though obviously getting stamped on the national consciousness in the last few years and drawing enthusiasm in a number of quarters, has not made more inroads than it has. Why, in particular, has it not drawn more attention on college campuses, where fringe ideas with good intellectual credentials are often picked up and supported, at least by the politically-minded minority of students and the more adventurous of the faculty. Why, for example, has there never been a single faculty member of Middlebury College or (with one exception) UVM to come forth to join the Second Vermont Republic or any of its sister causes? Why haven't there been academic studies in Vermont supporting secession by showing how the state would be better off economically if it were free of Federal taxes and regulations?

And it dawned on me that actually the American academia would be the last place in the world that would be critical of the American empire, much less interested in breaking it up. It is a creature of that empire, it gets funding in the billions from it, its research is heavily directed toward its needs, its faculties are intertwined with Federal agencies, and insofar as academia may be said to have a philosophy it would follow more or less the liberal support for big government, and the bigger the better.

So how could I expect any enthusiasm for secession from that quarter?

The American university system is enormous and it plays an enormous role in making the nation what it is — it is not too much to say, in fact, that it is an equal partner in the military-industrial-academic complex that essentially runs the country. And it continues to expand its role and power every year, getting added money in tuition and fees every year ($37,000 annually for Harvard) despite a tight economy, and getting added Federal money every year (now about $60 billion, including student grants).

I would argue that this is a bubble that will eventually burst, because it is more and more obvious that just having an expensive college education doesn't guarantee a job, even less a job that will pay enough to pay off that expense. But while it lasts, there's no sign that academia is in danger of loosing its comfortable place in the national pantheon of imperial power.

And here's the kicker: while it lasts it will obviously continue its role of conditioning and indoctrinating the young minds in its care to have a deep and abiding belief in the singular virtues of the American republic, indivisible even at 310 million people, and its legitimate business of imperial domination, regardless of party or faction. They wouldn't call it patriotism, the liberal faculties, and they wouldn't call it knee-jerk reflective, but that is what it is. And it ill becomes institutions that once were in the tradition of skeptical criticism.

Kirkpatrick Sale [send him mail], scholar and prolific writer, heads the Middlebury Institute.

It seems to have become something of a national issue, and being in a good position to take a look at the events this spring commemorating the sesquicentennial of what they like to call “the late unpleasantness,” I thought I’d try to shed a little light amid the considerable murkiness of ignorance all around. But first I think it’s important to remember that the secession that took place 150 years ago was in a grand old American tradition. The American “Revolution” was, in fact, a war of secession – 13 colonies breaking away from the British Empire – not a war of conquest, and most of the Founding Fathers understood that to be a given right when they created the Articles and then the Constitution. The creation of the Republic of Vermont in 1777 was another act of secession, from both New Hampshire and New York. And just 25 years after the new nation was born, representatives from all New England states (only one from Vermont) met at a convention in Hartford to consider secession from the United States if their grievances against President Madison’s conduct of the war of 1812 and limitations on Atlantic trade were not satisfied; in the event, they did not vote for secession, but its spirit was in the air.

So in that context, let’s make clear that what began 150 years ago this April was not a true civil war, except in the sense that there were two sides in one country, because there was no attempt by one side to take over the other, as in the more familiar English civil war between Parliament and Charles I. The South did not want to run the Union, it wanted out of the Union. That makes it a war of secession (similar to the war of 1775-1783) or, as various forms have it, the War of Southern Secession, the War Between the States, the War of Northern Aggression, or the War to Prevent Southern Independence – all more accurate than “Civil War.”

Next, let’s see who really began it. The first conflict had to do with Washington’s unwillingness to give up Federal forts and bases in states that had declared their independence, or even to negotiate some kind of settlement. After declaring independence in December 1860, South Carolina sent two delegations to Washington with the express purpose of working out terms, including monetary compensation, for the turning over of Federal outposts in Charleston Harbor, including Fort Sumter. Refusing to negotiate, President Buchanan in January sent ships with 200 troops intending to restock and reinforce Fort Sumter, an island only four miles from downtown Charleston. The first one was fired on and forced to turn back, and the South looked for some reconciliation. But when Lincoln took office two months later he still refused to negotiate and, a month after saying he had no intention of invading the South, accomplished that in effect by ordering a second flotilla of armed supply ships to force its way into the harbor. Upon learning of the second fleet, in what seemed a clear and deliberate act of war, the government of South Carolina repeatedly demanded that the Unionists in the fort surrender. When they refused, the Carolina battalions gave warning on April 12, and after an hour began firing. The fort, low on munitions as well as provisions, finally surrendered the next day, the soldiers were transported by Confederate steamers to Union ships outside the harbor, and the only casualties were two Union soldiers that blew themselves up by accident during a cannon salute during the lowering of the U.S. flag.

Exactly what Lincoln wanted. It mattered not who committed the first act of war, which was the North, but who fired the first shot; that would work in the Union propaganda machines sufficiently to have it understood not only in the North but in the Border States and territories that the South had started the war. A Union invasion of a revolutionary Confederacy that fired first seemed only a fit and proper response.

Which in turn brings up the next nettlesome issue that always surrounds this issue: slavery, and the motive for Northern invasion. In fact, after the fall of Fort Sumter the Union armies descended on the South in 1861, or tried to, in order to put down what Lincoln held to be a revolution by a federation of states that had illegally left the Federal compact. They did not, nor would their generals or soldiers have even so formulated it, invade the South to eliminate slavery, in the cause of abolition, or for the liberation of Negroes. It was not formally or informally, in the minds of either the Union armies or their civilian instigators, a war about slavery. The great myth that the Union was fighting for a high moral cause, the elimination of chattel slavery and freedom for four million oppressed people torn from Africa, was ultimately a very convenient falsehood that served Northern ends later on in the war, particularly in distorting world opinion so that neither England nor France, though they might have had some allegiance to the cause of independence, were able to take the side of the Confederacy. But even then, the ultimate welfare of black Americans and their peaceful economic and social integration into white American society was never, but to a tiny few – and certainly not to Lincoln or his government – a moral (or even political) principle even thought much less expressed. The deep racism of the American North, though the victors would try to go on to forget it, was as dark a stigma against the Union as anything it would project on the South.

And the Emancipation Proclamation? Well, in the first place, it had nothing to do with slavery, per se. It did not abolish slavery. It decreed that slaves in the Confederacy only were to be free, but not those elsewhere in the Union or the territories (Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri all had slavery, as well as Washington, D.C., until 1862). It was at bottom a military ploy, hoping to create rebellion and civil unrest on the South’s plantations at a time when the war was not going all that well for the Union. (“It has no constitutional or legal justification, except as a military measure,” its creator acknowledged.) It had no particular moral implications, and it made no provision for how the liberation was to be effected, what would happen to the slaves after they were emancipated, what the slaves would in fact do for a living, or even where they were to go if they left the plantations that had been their home for generations. (They could not, incidentally, go north, because no state there would welcome them and a good many, including Lincoln’s own Illinois, had laws forbidding immigration and settlement of Negroes.) Unlike a number of serious schemes that had been proposed, North and South, before the war, the Proclamation did not deal with necessary issues of compensation for deprived slave-owners, integration of ex-slaves politically or economically into white societies, or even for their deportation to Africa, an idea that Lincoln in particular had favored. It was, in short, a military ploy without moral or humanitarian foundation.

Finally, we should understand that the issue of slavery, strictly, was not the cause of Southern secession or the reason for the war on the Confederate side. The South did not want to protect slavery from a Northern attempt to abolish it, because no such attempt was ever intended or expressed by any serious party, and indeed Congress in 1861 had explicitly defended the continuance of the institution in the South. Nor did the South want to extend slavery into the Western territories, because it was clear it was neither a useful nor a welcome practice there, and besides when it formed the Confederacy it no longer had any constitutional claim to influence in those sections.

What the South wanted was to continue an economic system that it had inherited for 200 years, that had been fostered and maintained by Northern interests (particularly New England shippers and textile barons) that entire time, that had been the foundation of the United States economy both North and South from the beginning of the nation, and that was a way of life now so entrenched no one knew how to alter or ameliorate it even if, like quite a few, they wished to do so. And the South wanted to be free of Northern interference: the continued attempts by abolitionists (as John Brown in 1859) to foster slave rebellions and terrorism in the South, the refusal of Northern states to return illegal runaway slaves (or to return Brown’s companions who had fled North), the threat of increased tariffs on Southern goods, the stated purpose of the new Republican party to expand federal power in the interest of Northern industrialists, and the clear perception that Lincoln had come into office with a hidden agenda of limiting if not eliminating Southern influence on the national scene (he was elected with not a single Southern electoral vote). So, is all that clear? Now we can go on with four more years of sesquicentennial commemorations without all the myths and misunderstandings. Maybe.

Reprinted from Vermont Commons.

Kirkpatrick Sale [send him mail], scholar and prolific writer, heads the Middlebury Institute.

The Problem: The American Empire is the largest, wealthiest, most powerful, most materialistic, most racist, most militaristic, most violent empire of all time. It is owned, operated, and controlled by Wall Street, Corporate America, and the Israeli Lobby. It has lost its moral authority and is unsustainable, ungovernable, and, therefore, unfixable.

Opportunities:

1. The Vermont Mystique. Classic red barns, covered bridges, the picturesque patchwork pattern of small farms, black-and-white Holsteins, tiny villages, little rivers, ridges, hollows, valleys, and dirt roads.

2. The Vermont Village Green. A place where people meet to chat, have a coffee, a locally brewed beer, a glass of wine, or a bite to eat; read a newspaper; listen to music; smell the flowers; and pass the time away. A place which is all about the politics of human scale – small towns, small businesses, small schools, and small churches. The village green is neat, clean, democratic, radical, nonviolent, noncommercial, egalitarian, and humane. A mirror image of the way America once was but no longer knows how to be.

3. David and Goliath Image. What could be more absurd than tiny Vermont, the second smallest state in the United States in terms of population, confronting the most powerful empire in history? The image of Vermont as an underdog is not likely to go unnoticed.

Challenges:

1. Neoconservatives. The Republican Party, Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and CNBC. [Vermont] Governor Jim Douglas, Lt. Governor Brian Dubie, the Ethan Allen Institute [John McClaughry], and True North Radio.

2. Neoliberals. The Democratic Party, most of the national media including ABC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, PBS, and PBR. Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Patrick Leahy, Congressman Peter Welch, and their political supporters.

Objectives: The peaceable return of Vermont to its status as an independent republic [1777–91] and the peaceable dissolution of the American Empire.

Goals:

1. Political independence by 2015.

2. Dissolution of the American Empire by 2020.

Strategies:

1. Moral Authority. Challenge the moral authority of the U.S. Government, Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Patrick Leahy, Congressman Peter Welch, and all of their collaborators.

2. Swiss Model. Unabashedly embrace the socio-economic, political model of Switzerland, the most sustainable nation-state of all time.

3. Imagine…Free Vermont. Launch a new political party whose aim is to elect state government officials and members of the legislature committed to Vermont independence. Once the party has a majority in the legislature, a motion will be introduced calling for a statewide convention to consider articles of secession. After these articles of secession have been approved by a two-thirds majority of the convention delegates, negotiations will begin with the United States Government for the peaceable departure of Vermont from the Union.

4. Vermont Commons. Develop the economic, agricultural, energy, and environmental foundations necessary to support a sustainable, politically independent Free Vermont.

5. Radio Free Vermont. Sow the seeds of peaceable rebellion against the Empire through Vermont-based music produced by Vermont musicians.

6. Outreach. Through the Middlebury Institute, the website SecessionNews.com, and other networks, reach out to other independence movements in the United States and elsewhere.

7. Finance. Utilize modern Internet-based social-network technology to raise money to finance the activities of the SVR Strategic Alliance.

Reprinted from The Middlebury Institute.

Kirkpatrick Sale [send him mail], scholar and prolific writer, heads the Middlebury Institute.

First of all,
a fellow named Bill Miller has started a new website, SecessionNews.com,
and it is a Drudge-Report-like compilation of anything connected
with secession across the land and around the world. It is an extraordinary
endeavor, and it reflects a great deal of talk about, interest in,
separatism and independence these days. Miller, a retired computer
engineer, has undertaken this, he says, because he has a passionate
interest in getting Americans to understand that secession is a
legitimate and honorable political strategy. Increasingly, it seems,
they're listening.

A regular contributor
to the Miller site is Russell Longcore, who has also started up
a new site of his own, the bluntly named DumpDC.com.
Longcore, who seems to have insurance and publishing businesses
in Georgia, writes long and vigorously about secession in his fairly
regular posts. "Secession," he says, "is on the lips
of many Americans today. When they look at a Federal Government
that is spinning wildly out of control, state secession begins to
have an allure as a remedy. America has gone from a nation of sovereign
states with a carefully defined Federal Government to a nation where
states are but subservient territories of a rapacious, tyrannical
ruling entity that entirely ignores any restrictions on its power."
His site figures to do something about that.

Last December
another new voice was added to the cause, from something called
Attackthesystem.com that considers itself to represent the "radical
Left." It argued that secession should be supported because
it was the best way to bring down the American empire and all that
it stands for, including its support for corporate capitalism, longtime
goals of the traditional Left. Vermont liberals of the Sanders persuasion
should take a look at it ("Why the Radical Left Should Consider
Secession").

In January
one notable event, carried by the AP to the lengths of the land,
was the launch of the campaign by Dennis Steele and Peter Garritano
(and others) for an independent Vermont, but you know all that.
You might not have known that another secession campaign, or something
very close to it, was launched just before that in Texas, where
the Texas Nationalist Movement ("Independence. In our lifetime")
announced its support for the Ron Paul Republican candidate for
governor, Debra Medina. She is “in line with the core beliefs of
our organization,” it said, and she believes that the people of
Texas should vote on the issue of independence, a core TNM demand.

(Just as an
aside: Libertarians, particularly the smarter Paulists, are important
allies for secessionists, since they get to the nullification/secession
place with only a few prompts if they're not already there. Ron
himself has said it's a workable option.)

Also in January
the invaluable website TenthAmendmentCenter.com
began tracking the number of legislatures coming back into session
this year and considering bills to reassert their sovereignty and
Tenth Amendment rights. By the end of January resolutions were introduced
in 11 states (Washington, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Missouri,
Mississippi, Kentucky, Illinois, Maryland, and Rhode Island). Last
year (also tracked on this site) Tenth Amendment resolutions were
introduced in 33 states, passed both houses in five, and were OK'd
by the governors in two. The movement looks to be gaining momentum
again.

In February
that movement held a Tenth Amendment Summit, in Atlanta, assembling
state representatives and candidates from across the country for
a one-day closed meeting on strategies, and next day hearing presentations
from Judge Napolitano, the Fox commentator, and Ray McBerry, a secessionist
candidate for Georgia Governor.

Also in February
there took place a remarkable conference boldly announced as on
"Nullification, Secession, and the Human Scale of Political
Order" in Charleston, South Carolina, maybe the first ever
large-scale scholarly conference on secession open to the public.
It featured many leading secessionist scholars, including Donald
Livingston, Thomas DiLorenzo, SVR's Thomas Naylor, Marshall DeRosa,
Kent Brown, and yours truly, and was attended by upwards of 100
people, an impressive turnout, especially considering the admission
cost of $2–400.

A national
Tea Party Convention was also in February, not exactly a secessionist
event but a measure of the underlying discontent that is leading
people at least to protest the system (and the debt) they've been
given and start thinking (some of them) about alternatives.

So what's going
on?

Basically,
of course, it is the growing dissatisfaction, in blue states as
well as red, and the purple and mauves, too, with a government grown
too big, complicated, and corrupt to function. It can't do health
care, swine flue, stimulus payments, carbon limits, education, jobs,
corporate bonus control, or airport security. It can send
30,000 soldiers to the sinkhole of Afghanistan, because Congress
long ago gave up any role in military policy and the peace movement
long ago folded up, but that's what Presidents always do when they
want to seem to be strong. Reagan invades Granada, Bush I Panama
and Iraq, Clinton Kosovo, Bush II Iraq and Afghanistan. All for
no reason than showing that they can do something in Washington.

But there's
more to it than that. There is a deep and fundamental perception
that corporate America — briefly, Wall Street — really is in the
saddle and runs the country, and for its own benefit, of course.
Very successfully, too, and with complete impunity. It cares nothing
for public opinion and has no shame. Now this may always have been
true, but there used to be the accepted illusion that the corporations
had some interest in making the people happy, or prosperous — "What's
good for General Motors is good for the country." But now that
the country owns General Motors they make no pretense that they
are interested in spreading the wealth at all. And it is because
the public perceives it — unconsciously if not knowingly — that
there is the general sense of unease, of anger.

Many of those
feeling this unease and anger, of course, don't know what to do
about it other than going to tea parties and shouting at town halls.
But it is clear that a great many others are following the inexorable
logical train that leads to secessionist thinking: this system is
broken and can't be fixed, party (including third party) politics
is part of the problem not the solution, armed rebellion doesn't
have a chance against an apparently ruthless state, and the only
way to change things and have a chance of a better world is through
peaceful secession — getting out, not getting back. It has, too,
the virtue of seeming to be doable — not like revolution
or regime change or socialism or any other variant of extreme politics.

It's not that
I have any great faith in the mass of people of this nation using
logic, but it just feels as if more people are following this line
of thinking these days than… than any time since, say, 1865.

February
9, 2010

Kirkpatrick
Sale [send him mail], scholar
and prolific writer, heads the Middlebury
Institute.

Mt.
Pleasant, SC

It is heartening
that at last, thanks to a few off-the-cuff remarks by Texas governor
Rick Perry on “tea-party” day, people are starting to
talk about secession in these not-very-United States, and for the
most part taking the concept seriously. (”Secession Talk,”
as the New York Times put it, “Stirs Furor.”) It’s
the first time it has been a genuine subject in American public
discourse, says Emory University secession scholar Donald Livingston,
since the war of Southern Independence was settled in 1865.

So it’s
no surprise that a lot of people have completely misunderstood it,
and that the nerve in their knees often impels them to declare it
illegal and unconstitutional. Robert Schlesinger, a columnist for
U.S. News, is typical: under a headline “Texas Can’t
Secede,” he wrote that “one third of the voters think
the state has the legal right to secede from the Union.” Then,
so sure of his errant position he could get cutsey, he added, “Ummm,
no,” and went on to scold them for being so ignorant.

But the plain
truth is that Texas has that right, and so do the other 49 states.

Read
the rest of the article

May
2, 2009