I was about to write that I was shocked at the recent comments by Glenn Beck and Texas Governor Rick Perry calling for Americans or Texans or teabaggers (?) to secede from the Union. The very notion that prominent Americans would call for the dissolution of the republic is absurd and ought to be roundly criticized. At their core these suggestions (calling as they do for an end to the republic) are deeply anti-American. All this from the crowd that complains rather incessantly that it is the Left who hates and blames America for the ills of the world.
But the sad truth is that these comments are no longer shocking because wing nuts like Beck and Perry long ago left the modern age and have retreated back somewhere into crazy land. (read this excellent travel log from one DKOSer who recently took a trip there)
So I thought it might be useful to provide a (very) brief primer on the history of secessionist ideas in America as a reference for the kind of action that conservatives are calling for and the beliefs they are associating themselves with.
First a quick re-cap. Facing the most calamitous economic downturn since the great depression and a new and widely popular president moving forward on an ambitious and broadly supported agenda, right-wing movers and shakers have stepped up their heated anti-government rhetoric and are now calling on folks to abandon the 230+ year old republic that is the United States and start anew. Weird, I know.
Erstwhile right-wing rodeo clown Glenn Beck (and Father Coughlin wannabe)
has called for secession offering this peculiar interpretation of American history:
You can’t convince me that the Founding Fathers wouldn’t allow you to secede.
The Constitution is not a suicide pact, and if a state says: ‘I don’t want to go there, because that’s suicide, they have a right to back out. They have a right — people have a right to not commit economic suicide...
...Texas says go to hell, Washington, which by the way has been said before. I believe it was Davey Crocket...it’s about time that somebody says that again."
Who is it exactly Beck thinks is going to secede and what happens after secession is not entirely clear.
Meanwhile...
Texas Governor Rick Perry (following Beck's lead?) also recently threatened that Texans might someday soon decide that they have had enough and leave the union.
I believe the federal government has become oppressive. It’s become oppressive in its size, its intrusion in the lives of its citizens, and its interference with the affaris of our state.
Texans need to ask themselves a question. Do they side with those in Washington who are pursuing this unprecendented expansion of power, or do they believe in individual rights and responsibilities laid down in our foundational documents...
...We think it’s time to draw the line in the sand and tell Washington that no longer are we going to accept their oppressive hand in the state of Texas. That’s what this press conference, that’s what these Texans are standing up for. There is a point in time where you stand up and say enough is enough, and I think Americans, and Texans especially have reached that point.
I am not really clear on what exactly Perry thinks is oppressive about Washington’s recent actions. I am guessing that giving Texas millions and millions of dollars in cash stimulus monies (17 Billion at last count) is somehow oppressive? The solution to this unprecedented (and oppressive?) largeness on the part of the nation as a whole is to...secede from the Union? Ummm, okay.
No offense Austinians, but I say let'em go and Glenn Beck's looney army can join them there. Oh yeah, but first we may want to charge them for the roads, military bases, hurricane protection and monitoring systems they have been using (among a vast array of other things as well) for all these years.
So, considering the sweep of American history, let's take a quick look at some of the other secessionists that Beck and Perry and others are throwing their lot in with.
- The Articles of Confederation vs. the 1787 Constitution
In response to Beck's assertion that the founders could not have possibly created a governing system where you could not, if you wanted, simply opt out, I offer Daniel Shays.
In point of fact it was another tax revolt -- by led by Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays in the winter of 1786-87 that motivated the founders to scrap the Articles of Confederation and to call for a constitutional convention so that they could replace the Articles with a government that would more tightly bind together the newly formed states under a stronger, more centralized federal system. Oh yeah, btw, George Washington led a military expedition to western Massachusetts and crushed Shays rag-tag band of tax-protestors!
Spurred by the fears of Shays' Rebellion and the possibility of similar protests, the founders met in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 to craft a new constitution. The document they produced, the 1787 Constitution, created a new and permanent government that provided for a strong executive (the president) and explicitly charged federal authority with the responsibility of suppressing domestic insurrection [Art. I, Sec. 8, Par. 15: empowers Congress to call forth militias to suppress insurrections]. This section was aimed at the Daniel Shays (Glenn Becks, and Rick Perrys) of the world as well as addressing the threat of slave insurrections. In any event, it was clear that none of the founders thought you could just, ya know, decide to leave the union at will.
- Virginia and Kentucky Resolves (1798 & 1799)
These were resolutions written by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, passed and approved by the respective states, maintaining that individual states possessed the authority to nullify legislation enacted by the federal government. The resolutions were passed in response to the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts and were backed by President John Adams. These acts sought to criminalize political opposition and their passage played a large role in generating the Democrat-Republican Party as a counter to Adams' Federalists.
While the election of 1800 settled the matter in favor of Jeerson and the Democrat-Republicans, the question of a state's authority to nullify federal legislation would remain at issue until the Civil War. However, even the right-wing lunatics today don't assert the view of government and sovereignty held by the states' rights crowd of that era.
- Hartford Convention (December 1814)
A meeting of New England Federalists opposed to the War of 1812 -- with some calling for secession and reasserting the right of nullification. The end of the war soon after and word of General Jackson's victory at the Battle of New Orleans made the Federalists look deeply unpatriotic. The secession talk at the Hartford Convention essentially delivered a deathblow to the Federalists and our nation's first political party disappeared soon after.
Could the secession talk of Beck and Perry have the same impact on the Republican Party today? We can only hope.
- Nullification Crisis (1832)
In opposition to high tariffs (particularly the tariffs of 1828 & 1832) Vice President and South Carolinian John C. Calhoun argued that, since the states created the federal government, the states could hold special conventions and declare laws passed by Congress as unconstitutional. In response to the 1832 tariff the South Carolina legislature called a state convention which voted to nullify the 1828 and 1832 tariffs and prevented collection of tariff within the state. Calhoun resigned the Vice Presidency to become the S.C. Senator. President Jackson believed that nullification was treason and ordered S.C. forts strengthened and sent a warship to Charleston harbor to compel compliance. No other state was willing to follow South Carolina's & Calhoun's lead. Facing the threat of military action and without anyone else rallying to their cause South Carolinians relented.
That's right, this was just another tax revolt and Calhoun was another crazy, right wing Perry-type insisting that South Carolinians could and should go their own way. Is Perry the John C. Calhoun of our age?
- The Civil War & Reconstruction (1860-1877)
Calhoun and the other fire-eaters, as the secessionists came to be known, eventually (and tragically) got their way with the advent of the Civil War. The history of that conflict does not need to be recounted here but it should be noted that the Civil War permanently resolved some of the most pressing questions that had plagued the early American republic. Namely, the Civil War:
a) Abolished slavery (though the meaning of freedom was left open)
b) Established that states could not leave the union whenever they wanted
c) Established that states could not declare federal laws "null and void"
d) Established that the power, authority, and sovereignty of the federal government was in every way superior to that of the individual states.
In other words, the Civil War determined once and for all that the union was, as Lincoln had said it was, "indissoluble."
It is worth noting briefly here who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. The Southern secessionists (or Confederate States of America) fought to preserve slavery, to defend a dying and antiquated hierarchical social system, and an increasingly outmoded economic system.
The good guys here were the Republicans -- a newly formed 3rd party that won the presidency in only its second national election and generated perhaps this nation's greatest president: Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln not only came to lead a massive army that pursued the cause of abolition but Lincoln also headed an activist government that saw a responsibility to pursue a fiscal policy that supported the middle class. Lincoln argued:
The government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credit needed to satisfy the spending power of the government and the buying power of consumers. The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of government, but it is the government’s greatest creative opportunity. The financing of all public enterprise, and the conduct of the treasury will become matters of practical administration. Money will cease to be master and will then become servant of humanity.
And even in war, Lincoln concluded that:
Ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors to bullets.
I don't quite follow the logic of Beck and Perry (and the others) as they seek to take the conservative movement and the Republican Party (the party of Lincoln) further and further into the secessionists, right wing, elmininationist nut house. If they journey too much farther in that direction they risk--like the Federalists and Calhoun, and the Fire-eating Democrats before them -- the ruin of their political party and the intellectual credibility upon which it is based for generations and generations to come. Perhaps they are already there.
Conclusion:
So it is worth noting here that, with the exception of the VA and KT Resolves, the secessionist impulse in American history has mostly been reactionary -- and arrayed against the emergence of more modern and egalitarian forces in America.
Let me make one final point about the crazy threat that issues in Beck's and Perry's call for secession:
It really should not have to be pointed out that one of the essential components of our democratic system is that when one party/group wins an election and takes control of the government the opposition doesn't declare war on the victors nor do they withdraw to some safe haven and declare themselves independent.
In fact perhaps the most revolutionary feature emerging out of the enlightenment was that democratic elections would provide for the peaceful transfer of power from one group to the next without war, bloodshed or political dissolution. Democratic elections would confer legitimacy upon the victors. The losers -- while perhaps rightly frustrated and bitter at their loss -- are supposed to buy into the larger project of democracy; a project that vests sovereignty not in kings and ancient aristocracies but in the people.
Modern Republicans seem to have forgotten this central legacy. They are practically all secessionists because they do not see a loss at the polling place as conferring legitimacy upon the winners. Instead, they seek regularly NOT to combat their political opponents with alternate policies and proposals but instead they seek to delegitimize their political opposition (Al Franken, Scott Murphy, Gore in 2000, Obama's birth certificate, ACORN, etc., etc., etc.) Like the feudal kings of yore Republicans seem to believe only they possess true political legitimacy. If the other guys are in power than the only thing to do is to stoke the fires of revolution and threaten to secede.
I say we should call their bluff this time. Go ahead then, I say. Let's give'em Texas and get rid of them already.
UPDATE X1:
Good Diary Above on Response to Perry by TX Senator
UPDATE X2:
Secession Cathcing On: GA Senate Threatens to Seceede