There is an interesting tendency in American political history that whenever there is some sort of crisis, one answer to it, especially from the Right, is some form of secession. The waves of Liberal triumphant ecstasy that Obama rode into the White House were scary enough to start discussions of leaving the Union from Ohio to Oregon. During the 1990s it was the scary militias of places like Michigan that were supposedly going to fight for some sort of breakaway from the tyranny of Clinton. None of this came to pass and the only semi-successful attempt to do something like this required the support of the entire political and economic elite of the South, with a very heavy economic dependence on a “peculiar institution” to even try. But for some reason this naive power fantasy of being able to simply break away from the evil grip of Washington, gaining everything, yet somehow losing nothing just will not die. And so, now there is discussion of an imminent “Texit”. This time though the strategy is going to use a long term bureaucratic roadmap and vastly more signatures, stamps and red tape in order to ultimately fail.

Brexit is a False Narrative

This new term Texit comes from the “success” of the Brexit movement that sort of got the UK out of the EU to some extent. The glowing positive side of Brexit, is the fact that things were done absolutely peacefully via referendum and very slowly bureaucratic processes. Although the drudging seemingly endless path of Brexit was very annoying for those who advocated it, having lots of time to play with, allowed for things to happen more gently and with less economic consequences. If they would have just put up barbed wire and machine gun nests on the British side of the Chunnel the day after voting, the economic impact would have been a lot more severe. For us commoners we want politics to be exciting and full of triumphant victories towards a better tomorrow, but the reality is that sometimes slow and steady wins the race. No matter what the anti Brexit crowd says, Britain’s economy has not crumbled or suffered some sort of fatal wound due to leaving the EU. Essentially a soft secession, at least in the context of the EU, is now proven to be pleasantly survivable, at least for a major player like the British.

Image: Is a post-Brexit UK really fundamentally different?

It is probably this particular safer softer bureaucratic approach that appeals to those who understand paper dancing most intimately – local politicians. From their standpoint, why not try to slowly break Texas away from impending death from Socialism/Globalism, but in a rainbows and kittens peaceful way? Brexit required no guns nor blood, simply lots of time and stamps, this looks very spiffy in contrast to blood soaked Civil War 2.0.

If the British could leave without collapsing, why can’t the Lone Star State? Everything is bigger (and better) in Texas right?

The issue is that for pencil pushers the Brexit narrative looks attractive but ultimately this narrative is false. England was not able to lead some sort of massive Conservative or Nationalist revolution by gentle means. Yes, the Union Jack was taken down at the EU parliament, and in theory Brussels cannot suck more resources from across the English Channel at will, but ultimately the UK remains in NATO, completely philosophically dominated by extreme Progressive Liberals, and is not going to reforge “The Empire” any time soon. All of the pre-Brexit issues not related to tax that have been slowly destroying English culture and nationhood are still very much in place, but taxes are lower so that’s nice.

The UK is not truly independent, Brexit or not. The real test of a nation’s independence in a Monopolar world is if it can (or at least tries) to pursue policies that go against the desires of the Hegemon (Washington). So far we have yet to see a post Brexit UK try to work the Russians or Chinese against Washington or assert its interests over those of America’s anywhere on the globe. The Brits are not players in a “great game” at the moment, they have just adjusted the flavour of their vassal status. This Brexit narrative is something to note, something of interest, but it is not a “proof of concept” for Texas.

The collapse of the USSR is realistic a model for Texas

We should be impressed that local politicians in America were actually aware of an event that happened overseas. This level of worldliness is rare, but sadly if they were to look just a bit further east they would see the potential nightmare that can happen even if they were to succeed in leaving the United States on “peaceful” terms.

Despite the fact that 77% of the populace voted to save but reform the Soviet Union, it was broken up by pen strokes hidden in the forests at the very western edge of the empire. What ensued was a nightmare scenario of starvation, collapse and untold small military conflicts. Many of the chunks of the USSR felt quite confident in their ability to stand on their own as part of a great Red Civilization, but the second it fell apart they quickly had to fight to survive and quickly realized just how small and helpless their nations were without big daddy Moscow. To this day all the Former Soviet Republics remain poor irrelevant territories whose only purpose in their existence is to antagonize Russia and challenge the spelling skills of their Washington masters with their unpronounceable last names.

Image: Breaking away from the big empire comes at a high cost, is it worth it?

Texas is big and has a very vibrant culture, but it has far more value as a part of American Civilization than as a Texan nation. This is much in the same way that Armenia, Georgia, the Ukraine etc. were vastly more relevant as part of Russian/Soviet Civilization, than as forgettable blips on the global radar. Within Russia everyone can at least recognize Armenian script, knows the name of those big Ukrainian red trousers they like and can determine what is Georgian cuisine. As “independent” nations they are culturally non-existent globally except for those twerps who accidentally bought the wrong “Georgian” flags to the Capitol Hill protests. Even if Texas would be allowed to slowly nudge its way out of the Union by some sort of Texit its destiny will look much more like a Former Soviet Republic in the 90’s than their mythical Brexit narrative.

The geopolitics of Texas are dismal

If Texas were to become independent it would find itself surrounded by 3 different spaces. The first being the land border with the rest of America, who would be very hostile to the breakaway republic and very willing to put the economic screws to them. The United States has brought misery to many places across the globe with embargoes, sanctions and blockades. We shouldn’t be so naive to think they wouldn’t do it to a naughty Texas. The second space would be the Gulf of Mexico which is essentially dominated by the U.S. Navy. Texans would have to say goodbye to goods from China, unless they could get them via Mexico. Blocking off Texas from the rest of the world is very realistic and this enforced isolation will change the shining big cities of the state into dim impoverished Capitalist copies of North Korea in terms of economy.

Image: Texas would have it worse than North Korea during a “Texit”.

The third and most important space is the border with Mexico. If the Mexicans were not under the thumb of Washington, this could be a potential “way out” for an independent Texas, to get access to the world’s goods. But as it stands today Mexico City will always side with Washington when it counts. meaning that Texit would lead to a new nation being born that is completely cut off from the rest of the world. It would not only have to economically fight against the Global Hegemon but would start life surrounded by it on all sides to be consumed and digested like a longhorn steak. Texas is big, it has a diverse landscape, but maintaining an economy with guns pointed at you from every direction will not exactly be easy.

The geopolitics of America, being far away, surrounded by oceans with only underpopulated Canada and submissive Mexico at the borders is a huge boon to American stability. Well wishing and power fantasies cannot topple geopolitical realities and the fact that Washington will simply never let a Texit take place. The politicians advocating this position should understand that if they go forward with this Texas will gain geopolitical realities worse than those of North Korea. Furthermore, any Texan politician who will seriously put forward legislation for a referendum or soft exit process is likely to decide “to take their own life” as often happens with people who disagree with certain U.S. policies. The people advocating for Texit are naive, they have no idea what they’re actually getting into and just how bad things will be even if they succeed.

Every American Governor thinks his or her state is special, but only California Governor Gavin Newsom regularly refers to his as a “nation-state.”

The coronavirus pandemic has provided a high-profile stage for Newsom to play out his ambitions. He was the first governor in the country to issue a statewide lockdown. Together with Oregon Governor Kate Brown, he became the first to issue an official “roadmap” for ending it. Joining Brown and Washington Governor Jay Inslee, Newsom also announced his intention to create a coordinated regional plan for a phased return to normal social and economic life all along the west coast.

While media fanfare around the roadmap has outpaced the plan itself, California is one of only a handful of states beginning to think practically about how to enter ‘phase 2’ of the coronavirus pandemic—the time after the harsh lockdowns of ‘phase 1’ but before ‘phase 3’ normality. This has put Newsom in particular on a collision course with President Trump over who has the authority―and who will take the political credit―for making America work again.

The California roadmap is the latest in a long line of policies practically and symbolically distancing the Golden State from the rest of the country. California has long been the only state granted the right to maintain its own auto emissions standards. Since 2017 it has prevented state employees from traveling on official business to other states that, in the evaluation of its Attorney General, maintain legal “discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.” California is a self-declared “sanctuary state” limiting the degree to which state and local law enforcement may cooperate with federal immigration officials. In 2019 it began covering certain illegal immigrants in its state Medicaid program, and this year created a state-based coronavirus relief fund specifically for residents who are in the country unlawfully.

There is no doubt that California is both very peculiar and very large. Yet neither quality lends it the status of a nation, nor does it make California a state in the international legal sense of the term. Nonetheless one day it could become so, and the coronavirus pandemic is creating novel opportunities for California to travel down just such a path.

The state already has the political infrastructure to begin entertaining independence. In 2015 a set of quixotic activists formed the California National Party dedicated to the proposition that Californians deserve their own country. The next year a parallel organization, Yes California, formed to support an independence referendum for the state. Both the California National Party and Yes California are self-consciously modeled after the Scottish National Party (SNP) and the organization Yes Scotland that spearheaded the campaign for Scottish independence in 2014.

Californians can make a similar appeal. The state’s Electoral College votes haven’t gone to a Republican in over thirty years. Republicans haven’t controlled a house of the California state legislature in twenty-four years and there hasn’t been a single Republican elected to statewide office in California in ten years. Yet since 2000 Republicans have controlled the Presidency and the U.S. Senate 60 percent of the time and the U.S. House of Representatives 70 percent of the time. For eight of the past twenty years there has even been a Republican trifecta—simultaneous control of the White House and both houses of Congress. While Donald Trump won 46 percent of the national popular vote in 2016, he received a mere 32 percent in California, the third lowest proportion of any state in the country. The day after the election #Calexit became a leading social media hashtag. When campaigning for governor in 2018, Gavin Newsom told voters they were selecting the next “head of the resistance” to the President.

Four years of the Trump presidency have made many Californians grind their teeth, but the state is still far from taking secession seriously. Yes California failed in both its 2017 and 2018 signature drives, and the California National Party is still not a “qualified” political party granted automatic ballot placement. A Trump victory in November, however, could change the state’s mood. Yes California is hoping as much. Its current leader predicts “If Trump is re-elected in 2020 … California will push for secession.” Its former president even voted for Trump in 2016 as a kind of Leninist strategy to heighten the contradictions between California and the rest of the country.

Still, the barriers to a second Bear Flag Revolt are formidable and, contrary to the hopes of the California National Party and Yes California, there are far fewer meaningful parallels between Scotland and California than at first glance. Unlike the United Kingdom, the United States is a federal republic in which the states are powerful and semi-sovereign entities able to exercise considerable autonomy from the national government. If California doesn’t like federal policy, it can (and often already does) follow its own. Also unlike the UK, the U.S. has a presidential system with an independent legislature. In the U.S. this more often than not produces divided government and tempers fears of an unwelcome president. Finally the Twenty-Second Amendment ensures Trump will serve no more than eight years as president, unlike Margaret Thatcher’s eleven-and-a-half as Prime Minister of a deeply antagonistic Scotland.

Most importantly, however, California lacks the makings of a real nation. While the traditional definition of a nation highlights shared race, religion and language, none of these distinguish contemporary Scotland from the rest of the United Kingdom. What makes Scotland a nation is its historical and contemporary sense of self. Scots have a strong identity founded upon a 900-year history as an independent kingdom followed by 300 years as a legally distinct part of the United Kingdom. California’s life as an independent republic lasted less than a month and prior to the gold rush barely 7000 Spanish, Mexican or American settlers lived in the state’s present-day borders.

Meanwhile, Scotland’s deep historical memory is supported by a remarkably stable population. At its most recent census, 83 percent of the residents of Scotland were born there (a higher total than any U.S. state) while 93 percent were born in the United Kingdom (the same percentage of foreign-born as Nebraska). California’s lack of historical roots is exacerbated by the ephemeral nature of its current population. Only 54 percent of its residents were born in the state while just 72 percent were born in the U.S. In 2018, over 2 percent of the California population had lived in the state less than a year. A territory full of born-and-bred natives with local lineages going back centuries might fight for independence. A place full of transients constantly on the lookout for the next ticket in or out will not.

But if independence isn’t on California’s horizon, a decentralization of political power to the states might be. The current public squabble over the authority to enter and manage ‘phase 2’ of the pandemic is the tip of the spear. Concern over a second wave of the pandemic exacerbated by movement between states with different lockdown dates and practices will tempt governors to make their borders more than simple lines on a map. The country’s considerable size and diversity is the perfect premise for a balkanization of ‘phase 2’ practices lasting a year or more. Differing state capacities and political values will govern different balances between privacy and public health through any possible regime of ‘test and trace’.

As America’s largest state, California is well positioned to ride the federalist wave. But its strong ideological commitment to open borders and maximal social diversity will make a decentralized America a difficult one to manage. While Governor Newsom likes to speak of California “exporting” its excess medical supplies to other states, its less touted and much more significant export is its people. In 2018 nearly 700,000 California residents, almost 2 percent of the state’s population, left for other parts of the country while an untold number more moved abroad. California is a popular staging ground for immigrants to gain a foothold in America and then move onward to more attractive states such as Texas, Arizona, and Nevada.

A Trump victory in November would obviously put California at sharp odds with much of the rest of the country’s turn to immigration restriction and border enforcement. In response Californians could begin demanding their own autonomous immigration policy, much as Scotland now seeks and Quebec already has. To ensure California’s separate system doesn’t become the tail that wags the larger national immigration dog, California residency requirements for immigrants would have to be imposed. Temporary phase 2 restrictions on internal mobility could easily generate the infrastructure for a more permanent system to serve an asymmetrically devolved immigration regime.

California has already begun to erase the distinction between resident and citizen. It allows non-citizens (both legal and illegal residents) to vote in some local elections, to serve on state government boards and committees, and to receive state-based coronavirus relief funds. A California with its own immigration policy on top of its own nascent sense of ‘residentship’ would be a California that has taken a real step toward independence. And much like the plurality of English voters now looking at Scotland’s continuing demands for independence, the rest of the United States could be perfectly willing to let such a California go.

theamericanconservative.com

SPENGLER

American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup, by Francis H. Buckley. Encounter Books, 2020. 170 pages with index. US$23.99

Francis Buckley, a professor of law at George Mason University in Virginia, is the closest thing America has to a Jonathan Swift, the great 18^th-century Anglo-Irish satirist. His writing on politics is the most entertaining of any present commentator I have read on US politics, and his humor illuminates rather than obscures fundamental issues.

I read American Secession when it appeared earlier this year and thought it overstated. Re-reading it after the pandemic brought America to a virtual standstill, it now seems that Buckley pulled his punches.

Buckley, to be sure, does not want the US to crack apart, and initially intended the secession thesis as an ironic foil for his own views, in the spirit of Swift’s Modest Proposal. What he sees in today’s America, though, is alarming.

Asians who struggle to make sense of American social and political trends should give it close attention; it deserves translation into several languages. “We’ve hit rock bottom, with no clear path up,” the author avers, referring to the collapse of trust and civility across the American political divide:

“When Trump separated children from their parents at the border, the normally level-headed Joe Scarborough said, “I don’t want little children ripped from their parents’ arms. I don’t want them marched off to showers.”

Michael Hayden, former CIA director, tweeted that “other governments have separated mothers and children,” and he added a photo of Auschwitz. The respected Foreign Policy magazine published an article saying that, for the first time in America’s history, a Nazi sympathizer occupied the Oval office.

Violence has been normalized. When US Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) was attacked by a neighbor and suffered six broken ribs, lung damage and multiple bouts of pneumonia, Kasie Hunt laughingly said on MSNBC that this was one of her “favorite stories.”

The coastal states vote Democratic by huge majorities, while the interior votes Republican. California pays more than US$100 billion more in federal taxes to Washington than it receives in spending.

A California secession movement is afoot “soliciting signatures for a ‘self-determination ballot measure that would ask California voters whether the state should become independent. If it passed, it would lead to another referendum, which if passed would require the state legislature to issue a formal declaration of independence.”

The impulse comes from California’s left-wing fringe, to be sure, but, Buckley argues: “It might happen … it’s the state that bans offers of plastic drinking straws while giving heroin users free hypodermic needles. California has become the symbol of utopian excess, and a place where conservatives wouldn’t want to live.”

Meanwhile, in South Carolina – “too small for a republic and too big for a lunatic asylum” – a philosophy professor named Don Livingston has revived southern secessionism, suppressed by the 1865 Union victory in the Civil War but never extinguished.

Californians and South Carolinians “are like partners in an impossible marriage. It doesn’t matter who’s right when the differences are irreconcilable. And both might be right.”

What might unite the country? Not, says Buckley, the new nationalism, a political current that he helped foster as a founder of Scholars and Writers for America in 2016, a group of intellectuals (including this writer) supporting Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Buckley is an equal-opportunity offender, and points to the paradox in conservative nationalism:

“There’s been a revival of nationalism among conservatives, but this hasn’t served to unite the country,” he argues. “The icons of American nationhood are the liberal principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. Other countries have their common cultures or religions. What America has is an idea that constitutes our identity as Americans, and that idea is liberalism in the classical sense.” So “illiberal conservative throw away the only set of ideas that could unite us.”

There are other conservatives, Buckley continues, who “argue that nationalism must be based on something more than an idea. They dismiss what’s called ‘creedal nationalism’ as insufficient. We’re more than a creed, they say. We’re also a community with a common set of values and beliefs about how to advance the common good … For this reason the conservative nationalist should be a secessionist. He tells you he loves America. It’s just other Americans he hates.”

A good deal of Buckley’s book discusses the disadvantages of bigness and the virtues of state and local vs federal decision-making. His arguments are well-crafted but less arresting than his discussion of the great divergence in beliefs.

They also have a ready riposte: Local government does many things better than federal government, but the latter is far better equipped to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. One might add that in a world where power and prosperity both depend on technological advances, the resources of the federal government are required to support the research and development that generates new technologies.

America created the digital age as a byproduct of the Cold War – every important invention from the computer chip to the internet started with a Defense Department research grant – and if America is to compete with China, it requires aggressive federal support for R&D.

But that really isn’t what matters to Buckley. His discussion of the economics and legal mechanics of secession is offered in a Swiftian spirit, the better to examine America’s national character. The great political bifurcation, I would add, has the character of a religious war.

Along with Buckley, I believe that something more than liberal constitutionalism holds America together. In place of the accretion of habits and customers that define culture of the Old World, Americans are self-inventors, and our founding mode of self-invention is the Protestant identification of America with biblical Israel.

This is more vivid in the Civil War than in the Declaration of Independence – Lincoln’s Second Inaugural has the cadences of the King James translation of Hebrew Scriptures, and the Battle Hymn of the Republic begins with an apocalyptic reference to Isaiah.

I have written elsewhere of the making of American identity and its cultural expression in the individual’s never-completed journey towards salvation, which reappears in every Western, detective story and action film, not to mention our national novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

American culture was so compelling that it made generations of immigrants reinvent themselves. Reinvention is America’s strength and weakness. In the past Americans imagined themselves a new (almost) Chosen People building a new City on the Hill.

But the same Protestant religious impulse and penchant for reinvention went haywire in the era of identity politics, as chronicled by religious writers like Joseph Bottum and Joshua Mitchell. Instead of a common national identity, it spawned a welter of contending ethnic, racial and gender pseudo-identities.

The result of these fractures, Professor Buckley reports, is “a constitutional crisis, our second since the Civil War. In 1861, our Constitution proved incapable of resolving the differences among us. Now too, on health care, immigration reform and so many of the issues that divide us, stasis reigns and necessity is met with impossibility.”

Of course, he does not really believe that secession is at all likely. “So I reveal myself to be a unionist, albeit one who wants to see a smaller federal government and a devolution of power to state governments. I believe that tolerance is better than fanaticism, and that ideological hatreds are especially dangerous because they’re so enjoyable,” he concludes.

The Covid-19 pandemic makes an even stronger case against secession. The virus of identity politics preceded it, and produced fractures in the body politic at the state and local level which did as much or more damage than the divisions at the national level that Buckley cites.

A case in point is the acrimonious wrangle in March between New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio.

As Charles Duhigg reported in an April 26 expose in The New Yorker, DeBlasio’s health officials begged him to close schools and order social distancing at the beginning of March, when the mayor still tweeted that people who felt flu-like systems should go to their doctor, which “only increased the odds that the virus would spread.”

Health workers’ unions threatened that their members would stay home if the city didn’t provide child care after closing schools. Not until March 16 did DeBlasio accede to his advisers’ urgent demands, and then made a last trip to his own gym. A former New York City health commissioner told Duhigg, “if you tell people to stay home and then you go to the gym, you can’t really be surprised when people keep going outside.”

Duhigg adds: “At press conferences, Layton and other physicians played minimal roles while de Blasio and Cuomo, longtime rivals, each attempted to take center stage. The two men even began publicly feuding – arguing in the press, and through aides, about who had authority over schools and workplace closures … De Blasio and Cuomo kept bickering.

“On March 17th, de Blasio told residents to ‘be prepared right now for the possibility of a shelter-in-place order.’ The same day, Cuomo told a reporter, ‘There’s not going to be any ‘you must stay in your house’ rule.’ Cuomo’s staff quietly told reporters that de Blasio was acting ‘psychotic.’ Three days later, though, Cuomo announced an executive order putting the state on ‘pause’ – which was essentially indistinguishable from stay-at-home orders issued by cities in Washington State, California and elsewhere.”

“Tom Frieden, the former CDC director, has estimated that, if New York had started implementing stay-at-home orders ten days earlier than it did, it might have reduced Covid-19 deaths by 50% to 80%,” Duhigg reports. “More than 15,000 people in New York are believed to have died from Covid-19. Last week in Washington State, the estimate was fewer than 700 people.”

Democratic governors and mayors in California and Washington State listened to the epidemiologists, acted quickly, and saved thousands of lives. New York’s elected officials bickered and bowed to recalcitrant constituencies, notably the overwhelmingly minority health workers, and lost thousands of lives.

The blow from the coronavirus revealed lines of fracture that divide New York from California, and New York State from New York City. And these were deadlier than the wrangling between the Trump administration and state governors over availability of ventilators, timing of economic closure and opening and emergency funding.

The damage done to the body politic has reached the capillary level of the American body politic. There no longer are coherent regional divisions that might sustain a secession movement. The divisions inside the Democratic Party run as deep as the battle between Trump and the self-styled resistance.

Professor Buckley is right to call for more civility and moderation. What should alarm Americans – and only Americans – is that we find ourselves in the sort of crisis that in the past fostered a spirit of national unity, but instead set us at each other’s throats.

asiatimes.com