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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
It will never work, but that doesn't stop blue-state radicals from insisting they have the right to break up Bush's -- and Lincoln's -- "imperial" union. A revolutionary guide to American history.
Jan 25, 2005 | The idea of an American right of secession -- a state's right to abandon the union -- today invites a veritable cyclone of scorn and bafflement. Secessionism, you will be told, is immoral, treasonous, seditious, the failed machination of slave-holding Southerners whose nutty dream died in the judgment of 1865. "What insanity it is to reopen this issue," says Pauline Maier, professor of American history at MIT.
What you will not hear is that secessionism is as old as the states themselves, that it was not always a reviled idea, that it cleaves to the heart of a celebrated but perhaps outmoded American principle -- the rebellion against centralized power -- and that it is a founding American act enshrined in our most revolutionary document. "[W]henever any Form of Government becomes destructive," counsels the Declaration of Independence, "it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government."
Although secessionism today is politically impossible, if tenuously legal, the secession specter has arisen again, waking to the Declaration's call to self-governance. In 2005, it is the blue-state Northerners, bitter from the defeat of Nov. 2, who are, ironically, wearing its robes.
If their plaints have an epicenter, it is in Charlotte, Vt., in the wood-frame house of Thomas Naylor, professor emeritus, agitator, author, Rage Against the Machine fan, and founder and chair of the "Second Vermont Republic." Naylor seeks the rebirth of Vermont as the independent nation it was between 1777 and 1791. White-haired, jowly and soft-spoken, Naylor describes his little band of "rebels" (the Second Vermont Republic boasts 125 card-carrying members) as "a peaceful, democratic, libertarian, grassroots movement opposed to the tyranny of the United States," which has become "too big, too centralized, too intrusive, too militarized, and too unresponsive to the needs of individual citizens and small communities."
Like the original red-state secessionists, it is to the founding documents -- the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States -- that Naylor turns to buttress his belief in the morality and legality of secession. "We are enmeshed in a global system of conquest and destruction in which Corporate America and the United States government manipulate and control the lives of millions of ostensibly free individuals," he writes in his "Vermont Manifesto," published in 2003. "How many Americans are prepared to die to make the world safe for McDonald's, Wal-Mart, 747s, gas-guzzling SUVs, the Internet, Bill Gates, and the rest of the Forbes 400 richest Americans?"
Naylor comes to his radicalism by a not uncommon boomerang of contrary experience. He grew up in the 1940s in Jackson, Miss., one-time hotbed secessionist slave state, but hated the states'-righters who lamented the "war of Southern independence." Naylor kicked his way out of Jackson and went on to found a software company that sold $50,000-a-pop programs to Fortune 500 companies. After he sold the enterprise in 1980, he claims to have never again touched a computer.
For 30 years, Naylor was a professor of economics at Duke University, where he became best known as the co-creator of a freshman course on the giant topic of the "meaning of life" and as the coauthor of the subversive, anti-consumerist book "Affluenza." He also worked as a management consultant to corporations and governments worldwide -- including, fatefully, the Soviet Union, in whose peaceful collapse Naylor happens to see the future of the United States of America.
If the dark comparison holds -- the United States, according to Naylor, enjoys a similar far-flung geography, a one-party political system disguised in multiparty rhetoric, a corporate socialism that defies free markets, and a congressional incumbency as stable as the Politburo -- then Vermont is the antidote. By this, Naylor means the Vermont of small towns, small farms, small businesses, local governance, grass-roots democracy, green activism: Vermont as the gentle Switzerland of North America (but armed to the teeth, as Vermonters enjoy hunting in the woods).
The push for the Second Vermont Republic is no anomaly. Today there are secession movements afoot in Hawaii and Alaska, both complaining, with some validity, that fraud and coercion forced their entrance into the union. In New York, activist and author Jason Flores-Williams, lately best known for his disruptions at the Republican National Convention, plans a New York City secession movement "as much Andy Warhol as it is Tom Paine," he says, predicting his "secession parties" will become "the most happening cultural events in NYC, events that echo up and down the hierarchy."
Flores-Williams might consider contacting the people at Republic of Atlantica, which imagines a seaboard megalopolis nation stretching from Boston to Washington, D.C. Three thousand miles to the west, the Republic of Cascadia seeks to comprise Oregon, Washington and British Columbia as the country "whose software is on 97 percent of the world's computers." The group's Web site warns, "For too long have our people put up with indifference and condescendence from distant seats of power."
Most recently, on Nov. 15, a former evangelical minister from California named Jeff Morrissette announced the founding of the Committee to Explore California Secession, or Move On California. California as a nation, Morrissette notes, would be the world's fifth-largest economy -- larger than those of China, France, Italy and Canada. Among Morrissette's "train of abuses" is the brazen piracy of the California energy crisis in 2000 and 2001, which resulted in $9 billion in overcharges to consumers -- "economic sabotage," as Morrissette describes it, engineered by Enron and other energy traders close to the Bush administration.
"I'm not sure that secession is legal or constitutional," Morrissette says. "But I would certainly draw an analogy to the colonists and King George. The colonists didn't ask. They simply declared it done." He adds: "The legality and constitutionality are really a moot point. New nations are born by a declaration of independence."
