Secession Is More Than a 'Cause for Concern'
Plus: our move to the Hudson Highlands, and what's wrong with the concept of 'National Divorce.'
This newsletter, alas, has lain dormant now for eight eventful months. Every few weeks I’ve put a little “work newsletter” checkbox in my daily planner, and though I’m not ordinarily one to leave boxes unchecked, these have remained stubbornly empty. I attribute this to a few factors: full-time daddy daycare, until recently; commencing work on a big new project (more on that, hopefully, soon); the easing (likely only temporary) of the yearslong constitutional crisis that was the Trump presidency; ambivalence about the ideology and business model of this platform; the need to focus what little surplus creative energy I’ve had on writing for which I will be paid (I’ve reviewed two books in recent months, a biography of the great anti-slavery legislator Thaddeus Stevens, for The Baffler, and a study of Lincoln’s theory of the anti-slavery Constitution, for The Nation).
Then, too, this summer my wife and I finally made the move we had talked about for years, to the Hudson Valley, and that has been, at every stage, a time-consuming ordeal, though an immensely satisfying and thus far wildly successful one. After the Mrs., a high-school English teacher, landed a job in southern Dutchess County, we found a house in northern Putnam County, an area we’d always had our eyes on. We are technically in Cold Spring, the charming little village with absurdly beautiful views of the Hudson River and of Storm King Mountain, but on the outskirts of town. In fact, we’re on an old seventeenth-century road that I once dragged the Mrs. to find original, unpaved stretches of—making it all feel quite fated.
There is a hiking trail at the end of our street that leads right up (and up, and up, and up—it’s a punishing route) into Hudson Highlands State Park, connecting to a vast network of footpaths and old woods roads that, so my well-informed neighbor tells me, would take weeks to fully explore. I’ve always had a bit of a fantasy—perhaps Bananas-inspired—about repairing to some dark forest with a handful of idealistic comrades, living off the land, holding out indefinitely against the forces of tyranny. I formerly had to project this dream onto the elegantly manicured, largely artificial woodlands of my beloved and much-missed Prospect Park. Now I have a broader canvas for these admittedly puerile imaginings.
Although, that said, what both places have in common is a history of precisely that kind of guerilla campaign. I speak, of course, of the American Revolution. Prospect Park was the scene of some of the climactic fights of the Battle of Brooklyn. I used to constantly study the terrain there—and schlep the Mrs. on various historico-geographical excursions (a pattern emerges!)—in order to better imagine the hand-to-hand combat, the chopping of the ancient Dongan Oak to block the pass on the Flatbush road, the views one would have had then from the sheep-denuded hills of bucolic Kings County out over the flatlands as far as the sea. Well, it’s not so different here. Our rental is about a quarter-mile from a little knoll with a historic sign that says the area was fortified, from 1776 to 1783, by Continental soldiers guarding the Northern pass into and out of the Highlands. This very area where our house is, and the wooded hills above us where that hiking trail goes, apparently serve as an important setting in James Fenimore Cooper’s once-famous Revolutionary War novel The Spy. As some of you may know, my first book (though I’d already started working on Break It Up), was a breezy tour of literary places, so of course I’m thrilled to learn this. My copy is on the way.
In any case, now that we’re all set up in our new house—I have an office, with a door to both the inside and the outside, and a window looking out to the yard, a cluster of picturesquely dying leaves, and the passing highway—I’m hoping to get back to writing this newsletter on an at least semi-regular basis. All my schemes from last year for some kind of regular, organized format got me nowhere, so I’ll just do it each time however I feel like doing it: updates on work, life, local history discoveries, whatever has grabbed my attention, commentary on developments and links to articles germane to my work. Paid writing—that new project, inshallah—will have to take precedence, but I’ve realized many times over the years that writing begets writing, and it’s just good practice to always have something that needs working on. So, stay with me, share with friends, or drop off—all fine. Lord knows there’s too much to get through these days without my adding to it unnecessarily.
I won’t subject you to a comprehensive recounting of all the people and pieces that have talked about secession and disunion over the last eight months, though for whatever reason I’ve been privately cataloguing much of it. One thing that’s been interesting is the persistence of support for the idea in at least some quarters of the left even though a Democrat is in the White House. In his snooty review of Break It Up in National Review last year, the magazine’s editor, Rich Lowry, predicted that if Biden won the election the arguments of my book would be moot—those Democrats who had entertained or adopted secessionist views during Trump’s presidency would forsake them under Biden. That Lowry felt compelled to write about the subject again this month, in Politico, suggests that hasn’t been the case.
He was writing about a poll released over the summer that showed surprisingly high levels of support even among Democrats (41 percent) for the notion of state secession or regional partition—higher levels among Trump voters, unsurprisingly (52 percent). Larry Sabato, the political scientist who published the poll, said the results proved the existence of “deep, wide, and dangerous divides” in the body politic. Perhaps, but it’s difficult to think of any other issue on which support among American citizens is rising across the board—Democrats, Republicans, and independents; East and West, North and South. (Legalized cannabis, maybe?) It’s precisely this kind of trans-partisan convergence on the idea that this Union just might not be working anymore that has marked some of the most divisive periods in our past—the 1790s, the 1850s, etc.—and which I think should give pause to those eager to dismiss secessionist talk today as pure fantasy, unlike to lead anywhere.
As I recently told the journalist Steve Chapman for a column of his, “When Ben Shapiro and Sarah Silverman actually agree on something, maybe it’s worth paying attention to.” (For that motley pair’s nearly simultaneous embrace of secession, see, respectively, here and here.)
There has been a lot of talk over the last few months, especially on the right, about the concept of “national divorce.” The metaphor of the Union as a marriage, and of disunion as divorce, has been around since the founding era. In the book I quote John Quincy Adams writing to a Federalist associate in 1801 that if the Southern states wanted to secede he would let them go, just as, if his wife wanted a divorce, he would grant it, “though it broke my heart.”
Even so, I’m not sure “national divorce” is the most productive way to frame whatever constitutional break may be coming our way, mostly because it flattens the complexity of our problems and limits our options for what kind of arrangement could come out of such a break. For me, as I’ve explained many times, the point of either a complete break-up into separate nations or some kind of devolutionary break-down into regional sub-confederations would not be to create entirely homogeneous polities. That way lies folly, and most likely violence. The purpose rather would be to bring democracy back to a more local level, so we aren’t all fighting over everything in utterly dysfunctional Washington—where everything a governing majority wants to do, apparently, has to be packaged into one bill, and even that is subject to the veto of lone senators representing nobody’s interest but those of the coal companies and of themselves. That might lead to more efficient and effective policy-making as well as saner politics. (Karthick Ramakrishnan, a scholar who participated in a round-table discussion I hosted for Zocalo Public Square a year ago, about whether states are better at protecting human rights than the federal government, had some fascinating things to say in this regard.)
Another poll released over the summer also caught my eye. This was a survey by YouGov and Bright Line Watch, an academic research outfit, which found support for secession to be rising across the political spectrum and around the country. Questioners split the nation into five prospective countries—Northeast, Heartland, Pacific, Mountain, South—and asked nearly 3,000 respondents whether they would support their state leaving the Union to join the new regional confederations. Thirty-seven percent of the poll’s participants pledged their support for their own state leaving the United States to join its neighbors in forming smaller but arguably more perfect unions. In the South, Republican support for secession skyrocketed just since January, from 50 percent to 66 percent. Even Democrats in the Pacific region, whose brief Trump-era flirtation with #Calexit and other separatist schemes might have been expected to have waned by now, embraced secession in the new poll in higher numbers than last winter. Though a Democrat occupies the White House and California’s own ex-senator, Kamala Harris, is vice-president, 47 percent of respondents—nearly half—claimed they would favor forming their own West Coast republic.
The researchers stressed that the results demonstrated only “initial reactions by respondents about an issue that they are very unlikely to have considered carefully.” Surely that is the case. Few of those who said they would support, say, Kentucky or New Jersey or even California leaving the Union would be willing to march into battle—hell, even see their taxes go up—to bring that outcome about. Yet it’s striking nonetheless that so many Americans would agree, however reflexively and unthinkingly, that the Union has served its purpose and it may be time to pull the plug. Secession is indeed, as the researchers put it, “a genuinely radical proposition,” and however alarmist coverage of the poll was, increasing support for it is certainly yet another sign of a nation on the fritz. In the bone-dry language of the poll, “The broad and increasing willingness of respondents to embrace these alternatives is a cause for concern.”
Bright Line Watch appears to be a consortium of political-science researchers that publishes occasional reports on the state of American democracy. It’s hardly surprising the group would take a reflexively nationalist stance on the question of secession, but for the rest of us it’s worth asking whether rising support for secession should be dismissed as merely “a cause for concern” or instead embraced as a long-suppressed subject requiring urgent nation-wide discussion. One commentator writing about the new poll ruefully concluded that rising support for secession “bodes, very, very poorly for the future of American democracy.” I’d argue that what bodes worse is the insistent suppression of all public discussion about the potential merits of an alternate federal configuration.
And so, as I wrote in January, secession talk should be taken seriously. Dismissing it out of hand won’t make it go away. And if we don’t want secession to happen, if we don’t want the United States replaced by the five regional unions sketched out by the Bright Line Watch researchers, we have to consider what constitutional reforms will be necessary to avoid it. It would be difficult to conjure a more heinous display of America’s dysfunctional democracy than the back-room deal-making going on in Congress right now in a desperate effort to pass, for the first time in recent memory, actual legislation. Practically everyone feels the system is rigged against them—some more justly than others, but either way the widespread sense of dissatisfaction is corroding the foundations of the Union. Solemnly denouncing support for secession as a “cause for concern” won’t be enough to restore structural integrity to a rotted-out constitutional structure.
Good to hear from you glad everthing is good.Just athought ,Florida, Texas,NY governors are examples of the lack of professinalism,competence, the rise of idealogy and lack of accountability that secesion will not remedy. SZ