Secession isn’t as easy as it looks

November 5, 2005

Guest Post by Morbo

I’m sure it made perfect sense at the time: Religious and secular right-wing nuts would infiltrate and take over one state apiece and turn each into a type of laboratory for all of their kooky ideas.

The Religious Right settled on South Carolina. There they would establish a type of theocratic state where abortion, gay rights, evolution and general naughtiness would be banned. There would be Christian prayers in schools. Women would know “their place.” Courthouses would display the Ten Commandments.

At the same time, extreme free market libertarians focused on New Hampshire with bold plans to create a no-tax, no-regulation Grover Norquist wonderland with that nasty old government drowned in a bathtub.

Sadly, things just aren’t working out. Several news stories have noted that the fundamentalist takeover of South Carolina has been a bust, and this week the Associated Press reported on the dismal failure of the New Hampshire project as well.

The latter plan, dubbed the “Free State Project,” has really flopped. Organizers had hoped to see 20,000 Libertarians invade New Hampshire by 2006. You could say they are a tad short of that goal, since so far only 130 followers have actually moved to the state.

Struggling to put a good face on the debacle, Amanda Phillips, the president of the project, told the AP:

“What we found was what the people out there wanted to do was very different than how the project was structured. What it looks like people want to do is, is people don’t want to wait for 20,000. People want to move to New Hampshire when they’re ready to, and work toward liberty.”

It’s a darn shame. I endorse both of these projects and hate to see them floundering. It’s not that I accept the goals of either group. Far from it. I think they’re loons. But I wanted to see them succeed for two reasons:

1. Getting as many nuts as possible in one state is a good thing. Sticking the religious fanatics in South Carolina, for example, should make it easier for normal people to once again run states like Ohio, Missouri, Iowa and so on.

2. Letting these crackpots set up their scheme and fail miserably, as of course they will, would serve as a lesson to the rest of the nation. Anytime Grover Norquist opened his mouth, all we would have to do is say, “Good Lord, what do you want to do — turn the entire country into New Hampshire!?”

Some of you may be thinking, “But I live in New Hampshire (or South Carolina), and I’m not insane. I don’t want these nuts taking over!”

I understand. But I’m asking you to take a hit for the good of the order. Just before the kooks take over, we can provide relocation services. I’ve been to New England. It’s very compact, and I have no doubt we can resettle all of you in Vermont, Massachusetts and Maine. Those of you in South Carolina face more limited options, but I see no reason why we can’t pull off an airlift to the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina.

Once we get the sensible people out of both states, the kooks can pursue what I believe is their long-term goal: secession. Here’s the beauty: We let them. We say, “So long, it’s been great. Don’t let the door hit your butts on the way out.” It’s the perfect plan. We cram as many Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell devotees as possible in South Carolina, while New Hampshire gets the Norquist-Ayn Rand followers. Then we cut them loose. Within three years they’ll have made such a mess of things they’ll be begging for re-admission to the union. We let them back in — but on our terms.

What would those be? We can work that out later, but here’s a start: A combined vote of 1 in the Electoral College.

OK – so I get your logic of “take one for the team” but as a South Carolina resident I must strongly object. As I have told others, we are the great experiment for the wingnuts and it is far worse at the state and local levels where they control things like schools and property taxes and highway departments.

It would be fine if we could all move north (there are more of us normal humans hiding here than you might think) but we are the middle class, tied to jobs and families and mortgages. So we live here and suffer this stupidity waiting for opportunities to affect some positive change. By the way – if you send more of those wackos to my state, it will make the wait longer and I am not up for that. So we wait and watch as the Republicans manipulate our religious zealots into voting against abortion and gays and our gun nuts into voting against gun control, and our racist bastards into voting against equality. We watch them put flags and ribbons and W stickers all over their cars and rally their churches and hunting clubs and NASCAR buddies to go to the polls and defeat those northern liberal elitist snobs.

And the rest of the country completely gives up on us and our poor and our women and our kids. Please don’t.

  • no, we make them fight a war to rejoin. that’ll clean out a few thousand more nuts. then, we let the leftovers back in.

  • Let them seceed. Let them wait in line for visas to visit relatives, and go through customs every time they cross their borders. I will happily welcome all refugees from SC and Vermont.

    NC will lose the support of FEMA when they get hit by hurricanes, but that doesn’t seem like much of a loss these days.
    They probably won’t like losing our military bases, but what the hell – I’m not heartless – We can let them keep a few older tanks and file cabinets.

    Here’s the question. Both groups share a disdain for the UN, but I expect that to change once they join the ranks of impoverished, underdeveloped nations. Should they be admitted?

  • I’ve always wondered if the Republican President who did the most harm might be the first one. If Lincoln had just let the South secede we would have Canada with decent weather.

    I admit that the confederate states of america would have been a hell hole for a while, but with the underground railroad as long as a subway line, African Confederate Americans would have mostly managed to escape and the remaining confederates would have have reaped the wages of contempt for progress and education (mainly cotton as in you reap what we sew).

    I’d say pretty soon they would have applied for re-admission and accepted a reasonable deal, such as this: every White person born south of the Mason-Dixon line (such as myself) counts as three fifths of a man.

    Instead honest Abe managed to make his degenerate successors almost unbeatable as soon as the neo confederates got over their anger at the emancipation proclamation.

  • Excuse me for a minute, but I’m going to have to disagree. This is crazy talk. There are really only a handfull of these guys to begin with (just look at how many have made this move…), the rest are all followers, people who are just looking for a better life.

    The wingnut talking heads have simply found effective ways to use that to their advantage. They tell poor people that they must fear everything, and that your only hope is to protect yourself at the expense of those around you.

    This is really about language.

    Let’s quit talking about the myriad of issues we find important and focus instead on improving the lives of everyone. The rest will fall in place after we address these issues.

    Every time they talk about compassion, talk about a living wage. Every time they bring up values, talk about corporate accountability. Every time they mention lifestyle, let’s talk about education and healthcare. And for god’s sake, when they talk taxes, sell the idea of progressive taxation again.

    This is about focusing on concepts that improve life for everyone. They are the party of fear. We have to be the party of vision; we must be the party of the common man. We must avoid the banners of elitism and privilege at all costs.

    One of the successes of Bill Clinton was in discussing ideas that everyone identified with and saw a need for. He was never good at implementing them, but he promised universal healthcare and higher education for all. Those are issues that still need a champion, they are places where we can win back these people.

    Who’s with me here? I’m helping turn my red state blue, you should all be focusing on doing the same in yours. The south is very much in play, we just need to find the right way to talk to our friends and neighbors.

  • The Daily Show did a piece a while back on the effort to get the wingnuts to migrate to South Carolina. It was quite good, as you can imagine. The guy spearheading the effort lived in California, and he had no immediate plans to move to the Palmetto state. They talked to one guy who had moved from the northeast, and he was about the only one to have done so. He was basically the “lone ranger”. A miserable failure.

  • Wow. By coincidence I happened to spend 4 hours last night enthralled in the website http://www.johntitor.com

    “John Titor” is likely a nom-de-plume of a very clever sci-fi writer and performance artist. His post-apocalyptyc future USA scenario is very thought-provoking, and very realistic given the current path we are on.

    The kind of seccession/militia/micronation stuff you cite here underlines exactly how astute a socio-political observer “Titor” is.

  • I’m with you on this one Morbo, except I think a better choice for this bunch would be one of the less populous Western states.

    A common theme from these supposed I pulled myself up by my bootstraps people, the Libertarians, is that they achieved their success entirely own their own. They never seem to acknowledge that they have piggybacked on an already existing infrastructure.

    I say let’s put these tough self-starters in the middle of the desert and let them have at it.

    So while I agree with Alex that this talk borders on the far edge of a reasonable topic of discussion, why not give these people who live in fantasy land their own fantasy-farm? In the end they would have a chance to prove if their delusional economic theories would work or not. Who knows we might all want to join them, but I doubt it.

  • I’m wholeheartedly behind this idea. We just need provide emigration incentives. Perhaps we can give South Carolina the entire NASCAR organization, provided it never holds an event outside of the state. And if that’s not enough we’ll also give them … John Mayer. He’s popular with my fundie in-laws … so I’m guessing that holds true with the rest of that demographic.

    I apologize if you’re a NASCAR or John Mayer fan or both … we all need to make sacrifices for this noble endeavor.

    I’m stumped on what to offer New Hampshire …

  • And the far-right can have Texas, right? With Austin left as an enclave for good thinking folks, kinda like Berlin was in East Germany.

  • Your willingness to throw two states overboard reminds me of talk about moving to Canada after the election. I just returned home to South Carolina after 5 days in Micigan. As I flew in and looked down at the foothills of the Appalachians, I was so glad to be back in the place I call home. I love living in my state, eventhough it has flaws, just like I love living my country, eventhough it has flaws. I have no intentions of ceding either to those who do not understand the value of beauty and living up to your ideals.

  • I don’t want to have to cross New Hampshire in a sealed train just to visit my family in the Peoples’ Republic of Massachusetts. New Hampshire seccession would make us the West Berlin of sanity.

    Ich bin auch ein Mainer!

  • Just stumbled on this site, via Wolcott (if I remember my breadcrumb trail rightly) from Merry Old England (not so merry at the moment either but that’s different story).

    I think many Europeaas, including myself, find the amount of division within the US somewhat bewildering and sometimes quite hard to grasp.

    Although theoretically we can understand e.g. the Federal/State conflict (if I may somewhat simplistically call it that), it’s harder to fathom how it affects your societies. Federalism exists of course over here (the EU is somewhat of an example itself) but we don’t seem to reach that level of divisiveness.

    And for what is essentially a secular state, your politicians invoke G-d to an extent they would be boohd off the stage over here. For a PM to end a statement with: “G-d bless [insert country name here]” is still rather inconceivable even in very catholic countries like Italy or Spain…

    Good luck to you all.

  • Gert, you have to remember that Cromwell’s people– the Puritans– founded the USA.

    In some ways we are preparing to re-fight the English Civil War.

    Our country was formed by an alliance of armed utopian religous fanatics and scrappy get-rich-quick secular pirates. That that alliance is still in charge here should come as a surprise to no-one. The Mayflower Compact would still hold up well as a charter for Grover Norquist’s Wednesday morning breakfast. And House of Hancock was the colonies’ biggest smuggling ring.

    The entire nation was set up as a place for various utopians and brigands to escape from Europe and hide from each other, to set up their little separate social experiments– Puritans in Massachussets, Quakers in Pennsylvania, etc– and scams everywhere the brigands could find a “free market”. With the continual western expansion, all the kooks and religious fanatics (and get-rich-quick scam artists) continually migrated to find plenty of empty land to set up their own little social-experiment utopias: Kansas, Utah, Oaklahoma, Berkeley, etc :-). Add to that the fact that nearly everyone here has migrated from somewhere else: either to escape something awful, or in search of their own little utopia (whether religious or economic).

    Perhaps this might explain the uniquely American solution to any problem– run away to somewhere else! Or boldly venture off in search of greener pastures, however you want to have it. I’ve not been surprised to hear so many Americans talking about fleeing to Canada if the shit hits the fan here– most of us our here because our parents or grandparents similarly ran away when the shit hit the fan somewhere else.

    But today we are getting overcrowded, and our society is getting more and more nationalised by media and transportation and economics. There is no “frontier” to escape to anymore, and even if you found tons of empty land it is very difficult to escape from the national media or the federal government. We now have an “equal protection” clause which causes heartburn for people who might otherwise be able to live-and-let-live on issues like abortion, civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, marijuana rights, etc. South Carolina can’t outlaw abortion, California can’t legalise pot, and New Hampshire or Texas can’t declare its citizens exempt from federal income tax. Drat. In that sense, there is less and less “lebensraum” for many people, and perhaps that’s why the “cultural” issues have become the main area of contention– geography won’t keep us from bumping into each other with regard to those.

    Alas, the conditions are ripe for another bloodletting. Maybe that possibility will shock people here into growing up, and realising that we just have to get along. Our Founders specifically set out to avoid recreating the brutal religious and resource wars of Europe. It’s unclear whether their successes to date will hold up.

    Basically, Gert, what is happening in the USA is a small/fast repeat of European history. You-all have been jostling up against each other and fighting brutally for thousands of years, and finally even your leaders have learned after WWII that there is no alternative to living together in peace. I hope we don’t have to go through that kind of hell in order to learn the same lesson.

    In short, we’ve lived in relative peace for a few hundred years, thanks to some unique conditions which unfortunately appear to be coming to an end.

  • Goatchowder,

    Thanks for your enlightening comment, very much appreciated.

    Allow me to perhaps irreverently summarise it as follows: Europe’s Old World took centuries to build with much bloody, bloody turmoil, culmination in two World wars.

    But building the New World is equally difficult, as illustrated by American history. Well, let’s indeed hope you guys don’t have to suffer another (or multiple) civil wars to find relative peace.

    Europe remains of course also divided and separatist movements in all forms and guises are a plenty.

    Stability in your part of the world is extremely important, without it our prospects aren’t good at all.

    Thanks again.

  • As a South Carolinian and a secessionist/self-determinationist I find your article a bit patronizing. It’s good to get the word out though, in whatever form it may be. I think many Americans will say “let this be over and let’s just go our seperate ways” when the time comes, as will many South Carolinians. We’re simply different, and very proud of that fact. And whose business is it how we run our own affairs anyhow? George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, etc. would be with us in the independence movement today – resisting centralized tyranny is the American way.

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