The idea of breaking up America is very American.

The appeal of secession, which has reared its head again in Vermont, is that you get to start over again, a new clean slate. It’s like breaking sod on the first homestead in a valley theretofore untouched by human foot. It’s like starting a new settlement on the prairie, or one of those planned communities built by the New Deal’s Resettlement Administration.

It’s recreating the experience of the pilgrims, or of the Dutch sailor who first saw (as someone once noted), the ” fresh, green breast of the new world… face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”

In Vermont, secession has another appeal. It’s local. The same impulse that persuades some Vermonters to buy as much food as possible from the nearby farm, to shop in the village rather than at the big box store out on the highway, seems consistent with breaking away from the rest of the country.

So it’s kind of fun to play with the idea, and today is a fitting time to ponder it. First because the scheme seems to have become sufficiently mainstream to have inspired a couple of small advocacy groups, a free quarterly newspaper available all around the state, a web site, and the presence of two books on the  shelves of Vermont bookstores.

Then, too, today is the 200^th birthday of the fellow who squelched the only serious secessionist effort in American history.  And he’s very much part of this discussion, is Abraham Lincoln, because the few who are really serious about secession really loathe him.

“Lincoln was a world class political manipulator” (who) did not want to free the slaves,” claims Thomas Naylor, the intellectual guru of Vermont secessionists, in Secession (Feral House, 2008).

Like the rest of Naylor’s book that’s half correct and half absurd. Lincoln was a superb political manipulator who used that talent to end slavery, which he abhorred.

In America, no secessionist movement since the one Lincoln defeated did or does deserve to be taken seriously, though few have been as ridiculous as the one in Killington a few years ago.

The current “Second Vermont Republic” campaign is slightly less silly than that one, but has the same chance of success: Zero. That’s because there is zero evidence that more than a percent or two of Vermonters have the least bit of interest in leaving the United States. In fact, there is every reason to conclude that most of them still agree that the U.S., for all its faults, remains what today’s birthday boy called  “the last best hope of earth.”

Those faults are real enough, though, and even Naylor, in his short if barely readable book, gets some of them right. America has become something of an empire, dominated by huge, centralized private and public institutions, besotted by a rampant consumerism that can not entirely blot out what Naylor correctly calls the “anomie” plaguing many affluent Americans.

Those faults (and others) make secession an interesting topic of discussion, as long as it isn’t taken both literally and seriously. That’s the charm of the other secessionist book on the shelves, a reissue of Out by Frank Bryan and Bill Mares, illustrated by Jeff Danziger (The New England Press, 1987).

This is an amused, amusing, and blatantly silly prediction of Vermont seceding from the union in 1991. It isn’t that the authors don’t (sort of) endorse the idea. They (sort of) do. But mostly they’re clowning around and poking fun at American pomposity.

To the extent that they have a political point of view, it is an old-fashioned conservatism. Not so Naylor and most of the others who are serious about secession. They come to the discussion from the left. Naylor condemns capitalism and what he calls the “megalomania, globalization, and imperialism” rampant in the country. The secessionist support of organic farming, the “localvore” movement, alternative energy sources and the like also foster the impression that secessionism is politically left of center.

In fact, the Vermont secession movement is reactionary.

Let’s start with its racist tinge. Naylor and several of his supporters have long been associated with the neo-Confederate League of the South, described as a “white nationalist group” by highly-regarded journalist Thomas Edsall and a “Racist hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.” Naylor’s refusal to acknowledge that slavery was even a partial cause of the Civil War is not merely a delusion; it is a delusion that can be based only on a refusal to take slavery seriously as a moral issue.

Altogether, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that some supporters of Vermont secession want to leave the rest of the country to protect as much as possible the state’s nearly 100 percent whiteness.

Then consider some of the other allies of the Vermont secessionists, such as the Alaska Independence Party, the one to which Sarah Palin’s husband once belonged. It wants secession so its people can dig mines, cut down trees, and pump oil on every square inch of Alaska with no restrictions, regulations or prohibitions against ruining Wilderness areas, which would no longer be designated as such.

That’s probably not what those Vermont organic farmers who think it’s cute to support the secession movement have in mind. In this country, enlightened policy has usually depended on the national community working its will, often over the objections of the local.

That’s what James Madison knew. All those ancient republics had failed, he said, because they were too small, and eventually an intense faction achieved dominance, with no other faction strong enough to prevent tyranny. America, he thought, could survive as a free society precisely because it was big, with so many factions sometimes competing with each other, sometimes cooperating.

Lincoln knew that, too, and also knew that secession itself can lead only to anarchy or despotism, or both. If the South could secede from the Union, he noted,  then any state could secede from the South. If Vermont can secede, why can’t, say, Essex County? Or Chittenden County? Or why couldn’t the rest of Vermont kick out Chittenden County (an idea to which Bryan and Mares devote a funny chapter in their book)?

After enough separations, some realms would be so small, and so dominated by one faction, that freedom would be endangered. The liberty, if not the life, of an environmental activist in Catron County, New Mexico, or of  a conservative Republican in Brattleboro, might be insecure were that county and that city not part of their states and of the country, with greater powers and more diverse cultures.

When Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New York wanted to punish a city museum because one of its paintings offended him, it was the federal court that stopped him. America is free to the extent that it is cosmopolitan and national, not parochial and local.

Or as Lincoln put it, “a majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations…is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible. The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.”

On its own, even Vermont would risk despotism from whichever faction became dominant. Maybe all those Vermonters who volunteered for the Civil War that Naylor and his friends so disparage had that figured out.

Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Secession. Thomas Naylor

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 12th, 2009 at 12:07 am and is filed under Politics & Elections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.