Didn’t we already try secession? Politicians don’t like losing control

By David McElroy · November 15, 2012

On Dec. 20, 1860, people claiming to represent the broader population of South Carolina met in a convention and unanimously declared that they had withdrawn from the union of independent states which had been established less than a hundred years before. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas followed.

Early in 1861, delegates from all of those states held a convention in Montgomery, Ala., to set up a new federation for their independent states. The seven states started peacefully taking control of military facilities in their territories. U.S. President Abraham Lincoln said he wouldn’t use force to bring the states back into the old Union. But when he refused to turn over one of two remaining federal forts in southern territory — Fort Sumter in South Carolina — the Confederates opened fire and took the fort by force. The war had started.

After the fighting began, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas also withdrew from the United States and joined the Confederacy. Over the next four years, more than half a million people died in the fighting and from war-related disease.

That’s what happened the first time some people tried to secede from the United States. What insanity makes anyone think the power-hungry politicians of this country would stand for it any better in 2012 than they did in 1861?

Some people are just giddy at the petitions on the White House website over the past week requesting that the president “allow” the various states to secede from the Union. Bizarrely, some news stories are taking the petitions semi-seriously, rather than treating them as the PR stunts that they are. (ABC News is even reporting that the White House will respond to the petitions after they’re evaluated. Yeah, right.) Others are so angry about the petitions that they’ve started their own petition to demand that the president strip the secessionist petitioners of their U.S. citizenship and deport them.

As seems to be usual, I find myself appalled at both sides of this battle.

The vast majority of the secessionists don’t really want secession. They want Barack Obama to go away. They want someone in the White House who agrees with them. They want to wave their U.S. flags and be proud Americans, but they want to obey leaders who speak their language. If they thought secession were something other than a PR stunt, most of them would run from the idea.

The people signing the anti-secession petitions have a different problem entirely. They’re mad that people disagree with them and have the audacity to petition a government, so they want to punish people by throwing them out of the country. Do they understand the fundamental contradiction of what they’re saying — of wanting to strip people of citizenship for asking to be allowed to leave?

I like the idea of secession — for individuals and voluntary groups — but the idea that states are petitioning for secession has two really basic problems.

First, you don’t beg for the right to be free. Slaves didn’t go to their masters and ask permission to be free. The very fact of asking permission shows that you believe that the other person has the right to say, “No.” And if you believe someone else has the right to tell you that you can’t be free, you’re still a slave in your own mind.

Second, I don’t want my state government controlling me any more than I want a federal government controlling me. People who want state supremacy (of any kind) are misunderstanding the root problem. If the state where I lived now withdrew from the United States and otherwise maintained its current form of government, I’d be freer in some ways and less free in others. (I suspect the long-term direction would be populist, actually.) Overall, though, I would still be living at the whim of the majority of the people who happen to live in this territory. That’s no better off than today.

Some form of breakup has to happen in time, but if we just trade in an oppressive federal government in favor of an oppressive state government, we won’t have gained anything (and we might even have lost some things). We need a real framework for individual sovereignty — and some way that groups can band together in cities or enclaves to live under rules of their own choosing.

The breakup of large, oppressive states always brings chaos and opportunity. We need to prepare for the coming opportunity — whenever it arrives one day — not be wasting time with meaningless PR stunts such as these petitions.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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