Posted on 11/13/2012 11:37:37 AM PST by SeekAndFind
There are three common antisecession arguments, all of them bunk:
1. the no constitutional provision argument;
2. the Articles of Confederation perpetual union argument;
3. the mystical bonds, translegal union of lollipops and chocolate argument.
1 forgets that state powers are left undefined. It’s as if they never read the tenth amendment. Unless the people knew that’s what they agreed to, as by its being written down, secession would be a retained right of the states. Actually, not even then, because popular sovereignty us inalienable.
Which brings us to 2. Unlike the Constitution, its forerunner had language that sounds maybe antisecessionist. “Perpetual” usually means forever. I doubt the Founders were stupid enough to think it would last forever. In fact it lasted less than a decade, superceded illegally—according to its amendment process—by the Constitution, which makes no use of the word “perpetual.” Let’s say it did, though. Would that make secession impossible? No, for the same reason we were able to replace the Articles despite its putative perpetual status. That is, because the people are sovereign, supposedly, and sovereignty is inalienable.
3 is toughest to combat, mostly because it is not a real argument. It was one of Lincoln’s favorites, and according to it our nation was founded by the Declaration of Independence, and thereafter we are one and indivisible until the crack of doom. It fails for various obvious reasons, one of which is, hey, what if we hadn’t lost the War of 1812 and Canada had been incorporated into the union? Then you’d be saying Canadian territory is part of the mystical union, and without it the US would be like a man without a liver, or something. Or maybe there really is a mystically unbreakable nation, and it is England. After all, it had been around a lot longer than the hiccup between 1776 and 1860, from time immemorial.
Do perpetual unionists ever wonder why no one was prosecuted for the crime of secession? The Yanks were vindictive enough, and there were plans. Wouldn’t they have wanted the legal question settled for history, in a more official manner, I mean, than various combinations of the above three arguments outside a courtroom. FDR got his concentration camps greenlit by SCOTUS. Why didn’t Republicans get their rubber stamp in 1865 or after? Mist likely answer is they were not confident of outarguing Jeff Davis et al when rifles and grapeshot couldn’t decide it.
How about gold and silver?
Secession is not conducive to imperialism, no. But I’d ask what’s so important about international prestige and giant armies? What gad it gotten us, except ever more and more enemies and more burdens?
Hm, what an interesting -- in the grotesque sense -- set of premises here.
1 - The assumption that the state can unilaterally strip citizenship; this means that all rights and privileges attendant to citizenship are dependent upon the government.
2 - The assumption that political speech may be punished under laws which congress is prohibited from enacting.
3 - If not #2, then the assumption that a single person, the president, has that arbitrary power.
I hear ya. If Boehner is still in there, the chances for anything productive are diminished.
Kinda makes you want to sign up every lib you can think of don’t it?
(from a public pc and ip address)
And that is why a large percentage of your weapons should be hidden away, prior to confiscation. So you can tell them they were lost in a boating accident. Hidden areas in the home, or the extreme route of packing them in grease in tubes and burying them underground. They can be retrieved as needed.
Did you read the book: “Civil War 2”?
We can be what we are because we do carry some weight in the world. The American model or the American way of life carries a lot of conviction because of our position in the world.
Divide the country and half (or so) will immediately follow the European model. The rest will more gradually make its way in that direction, though some parts may end up under the sway of Asian or Latin American models.
Sure, it sounds nice to say "to hell with power or wealth, let's go for principle, even a much smaller territory," but split up the country and we'll start to look like a "failed state" and those principles won't even prevail in the smaller successor state that you might want.
None of this was specifically laid out in the Constitution though, so it's always going to be somebody's opinion, and that opinion could always be wrong (though people were ready to kill each other based on those opinions).
Even in The Federalist, the brilliant propaganda papers for ratification of the Constitution (largely written by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison), the United States are constantly referred to as “the Confederacy” and “a confederate republic,” as opposed to a single “consolidated” or monolithic state. Members of a “confederacy” are by definition free to withdraw from it.
Maybe our sense of the word "confederacy" has been affected by that 1860s Confederacy. It looks like they used the expression "confederate republic" to mean what we would call a "federal republic." We'd have to go back to look at the usage of the day.
Hamilton and Madison didn't believe the country was a unitary or "consolidated" republic, but they also didn't believe that it was a loose league or alliance of independent states. So whether the states were free to withdraw from the union wasn't absolutely clear.
Hamilton and Madison hoped secession would never happen, but they never denied that it was a right and a practical possibility. They envisioned the people taking arms against the federal government if it exceeded its delegated powers or invaded their rights, and they admitted that this would be justified. Secession, including the resort to arms, was the final remedy against tyranny. (This is the real point of the Second Amendment.)
That is the "right of rebellion" against tyranny. It might have been practiced by the states or by individuals or communities. That right didn't mean that states could withdraw from a constitutional government any time they wanted to for any reason they wanted to.
The Constitution itself is silent on the subject, but since secession was an established right, it didn’t have to be reaffirmed. More telling still, even the bitterest opponents of the Constitution never accused it of denying the right of secession.
Three states ratified the Constitution with the provision that they could later secede if they chose; the other ten states accepted this condition as valid.
In so far as the Anti-Federalist thought the Constitution could become tyrannical, maybe they did think that it would remove some right of secession, or maybe secession wasn't something they were worried about. Those three states may have been asserting their right to revolution against a federal government turned tyrannical or their right to reassume their sovereignty if the union failed. I really can't say. I'd have to do more research on this.
The lesson of all the history is that unilateral secession doesn't work. It turns away from established channels and often leads to war. Even if you want to dissolve your ties with the country, it's best to work within the established framework (so long as it remains constitutional and democratic or republican) and not act as though one has the right to cut all ties just because one feels like it.
I submit that hegemony is the rarest of states. The Pax Romana or Pax Americana—which aren’t really paxes, since they are constantly at war to maintain their power—are exceptional. As are binary systems like the Cold War. Much commoner is the scramble for power represented by Europe from the Middle Ages to WWII, or simple anarchy.
“In the pure sense, it’s a rather flimsy charge to make”
If you were to charge the US with neocolonialism aside from the colonies which we officially possess—that us, for instance for building factories in other countries—which people often do, I’d balk. Because that’s lassoing a loaded term for new uses, which is a rhetorical dirty trick. But imperialism? Need I name that argument. First of all land empires are also empires, and you might have noticed we crawled westward after independence. Secondly annexing Hawaii, the Spanish-American War, securing the Panama Canal, and too many foreign adventures to mention were purely imperialistic in the old sense.
We only get to your World Police patrolling parameters by WWI, if then. The whole making the world safe for democracy was BS, of course. But that is when what has been called the Wilsonian vision, which you seem here to espouse, took form. I hardly need remind you it didn’t work, and led directly to another war and decades of warlike peace. As for the keeping people from plotting against us in their countries, that sounds more like regular old defense. Only two things: the more imperialistic we are the more we are plotted against, and we don’t need troops stationed around the world permanently to repel attacks on the homeland.
“when it isn’t the world’s imperial power...someone else will be.”
And what? They’ll invade us? Or they’ll hedge us in, dictate policy, and otherwise deprive us of whatever it is we’re supposed to gave gained from the current arrangement. Well, you know what else there’s “no going back” on? Globalism. That is, the international market order. Jesus wouldn’t sit down to break bread with the Devil, but he could trade with him. That’s the beauty if it. And thus new hegemony, wherever it is, won’t be able to stamp it out, any more than the Soviet Union did. Nor will it be any more self-sufficient than was Nazi Germany.
There’s that, then there’s the corruption if national defense. First it was just that, being able to retain the right of self-determination. And you don’t need an empire to do that. There’s the more porous concept of national security, which I guess is more about how we feel. Then there’s one of the most beloved concepts of the modern superstate: national interest. Suddenly anything that seems not to be ideal for any and all of our citizens’ purposes deemed worthy are defensible in the same manner in which we have a right to defend ourselves from enslavement. Which is perfect when you can’t explain how Iraq or Vietnam have anything to do with defense.
We do not need to project power abroad, much less get involved in wars, big or little, which only concern us through a game of telephone, i.e. because thus guy touched that guy who touched another guy who someday may rub up against me. You only think we need to because you’ve been forcefed myths about the Hun, the Nazis, the Naps, the Commies, etc. bent like supervillians on conquering the world. It may have been true of the commies, at least ideologically. But that could have been taken care of here, not everywhere on the globe.
Let me clue you in on a little known secret: our last war of true self-defense was in 1812, and that’s only ignoring our expansionist territorial ambitions.
“and those principles won’t even prevail in the smaller successor state”
But they don’t prevail now, so what do we lose? World prestige? Military power? Oh, no!/s
Amen!
“None of this was specifically laid out in the Constitution though, so it’s always going to be somebody’s opinion, and that opinion could always be wrong”
Secessionists might be wrong, but for antisecessionists to be right, the way the Constitution works, it has to be specifically laid out. So we know they’re wrong, and if they want to push the issue we can always go back to the utter lack of legal justification for the veritable coup that toppled the Articles if Confederation.
They are going to need to re-instate the draft to deal with that many "enemies".
Thanks for the response.
U. S. premier global nation, bad idea...
China premier global nation, not so bad.
Not buying in. Thanks.
China is a parasitic economy living on borrowed time. It’s parasitic in the sense that its economy is almost entirely based on foreign trade. When the rest of the world is no longer able (or willing, when countries start setting up protectionist regimes and bolstering their own industries) to buy China’s goods, China will fold like a cheap suitcase, and will return to its normal state of internal disorder and poverty. If China is foolish enough to try the superpower game, it will burn itself out in short order. As for your other worries, well, China’s military prowess is trumped up by people (mostly of the neocon persuasion) who are nostalgic for the old Cold War and would love for us to have a new Cold War with a real enemy (Islamic fundamentalists don’t quite cut it for them).
Someone stated, “Obama’s not going to go down in history as the man who let the country fall apart.”
No, he will not be accused of letting if FALL apart, he will be accused of causing it to implode. The results will be the same but the blame will be different.
“The lesson of all the history is that unilateral secession doesn’t work”
Yeah, there never was any such thing as the US. We’re still part if the British empire, working within their established channels, and the last 200-plus years was a fever dream.
By the way, I’ve often wondered whether the revolution was justified, or if unjustified nevertheless worth it, especially considering the Constitution failed (or we failed it, whatever). I do find it funny, though, that people talk like Tories without realizing it, and would die to defend a country the very existence of which it theoretically argues away.
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