Are We Witnessing a "Soft Secession"

“I actually think,” Rush Limbaugh told his many millions of listeners during the weeks between Donald Trump losing the 2020 election and his supporters’ assault on the Capitol, “that we’re trending toward secession. It can’t go on this way. There cannot be a peaceful coexistence of two completely different theories of life, theories of government, theories of how we manage our affairs.”

Twenty months later, on the day the F.B.I. seized thousands of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, The Times reported that “posts on Twitter that mentioned ‘civil war’ had soared nearly 3,000 percent in just a few hours” and “jumped again a few weeks later, after President Joe Biden branded Mr. Trump and ‘MAGA Republicans’ a threat to ‘the very foundations of our republic.’”

Days after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, then-Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene reiterated her push for legally splitting up the country: “I want a peaceful national divorce. Our country is too far gone and too far divided, and it’s no longer safe for any of us.” Polls since 2021 by universities, YouGov and others have consistently found that a third or more of Americans said they expected a civil war during the next decade or so.

A national divorce — let alone a civil war — is, for now, the stuff of fiction. But while loose talk from rabble-rousers has distracted us, the nation has sunk, almost unnoticed, into an unspectacular yet profoundly strange new arrangement. It’s not yet a divorce; it’s more like a bitter, loveless marriage in which the parties stay technically but less and less enthusiastically united because splitting up is too complicated or dreadful or expensive.

...During the past two Democratic presidencies, many red states and counties declared themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries, prohibiting their police forces from enforcing some federal gun regulations. (The term was a trollish play on Democratic sanctuary cities, which did the same for federal immigration policies.) Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas took it upon himself to override federal immigration policy, deploying the National Guard to string the banks of the Rio Grande with coils of razor wire and ordering his troops to prevent federal border agents from helping migrants who got tangled in them. More than two dozen Republican governors endorsed the show of anti-federal strength.

Now that Mr. Trump is back in office, Democratic-led states and cities are getting almost as aggressive, overriding or ignoring federal and state policies they find objectionable. Local police departments aren’t cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Many states passed laws to shield residents from prosecution if they are charged elsewhere with facilitating abortions, and several have stockpiled abortifacients in case federal law or regulations make them hard to get.

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Revisionist History: Five myths about why the South seceded

One hundred fifty years after the Civil War began, we’re still fighting it — or at least fighting over its history. I’ve polled thousands of high school history teachers and spoken about the war to audiences across the country, and there is little agreement even about why the South seceded. Was it over slavery? States’ rights? Tariffs and taxes?

As the nation begins to commemorate the anniversaries of the war’s various battles — from Fort Sumter to Appomattox — let’s first dispense with some of the more prevalent myths about why it all began.

1. The South seceded over states’ rights.

Confederate states did claim the right to secede, but no state claimed to be seceding for that right. In fact, Confederates opposed states’ rights — that is, the right of Northern states not to support slavery.

On Dec. 24, 1860, delegates at South Carolina’s secession convention adopted a “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.” It noted “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery” and protested that Northern states had failed to “fulfill their constitutional obligations” by interfering with the return of fugitive slaves to bondage. Slavery, not states’ rights, birthed the Civil War.

South Carolina was further upset that New York no longer allowed “slavery transit.” In the past, if Charleston gentry wanted to spend August in the Hamptons, they could bring their cook along. No longer — and South Carolina’s delegates were outraged. In addition, they objected that New England states let black men vote and tolerated abolitionist societies. According to South Carolina, states should not have the right to let their citizens assemble and speak freely when what they said threatened slavery.

Other seceding states echoed South Carolina. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world,” proclaimed Mississippi in its own secession declaration, passed Jan. 9, 1861. “Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of the commerce of the earth. . . . A blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”

The South’s opposition to states’ rights is not surprising. Until the Civil War, Southern presidents and lawmakers had dominated the federal government. The people in power in Washington always oppose states’ rights. Doing so preserves their own.

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Scotland Says "No" to Secession

Scotland has decisively rejected secession from Great Britain. If the current figures hold, the margin of defeat for the nationalists will be near a super-majority of 10 pts. Such a sharp rejection of the proposal should put an end to any serious threat of dis-union for the foreseeable future and cannot be seen as anything other than an electoral rebuke to the SNP.

Still, Westminster would be gravely mistaken in taking too much comfort from this victory. A significant percentage of Scots did vote to secede.  And it is probable that at least some of the No votes were reluctant ones, likely based  more on pragmatic concerns than any affection for the United Kingdom. Clearly there is a strong undercurrent of dissatisfaction north of the border.

Six Reasons Scotland Might Vote to Secede

How will it go tomorrow? Nobody really knows. Both campaigns are supremely confident, both can point to polls that show them narrowly ahead. Both have “invisible advantages”. YES probably enjoys the support of thousands of first time voters; NO thinks that it leads comfortably on early postal votes. The NO people are satisfied that they have a “quiet” vote motivated by reason rather than passion, and that with every new outrage perpetrated by YES extremists they gain yet more silent support. One YES person put it to me that the people who tend to break toward NO are the old and English-born.

Personally, I think that YES might indeed enjoy a slight edge. Due to the following factors:

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Scottish nationalists 'severely underestimate the economic risks of independence

Scottish nationalists have severely underestimated the economic risks of independence, a leading think tank has concluded as it predicted a major black hole in public finances after a Yes vote.

The triple-whammy of declining oil revenues, fleeing financial services and increasing pension costs would see Scottish Government revenues drop more than £13bn after a Yes vote, according to the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS).

The centre-right think tank predicted the Scottish Government would bring in just £50bn in 2015-16 – some £14bn lower than predicted by the Yes campaign.

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Scottish Independence would be a train wreck

There is a simple yet fatal contradiction at the heart of Alex Salmond’s case for Scottish independence. With self-government comes the need to earn economic credibility – and yet Salmond is threatening a confidence-shattering default on Scotland’s share of the national debt, is clueless about which currency he will adopt, has no idea how to retain a financial sector in Edinburgh, doesn’t have a realistic plan to deal with Scotland’s declining oil revenues, hasn’t thought through his future trading arrangements and continues to support a nonsensical, something-for-nothing approach to the public finances. 

It’s a recipe for disaster, and the very opposite of the cautious, prudent, pro-market manifesto that would be needed to make independence succeed. 

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Rand Paul staffer has disturbing record

An aide to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has a history of  inflammatory comments about race and the Civil War.

As first reported by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online publication, Paul new media staffer Jack Hunter has for years been a provocative talk radio host who called himself the “Southern Avenger.” Before that, he was a member of the League of the South, a group that advocates Southern secession.

“Sen. Paul holds his staff to a standard that includes treating every individual with equal protection and respect, without exception,” spokeswoman Moira Bagley said in a statement.

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Gordon Brown Slams Scottish Independence Bid

Gordon Brown has warned the SNP is willing to endanger Scottish jobs, mortgages and state pensions in the hope of winning next year’s independence referendum.

Launching Labour’s campaign to keep together the UK, the former Prime Minister delivered a passionate and sometimes angry critique of the Nationalists’ economic blueprint for separation.

He argued that the consequences of the SNP’s policies would be less money for basic services and pensions, while their desire to keep the pound would mean ceding control of the economy to what would be a foreign country.

Scotland would have no input, either at Westminster or Bank the England, over decisions that would have a major impact on job levels or mortgage repayments, he said.

But the former Chancellor suggested SNP ministers deliberately ignore the risks their plans pose to ordinary families because their overriding concern is the “dogma of separation”

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The Confederacy of Takers

President Obama’s opponents have unwittingly come up with a brilliant plan to avoid the “fiscal cliff.” They want to secede from the union.

If Obama were serious about being a good steward of the nation’s finances, he’d let them.

The White House, in one of those astro-turf efforts that make people feel warm about small-d democracy, launched a “We the People” program on its Web site last year, allowing Americans to petition their government for a redress of grievances. Any petition that receives 25,000 or more signatures within 30 days is promised a response (though not necessarily a favorable one) from the Obama administration.

And so a large number of patriotic Americans, mostly from states won by Mitt Romney last week, have petitioned the White House to let them secede. They should be careful about what they wish for. It would be excellent financial news for those of us left behind if Obama were to grant a number of the rebel states their wish “to withdraw from the United States and create [their] own NEW government” (the petitions emphasize “new” by capitalizing it).

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