Thoughts on the Current Push for Secession
Donald Trump’s win in the Iowa caucus spurred a new round of commentary that Trump’s persistent and, to his critics, toxic presence in American politics portends a violence that could lead America into its next civil war. Whether Trump is a cause or a symptom of our political problems seems to matter little to those who denounce him, but it does matter if one wants a clear sense of what our future might look like and a proper understanding of our present. What’s especially interesting is that Americans for every 150 years believed that the question of state secession had been definitively answered, but it now reappears with a newfound vigor — and that often among those who would be the biggest critics of the South’s secession arguments. I make no claim to knowing what the future holds, but past experiments in secession certainly ought to give us pause, even though I am not opposed to it in principle.
At the onset of America’s most serious secession crisis the newly elected President Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural speech, addressed secessionists by suggesting they were operating with the wrong metaphor. The argument for secession, he claimed, had no Constitutional sanction but, more damningly, predicated itself on mechanistic and contractual notions of nationhood that were, he averred, contrary to the Union’s covenantal nature. The defining issue, he argued, wasn’t slavery so much as an understanding of what a political community is and is for. Once that community was brought together, no man had it in his power to put it asunder.
Like any marriage that hits its rocky stretches, the relationship between the states and Americans generally had to be maintained at its low points by “the mystic cords of memory” and by residual affections that could be rekindled once the tough times passed. Divisions may seem inconsequential down the road if we “just stick with it.” Lincoln further envisioned the Union as a mode of civic friendship held intact not only by mutual solicitude but also by a shared religious culture.
A shared religion may hold otherwise disparate parts of a polity together (indeed, the word “religion” means “to bind together”). Lincoln’s call in his Second Inaugural for charity, forgiveness, and a just and lasting peace was grounded in his conviction that both parties “read the same Bible and pray[ed] to the same God.” God’s justice, and belief therein, Lincoln asserted, made human efforts at justice possible. Without God’s justice, he said—using ideas that echoed Augustine’s claim that Rome never experienced true justice and thus was no better than a band of robbers—politics becomes nothing more than the ugly competition among those dominated by their lust to dominate and the lording of their power over the ruled.
If the sole principle of rule is domination, the polity will quickly fracture once the power of the rulers weakens (as seems inevitable). That fracturing will manifest itself in different ways, one of which is secessionist. But not only the weakened power of rulers, note that current talk of secessionism results from two primary factors of contemporary American political life: the rise of secularism and the decline of civil society. The decline of religious belief in America gives rise to alternative beliefs, the most prominent of which has been the belief in progress as underwritten by science and technology. America is divided among three groups: traditional religious believers, those who believe in the narrative of progress, and those who are skeptical of that narrative but have no firm religious convictions of ecclesial affiliation, with the first and third groups sometimes overlapping. The believers in progress still hold the cultural center, are desperate to maintain their power, and have declared war on the other two groups, notably by challenging their rights, attacking their institutions, and impugning their motives and reputations. As James Davison Hunter noted 30 years ago, the culture wars are fundamentally about the nature of moral authority and whether it has a transcendent or immanent source; but neither should we discount the persistent temptation to doubt authority altogether. In any case, these positions are largely incommensurate, and thus can work together only fitfully.
On the practical side, the cronyism of centralized government and powerful multinational corporations and tech companies has eviscerated both civil society and associative life, and it has left anxious individuals face-to-face with an overwhelming power structure they neither understand nor have any control over, this despite the rather strange protestations that we would have a fully functioning democracy were it not for certain electoral outcomes. And that creates a serious crisis of legitimacy, the evidence for which is found in ever-declining levels of trust in … well … anything.
Secession won’t solve the crisis of legitimacy or restore lost trust any more than parents getting a divorce “in the interests of the children” will thereby restore that child’s trust. In any case, the separation is not likely to be amicable. Any secession would require massive population shifts as people seek polities most conducive to their particular views. And here the history of American Protestantism provides a useful lesson: once the principle of separation is established, it will not easily be contained. More seriously, secession could result in forced repatriation. If some writers such as David French think that American belligerents operate with a “substantially true narrative of grievance and atrocity[!]” sufficient to ensure “a politics of mutual destruction,” imagine what forcing people out of their homes will accomplish.
The more chilling possibility is the devolution of our disagreements into a Spanish-style civil war that could drag many people against their will into our already nascent violence. I’m not the only American who senses trouble. Americans in 2020 purchased 40 million firearms, a 65% increase over the previous year. Roughly nine million of those purchases were by first-time gun owners. Sales in 2021 were nearly as brisk, but all gun owners in the past two years have faced ammunition shortages. America’s last Civil War was the bloodiest in its history; our next one, if it comes, will likely eclipse it and won’t resolve as neatly.
Secession, like divorce, sounds like a good idea until you actually proceed with it. Granted, there are situations where divorce is absolutely necessary, but it’s never not messy and it rarely leaves everyone better off than before. My patriotism doesn’t attach itself primarily to the nation, but neither am I insensitive to its advantages or ungrateful for its benefits. As a conservative, I’ll always prefer the devil I know to the one I don’t.
It thus becomes more frustrating when I see the best of American life sacrificed by the ideologues who will constantly slaughter the “not bad” on the altar of “the perfect” until, as Madison observed, liberty be lost in the pursuit. There are obvious but largely impractical because extremely difficult to implement solutions: a renewed appreciation for tolerance, a revivification of civil society, the devolution of centralized government, the cultivation of virtue, commitment to democratic practices and outcomes, respect for other persons in their multidimensionality, and a vigorous economic and political localism. It all sounds swell. But how? How, especially, when the people running things view all the above as contrary both to their interests and to the stringent demands of their progressive ideology?
I’m arguing here for the liberalism of the 16th and 17th centuries that we discredit at our own peril. It is worth keeping in mind that liberalism is primarily a set of practical arrangements that were formed in the fires of conflict created by the friction of disagreement among ideological and religious absolutists, one quality of which is the impossibility of imagining they might be wrong. Only after having passed through the violence and chaos did liberalism’s moral appeal become apparent. Are we too obtuse to relearn those lessons any other way, or can we reclaim a heritage of peaceful coexistence that treats politics as a necessary but lesser way of life while mitigating its violence? Can we reclaim politics as a relative good and purge it of its absolutes?
Hard lessons can’t spare the rod. The crusaders on both the left and the right are so damned sure of themselves, and so desperate for the penny’s worth of meaning and purpose that politics provides them, that they’ll burn the whole system down before accepting compromise. They can’t be reasoned with. And although they can’t be reasoned with, they can be resisted, but only by refusing to play the game on their terms. The reclamation of the best of American virtues happens by living a life that is attractive because it’s not angry, resentful, isolating, alienating, controlling, or ostracizing. It actively seeks and instantiates what’s good in the human condition instead of obsessing about what’s wrong in our politics. Mainly, it is a way of living where people are content to mind their own business, stick to their tasks, and not force another person to do something that person doesn’t want to do. Remember: the fundamental principle of good and just law is restraint and not compulsion.
The liberal accommodation in its most well-known form largely emerged from the English Civil War. In his analysis of thinkers’ responses to the aftermath of the English Civil War, Eric Voegelin highlighted the fact that the Puritans identified the public will with their private will, thus establishing on a mass scale the egomaniacal deformations of the movement’s leaders. He also demonstrated how they shut down discussion and thereby insulated themselves from critique — a constant temptation of those in power. A more liberal view calls foul on such efforts and refuses to substitute its own ideology for the deformed one. It operates by argumentation and not assertion.
But neither is it confident in its success. Republican government, Hamilton noted, always vibrates between anarchy and tyranny, dissolution or force and violence. If the American march toward civil war continues, we may get the worst of both. The hope resides in those who see the progress myth as just another lie told by those who think they have a “divine right” to rule over their inferiors. For all their talk about “attacks on our democracy,” it is the opinion-makers and those in control of our institutions who flaunt its principles most aggressively. There are plenty of signs people have had enough of the ongoing machinations and deceptions of the ruling class; whether that class will give up its rule without a fight remains to be seen, but they’re sadly mistaken if they think they can win such a fight.
Discussion Questions:
Is secession a reasonable alternative to civil war?
Why would to be bad for our country to start dividing into separate states, and what might the benefits be?
What principles of unity might sustain us in this time of division? What mystic chords of memory?
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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