Freeeedom!

It comes as a surprise to me that many liberals oppose self-determination, especially since home rule is the central theory on which this country was founded. Remember the Declaration of Independence?:

That to secure these [inalienable] rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, – That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness….

It should be obvious that vast swaths of the country, emanating from the South and creeping westward and northward, do not now nor did they ever want to adhere to laws imposed by representatives of the majority of U.S. citizens. Moreover, those Southerners and others believe it is their inalienable right to ignore – or nullify – majority rule. In 1830, Vice President John C. Calhoun of South Carolina wrote to a friend,

The truth can no longer be disguised, that the peculiar domestick institution of the Southern States [i.e., slavery], and the consequent direction, which that and her soil and climate have given to her industry, have placed them in regard to taxation and appropriations in opposite relation to the majority of the Union; against the danger of which, if there be no protective power in the reserved rights of the States, they must in the end be forced to rebel, or submit to have their permanent interests sacraficed, their domestick institutions subverted by Colonization and other schemes, and themselves & children reduced to wretchedness.

Two years later, South Carolina’s legislature formalized Calhoun's theory in an Ordinance of Nullification:

We..., the people of the State of South Carolina, in convention assembled, do declare and ordain ... that the several acts and parts of acts of the Congress of the United States, purporting to be laws for the imposing of duties and imposts on the importation of foreign commodities..., are unauthorized by the constitution of the United States, and violate the true meaning and intent thereof and are null, void, and no law, nor binding upon this State, its officers or citizens....

This is the same theory under which the Southern states seceded in 1860 and 1861, and under which they imposed Jim Crow laws in violation of the post-Civil War Constitutional Amendments. Nearly two hundred years later, many states have passed laws that nullify federal laws and Supreme Court decisions: they violate Roe v. Wade, Planned Parenthood v. Pennsylvania and the Voting Rights Act. States and communities have passed laws and put into common practice violations of the First Amendment, laws and court decisions imposing the separation of church and state. In today's New York Times, the editors point out that four states – Texas, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Louisiana – are violating an order from the Defense Department – based on a Supreme Court decision – to provide equal protection to same-sex couples in the military. As the editors note, “The [national] guard units say they are merely adhering to state constitutions that ban same-sex marriages and do not recognize same-sex marriages lawfully performed in other states.... Under the Constitution’s supremacy clause, federal law takes precedence.” The editors are absolutely right about U.S. law, but the powers that be in those states don't see it as the New York Times does. Those Southern National Guard units stand today with the South Carolina nullifiers of old.

At least one writer in yesterday's comments thread suggested a sort of Rodney King solution – we should all just get along. That is a lovely thought, similar to one expressed by Barack Obama in his 2004 Democratic convention speech. Now President Barack Obama has found out the hard way that his lovely image of “one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America” is illusory. Legislators in and from red states have done all they can to nullify laws passed during his administration, most notably of course the Affordable Care Act. They have done this, as Paul Krugman notes today, out of “sheer spite – the desire to sabotage anything with President Obama’s name on it,” and to the disadvantage of their neediest citizens. Southerners do not believe Barack Obama is the legitimate President of the United States; as Garry Wills writes, they say they “object to Obama because he is a 'foreign-born Muslim'” but “they really mean 'a black man.'” Public Policy Polling found that

49% of GOP voters nationally say they think that ACORN stole the [2012] election for President Obama. We found that 52% of Republicans thought that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama, so this is a modest decline, but perhaps smaller than might have been expected given that ACORN doesn't exist anymore.

Almost 200 years after the South Carolina legislature passed the Nullification Act, 150 years after Southern states seceded from the Union and Northern states forced them to return – Southerners and some Westerners continue to hold the views that inspired these early acts of nullification. Today's Southerners are not going to try to “get along” with “Northern aggressors.” Laws imposed by the representatives of the majority of Americans did not adhere to Southern views then or now. Southern conservatives think the federal government is illegitimate – a fraud perpetrated by liberal election cheats.

I don't agree with any of those Southern conservative views. I believe in a woman's right to choose, in everyone's right to vote, in everyone's right to equal protection, in the separation of church and state, and in the legitimacy of the elections of Barack Obama. But I also believe in the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence: that governments derive their power from the “consent of the governed.” It is clear that Southerners do not consent to certain Constitutional provisions and laws deriving from them. Perhaps the majority of Southerners do not “consent” to the U.S. government. They live in a country that has for two centuries deprived them of self-determination.

That is why I propose secession – not to punish Southerners but to free them to make their own constitutions and their own laws. For most of the history of our country, the North has aggrieved the South. Northerners have forced Southerners to live in a country whose values they eschew. We should give them a way out. It has happened before, and it has happened on a massive scale during my lifetime. The break-up of the Soviet Union came in the form of a “Velvet Revolution,” one in which nary a shot was fired, but the “inalienable right” to self-governance was restored to millions of Europeans and Asians. Is it likely to happen here? No. But until it does, this country will be crippled by a fundamental and unbreachable divide. You can suppress people, but you cannot suppress their beliefs. Attempts to suppress beliefs and values serve only to solidify those beliefs and to give them exaggerated importance. After 200 years, let us not insist upon prolonging this noble experiment. It failed when we forgot why we started it in the first place.