American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup

160 Pages·2020·3.792 MB·English

by  F. H. Buckley

Praise for The Republican Workers Party
The spirit of Buckley’s endeavor represents what is finest in the Trump moment,
and what is best in conservatism, too.
—Daniel McCarthy, American Conservative
An early and confident Trump supporter, Buckley makes a persuasive argument
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The best explanation of Trumpism that I’ve seen.
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Buckley is by turns scathing, funny, and sympathetic, but always well-informed.
He rolls the stone away from the American heart.
—Allen Guelzo
An important and provocative book.
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Frank Buckley is one of the most astute observers of the modern American
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Bracing stuff … his writing is lucid and often witty.
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Political corruption, in the form of crony capitalism, is a silent killer of our
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This is Buckley at his colorful, muckraking best—an intelligent, powerful, but
depressing argument laced with humor.
—Gordon S. Wood, Pulitzer Prize winner
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Frank Buckley marshals tremendous data and insight in a compelling study.
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Best book of the year.
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THE LOOMING THREAT OF A NATIONAL BREAKUP
American Secession
F. H. BUCKLEY
© 2020 by F.H. Buckley
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior written permission of Encounter Books, 900 Broadway, Suite 601, New York, New York,
10003.
First American edition published in 2020 by Encounter Books, an activity of Encounter for Culture and
Education, Inc., a nonprofit, tax exempt corporation.
Encounter Books website address: www.encounterbooks.com
Manufactured in the United States and printed on acid-free paper. The paper used in this publication meets
the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992
(R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).
FIRST AMERICAN EDITION
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Buckley, F. H. (Francis H.), 1948– author.
Title: American secession : the looming threat of a national breakup / by F. H. Buckley.
Description: New York : Encounter Books, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019018857 (print) | LCCN 2019981176 (ebook) | ISBN 9781641770804 (hardcover) |
ISBN 9781641770811 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Secession—United States. | Polarization (Social sciences)—United States. | States’ rights
(American politics) | United States—Politics and government—21st century. | United States—Politics and
government—Philosophy.
Classification: LCC JK311 .B83 2020 (print) | LCC JK311 (ebook) | DDC 320.973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019018857
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019981176
For Esther, Sarah, Nick and Benjamin Herbert
CONTENTS
Preface
PART I: A CURE FOR A DIVIDED PEOPLE?
1 One Nation, Divisible
2 When Secession Is Politically Correct
3 Secession: A How-To Guide
PART II: A CURE FOR BIGNESS?
4 Bigness and Badness
5 Bigness and Happiness
6 Bigness and Corruption
7 Bigness and the Military
8 Bigness and Freedom
9 Bigness and Wealth
PART III: LESSER CURES
10 Secession Lite
11 Home Rule
12 Everything That Rises Must Converge
Appendix
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
PREFACE
This is a book about breakups, about how countries split apart and how the
United States is ripe for secession. Across the world, established states have
divided in two or are staring down secession movements. Great Britain became a
wee bit less great with Irish independence, and now the Scots seem to be
rethinking the 1707 Act of Union. Czechoslovakia is no more and the former
Soviet Union is just that: former. Go down the list and there are secession groups
in nearly every country. And are we to think that, almost alone in the world,
we’re immune from this?
Countries threaten to split apart when their people seem hopelessly divided.
I’ve seen it already. Before moving to the United States, I lived in a country just
as divided, without the kind of fellow feeling required to hold people together.
Canada was an admirably liberal country, and yet it came within a hair’s breadth
of secession. America is headed the same direction today, and without the
reserve and innate conservatism that has permitted Canadians to shrug off
differences.
We’re less united today than we’ve been at any time since the Civil War,
divided by politics, religion and culture. In all the ways that matter, save for the
naked force of the law, we are already divided into two nations just as much as
in 1861. The contempt for opponents, the Twitter mobs, online shaming and no-
platforming, the growing tolerance of violence—it all suggests we’d be happier
in separate countries.
That’s enough to make secession seem attractive. But there’s a second reason
why secession beckons. We’re overlarge, one of the biggest and most populous
countries in the world. Smaller countries, as I’ll show, are happier and less
corrupt. They’re less inclined to throw their weight around militarily, and they’re
freer. If there are advantages to bigness, the costs exceed the benefits. Bigness is
badness.
It might therefore seem odd that we’ve stayed together so long. If divorces
are made in Heaven, as Oscar Wilde remarked, how did we luck out? The
answer, of course, is the Civil War. The example of Secession 1.0 in 1861, with
its 750,000 wartime deaths, has made Secession 2.0 seem too painful to
consider. But this book will explode the comforting belief that it couldn’t happen
again. The barriers to a breakup are far lower than most people would think, and
if the voters in a state were determined to leave the Union they could probably
do so.
To begin with, we’re far more likely to let it happen today than we were in
1861. John Kerry had a point when he said that Putin, by invading Crimea, was
behaving as if it were the nineteenth century. While the secretary of state was
mocked for what seemed like naiveté, public attitudes have in fact changed since
1861. We are now less willing to take up arms in order to maintain the Union
and readier to accept a breakup instead.
Second, a cordial divorce might be worked out through the amending
machinery of a convention held under Article V of the Constitution, if all
sections of America were good and tired of each other. Secession cannot be
unconstitutional when there’s a constitutional way of making it happen, through
a constitutional convention.
Finally, the Supreme Court might revisit its denial of a right of secession.
The originalists on the Court would recognize that the Framers had thought that
states had the right to secede, while the more politically minded members of the
Court might hesitate before ruling secession illegal and permitting the president
to make war against a state. Instead, the Court could be expected to look
northward, to the more nuanced view of secession rights taken by the Canadian
Supreme Court, which rejected both an absolute right and an absolute bar to
secession.
So it’s not difficult to imagine an American breakup. The reasons why a state
might want to secede today are more compelling than at any time in recent
history. Slavery isn’t on the ballot, and there would be no undoing of the civil
rights revolution anywhere. Indeed, the states with the most active secession
movements are progressive and want to escape from a federal government they
think too conservative. Were secession to happen today, it would be politically
correct.
So it might happen. I see us on a train, bound for a breakup. The switches
that might stop us have failed, and if we want to remain united we must learn
how to slow the engine. That will take things that have been in short supply
lately: a greater tolerance for ideological differences, thicker skin to imagined
slights, a deeper repository of confidence in and sympathy for our fellow
Americans. These are things we used to have, and can learn to have again if we
recognize that the alternative is secession.