Further proof emerged this month (as if we needed any) that the GOP/Conservative movement has passed a threshold of insanity and destructiveness not witnessed since Bleeding Kansas.
Follow me after the fold.
It seems that on April 1 (no fooling), in the closing days of the 2009 legislative session, the Georgia Senate quietly voted on a bill of secession from the union. Further, the bill declared the dissolution of the United States due to the fact the Federal Government (read Obama, here) had breached the terms of the constitutional compact by overspending (among other things).
The bill is similar to a bill passed in both houses of the Oklahoma legislature, making them the first state to secede since Virginia did so on April 17, 1861. Likewise, similar legislation has been introduced in Texas and both the governor of Texas and the inveterate Tom Delay are calling for Texas to secede from the union.
There are several interesting things about these developments, among them the fact that these very states (Oklahoma, Texas and Georgia) recently accepted funds from the very federal government they wish to disband; secondly, that the people pushing secession (see Session.net and The American Secession Project, not to mention Hannity and Rush) seem to have no conception of just how disruptive and destructive it would be, despite abundant historical evidence.
Memory Lane I was born in 1953, just about twenty years after the last veterans of the battle of Gettysburg died. Despite the fact that I lived in the north, and came from a family of German immigrants who had arrived in the 1870's, the Civil War seemed very close and clear to me. As an adolescent, visiting the South with my parents, I could clearly see the results of that conflict still evident in 1965, one hundred years after the end of the war.
Those results included a racial and social conscience still frozen in the desperate aftermath of utter defeat. The State economies seemed as if, without federal dollars --- in the form of defense plants and military bases -- they would have been the equivalent of third world countries. I observed whole communities of people living, still, in the 19th century. It was a startling contrast to the industry, openness and energy of my Ohio homeland.
On returning to the South in 1987, things had changed much for the better; but the old thinking and old ways still haunted, and threatened to break free at any moment to quash improvements in infrastructure, social equality and economic progress. At that time, I met people who had been schooled at the knee of grandparents who had fought at Vicksburg, Antietam and Shiloh. People who had inhaled the resentment, anger and fear nurtured for a dozen generations after total defeat.
I left the south after only a few years, and returned in 2005, to the city too busy to hate -- Atlanta. Here I found a bastion of industry, equality and progress. But my travels into the mountains revealed pockets of those still pushing the old agendas: secession, segregation, agrarian idealism that is resentful of all things modern.
Not The Same Movement? I'm not sure the new secession movement is closely related to that of the Civil War era, except to say that the modern conservative movement was largely built by those who were on the losing end of the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950's and 1960's. And those who fought against integration and equality largely were defending a "way of life" defined in the antebellum South and built on the pillars of brutality, envy and elitism of the worst kind.
The same principles seem to be at play in this modern secession movement: resentment at those who are different, a zero-sum thinking that believes every effort to help anyone who is sick, poor or in need necessarily detracts from the gains made by others; and a naive belief that one can eliminate taxes without also eliminating welfare to corporations, cities, states and middle class mortgage holders.
Fear Abides It's my observation that the secessionists, like their forebears of the 19th century, are so utterly shocked at the election of a Liberal Black Man that they don't know what to do except pack up their toys and run. IOW, it is fear that is driving both secession and the tax protest; fear of a society that is relentlessly changing, and a deadly resolve to use whatever means available -- including (maybe especially) violence, to convince themselves and others that they are still in control.
I've come to believe over the past generation that it is not government policy the conservative movement disagrees with, it is the existence of government itself. There seems to have grown a childish, magical thinking that government can be driven bankrupt and killed (in a bathtub). The separation from reality is perhaps most evident in the proposition -- advanced by many on the right -- that it would be ok for the entire economic system to collapse, because that is what a true capitalist would do; ignoring, of course, how piteously vulnerable and dead our country would become as a result.
So it is with secession. No one believes that seceded states could mount a military offensive against the federal government, as the Old Confederacy did. Yet, it is not too far-fetched to say that sufficient civil, economic and legal unrest could be sewn that it would inevitably result in just those sorts of confrontations on a smaller and less organized scale. And the result would be much the same: the Union, to reassert its viability, would have to impose martial law on those involved in the uprising.
There are many ways this could play out, and I vacillate between believing it will be a Keystone Cops Saturday and a Jeb Stuart charge off a social and economic cliff.
Whichever way it goes, I really hope I don't have to flee to the north. I like living in Atlanta. But I know where my loyalties lay.