With members of the ultra-left Middlebury Institute sitting down with members of the League of the South, who are devoted to more limited government, and the two discussing plans for leaving the United States, the topic of secession has once again become just slightly more popular dinner conversation than how much lint Aunt Carla found in her belly button last night. Both groups, despite their divergence on almost everything else political, want to be able to leave the United States peacefully.
The liberals, of course want to leave because they are tired of living in a nation that actually defends itself, its allies and its interests around the globe and is constantly pushing back against their nanny state plans for everyone. The League of the South wants to leave because it is tired of the over burdening regulation that has piled up in Washington over the years because of these same liberals they are now rubbing elbows with. They both see secession as the only way to solve this problem. They both want to leave but I say that if you truly believe in limited government, and our Constitution, you don’t want to secede.
What you need to do is simply agree to kick the liberals out or, in the case of the leftists in Vermont, let them walk away.
If people like those that are members of the Second Vermont Republic want to try yet another failed experiment in Marxism I say let them. And while they are at it they can take New York, California, Michiganistan, The Kennedy Empire (formerly known as Massachusetts), Washington, New Jersey and Oregon with them. Heck, we’ll even throw in Hawaii so they can actually have some place in liberal la-la land that people will actually want to visit for a couple days each year. Until they manage to run it into the ground and turn it into the next Cuba that is.
But there is no reason to want to leave the United States yourself IF you truly believe in the founding principles of the American Republic. You know, radical things such as all men created equal, unalienable rights, limited government and all that good stuff which are spelled out clearly in our founding documents.
Southern secessionists have many different stripes. Some are your old school Democrats still looking to re-fight the Civil War, upset they lost, wanting to get out the sheets and form lynch mobs to go after uppity blacks while some are radical isolationists and yet lots of others are people simply and truly fed up a federal government run amok. But to suggest that you need to leave the union could be possibly the dumbest thing in the world especially when, as I already stated, many liberals seem eager to leave themselves.
Why secede and start from scratch when you can just kick the liberals out?
Folks like the League of the South argue that the Constitution is beyond repair after years of tinkering by leftists. But really it’s not. Think about how easy it would be to correct all the problems heaped upon us by nebby, leftist do-gooders who have a distorted view of history, innate humane abilities, basic English and economics if we simply said to them, to quote Douglas Adams, “So long and thanks for all the fish”.
When you look at where the vast amount of socialism is being proposed comes from with regards to members of our Congress, kicking out states that are the major troublemakers and demonstrate that they no longer believe in our Constitution by their continual election of anti-American Marxists would almost immediately halt and then reverse our country’s leftward march.
But the issue of secession and the permanence of the union was settled when General Lee surrendered at Appomattox wasn’t it? Hardly.
It is often falsely believed that the Civil War settled the issue of a state’s right to simply leave Republic and that the answer to the question of secession was a resounding no. But this is not the case. As I often gleefully point out, the Civil War was fought over many issues but one that caused the biggest divide between Northern and Southern states was the issue of slavery.
Yes, I know that many of you who have been educated in the government schools have been taught that this is not the case. But like so much that has been revised about history in our education system, the truth is much different from what you might have been taught. Several southern states made it painfully clear that it was, in fact, the issue of slavery and the anti-slavery movement in America that prompted them to secede. States like Mississippi, Texas, Georgia and South Carolina all cited the north’s their anti-slavery stance ad nauseam in well preserved declarations of why they wanted out of the union. Sure, it wasn’t the only issue but when you see the word “slavery” appear over and over and over and over again in these declarations only a fool would not take notice and admit that there just might have been something or other having to do with slavery that caused the war.
No, the issues of the Civil War, while many, was not about ending once and for all a state’s “right” to leave the union. It was however, partially, about the right of the federal government to act in order to defend those which were being held in bondage and who had committed no crime other than the falsely perceived offense of being inferior based on the color of their skin. In short it was about a State’s right to secede in order to continue to deprive men and women of their unalienable rights.
And before you start trying to cite how things like segregation and racism exploded in the south after the war, I would like to remind you of something else that you might never have been taught in you government approved history classes. That lesson is that until the North and the Republican Party gave up on the philosophy of Reconstruction because they had grown weary and too weak of will to complete what they had started, blacks had thriving communities that were only threatened when the Democrats were allowed to take back the south bringing us poll taxes, Jim Crow laws, and so on that set this nation on a course of racial strife for the next century.
So the Civil War worked and served its purpose. At least until people gave up on seeing it through to the end for political expedience and just generally succumbing to the typical short attention spans Americans often exhibit in matters of importance.
But since slavery based on the color of one’s skin is no longer an issue in wanna-be Marxist utopias like Vermont and no citizen is being held against their will (at least until the liberals build their walls to keep them from fleeing their “compassion”) and could freely leave the state should they want to leave, or as I have proposed be kicked out of, the Union, there would be no reason to stop them.
I agree with the League of the South that states have the right to leave the union. It’s right in Amendment X to the Constitution where it says all powers NOT given to the federal government are reserved by the states and the people. Since forced retention of member states is NOT a power found in the Constitution anywhere, obviously the states have the power to leave.
I agree with the League of the South that the federal government has become too unwieldy due to the more the liberal states including my own Pennsylvania. But we part company after that. Because I still believe that the Constitution complete with its amendments is, stripped of all the superfluous and liberty destroying regulation piled on top of it over two-hundred some odd years, about as perfect a document for the formation of government ever created. And there is no reason to even try to reinvent the wheel.
Of course letting the deepest of blue states secede because they think they can do things better does pose certain problems. After they establish their “utopia”, or “utopias” if they can’t agree amongst themselves exactly how to do such, the same thing that always happens with Marxist states will inevitably happen again. The economies will falter to a point where not even the lobster boats out of Massachusetts will be able to operate and catch enough to feed their populace while the vineyards of California go unplanted and deprive the elite of their wine because taxes and regulation make it more bother than it is worth to grow grapes. Waves of poor and starving citizens will start to look to cross the border illegally into the remaining United States looking for a better life. And we’ll be discussing whether or not we should build walls to keep them out and prevent them from bringing their liberalism back with them to re-infect us.
And after years of watching their citizens flee, in these utopias where the rich who were taxed at obscene rates to feed the rest until there are no more “rich” the rumblings of Emperor Kennedy and his ally Comrade Clinton will begin as they rattle their sabers. They will claim that the those evil folks from the United States stole their stuff and that they are victims of the evil capitalists. Walls topped with barbed wire will sprout up complete with machine gun nests manned day and night to watch for any ungrateful souls not pleased with their masters and seeking a way out. And their citizens will be more worried about finding bark on trees to eat for dinner and postulating their escape to pay much attention to the bloviating of their leaders.
But at least they’ll have “free” healthcare, their retirement taken care of and food stamps to purchase bread from the empty shelves of the local market.
Honestly, the sooner they leave, or are kicked out, the better! That’s what I say!
J.J. Jackson is the owner of American Conservative Daily Blog. He is also the lead designer for The Right Things – Conservative Political T-shirts. His weekly articles and exclusive content can be found at Liberty Reborn.
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