As the Trump administration cripples the power of the federal government, some Democratically controlled states have floated the idea of "soft secession." They hope to take up the slack for the rescission of federal funds and the gutting of federal agencies that provide essential services to all Americans by instituting state programs and creating interstate compacts to achieve what they can of the abandoned beneficial goals.
Soft secession acquiesces to the concept of "states' rights." It also echoes state initiatives that formed the basis for the progressive reforms at the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries, but the concept of states' rights has been a rallying point for the political forces that have sought to demolish the federal government since the New Deal was enacted. Before that, of course, it was used to justify the spread of slavery in the expanding nation, leading to the Civil War.
Increasingly through the latter half of the 20th Century, and exponentially in the age of the Internet, states' rights has been used as cover for repressive laws enacted at the state level as federal oversight has been crippled. Voting rights,civil rights, women's rights, public health, infrastructure, energy modernization, and more have been demonized by well funded institutions pretending to be about personal freedom while exploiting bigotry and religious zealotry to advance a narrow view of what freedom is and who gets to exercise it.
Soft secession initiatives legitimize the idea that states' rights can be a viable method of organizing the country. The primacy of states' rights completely undermines the concept of the United States as a single nation. The Constitution was supposed to advance the concept of one nation with a set of undeniable universal rights of citizenship, replacing the unwieldy confederation that had been falling apart as the national government after the Revolutionary War. The confederation would have broken into a bunch of little nations, separately easy prey to the larger, powerful, established nations from which the colonies had broken philosophically.
We can hope that soft secession efforts succeed in the interim to navigate through the constant crises brought on us by the corruption and incompetence of the Trump regime, but we must be sure that they are temporary, lest they lead to the fragmentation that the misguided ideologues of the far right have longed for.
The federal government failed in many ways in the latter half of the 20th Century. This led to the distrust that the right wing has turned to its advantage after the liberals abandoned it once the Vietnam War was over. Between leftover lefties who don't trust The Man, and rebellious righties bent on unlimited individual liberty even if it kills us all, the clever institutions seeking control have plenty of handles with which to steer paranoid voters. But we have to look at when, why, and how the federal government failed. Those failures were a product of their era. They also reflect basic realities of the conduct of a nation dealing with other nations. All nations have common and competing interests. All nations present varying levels of threat and opportunity to the other nations.
Life is simple, but foreign policy is a tangled mess. There's no way to have absolute transparency, and you will never satisfy every citizen in a large population in a democratic republic. You'll be lucky to satisfy a majority with what you can say in public. It all factors into the biennial popularity contests that sweep the country with regularly scheduled, mostly bloodless revolutions.
More than foreign policy will require a degree of confidentiality. But most legitimate government secrets relate in some way to managing the relationship with other nations. There are things we don't want them to know in full detail. Make them at least conduct some espionage to find out. It creates jobs in the spy community.
Full and permanent secession -- a reversion to confederation -- would require each little nation-state and sub-confederation to supply its own military and intelligence capability, funded by whatever economic resources the state or confederacy controls. Who gets the former federal military assets in a given state when the breakup occurs?
When the Soviet Union broke up, the United States and NATO stood as a bastion of stability and arbiter of standards. The "free world" and rising Asian powers oversaw the distribution of hardware. Now that Russia seeks to reclaim its imperial glory with the help of a puppet government in the United States, our breakup would be supervised by a rival nation that has sought our downfall for 80 years. At the same time, an ever more powerful China watches and maneuvers to counter both the sabotaged and crumbling United States and the wily chess players of Russia on the global game board.
Nuclear war seems like the big nasty. It serves as the monster under the bed to frighten citizens in every country, while the real horror is that conventional warfare has never ceased. The lives of the general population are expended by governments controlled by rich egotists who feel no shame or horror at maiming and death of thousands. It's good business and great domestic policy to give people the blood sport of war on just the right scale.
Because nuclear weapons exist, the deterrent of mutually assured destruction will probably always be with us. In the name of avoiding it, we are encouraged to accept the heroic sacrifices of brave service members in conflicts below that threshold. We will need those for as long as humanity separates itself into territories and conflicting ideologies.
Small nations will always be vulnerable to the ambitions of the leaders of larger nations. Breaking up the United States does not serve any American well. It only serves the interests of the powers arrayed against what was once our steady march to better express our stated founding ideals of liberty and justice for all. We had much work still to do. Our worst enemies in that work live among us. Don't let their longstanding advocacy for states' rights carry out its true purpose of curtailing individual liberty and dismantling the United States. Your constitutional rights will mean nothing when there is no longer a federal government to act on your behalf.
Like gerrymandering, soft secession should only be considered as a drastic temporary measure to regain our footing as a unified, representative democracy. You can't claim to be a patriot while undermining the principle that our diverse nation draws its strength from the collection of individual citizens into a unified national entity.
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