Secessionism is not just for states any more

What is secessionism at its basic level? It is the withdrawal from the greater community to form a community of difference. It is the fragmentation of a larger society into smaller ones.

We think of secessionist movements as political: The South's secession from the Union in 1861, California's active secession movement today. But secession has been going on in this country for many years now, social and linguistic, academic and financial, rather than boundaries-concerned political. And it is accelerating like this:

There is a friend of mine who is liberal, but I always chalked up as a sort of moderate lefty. We could talk about politics, and disagree on most everything, but drink beers and bullshit anyway. No rancor. We both acknowledged that we were trying to solve the same problems in different ways. Mostly, I could understand him, and he could understand me.

But now, I feel like I can’t reach him anymore. He’s drifted off too far. Oh, he mouths the same words as before. But they are empty. Like he doesn’t really believe them anymore. And I’ve come to realize it is the same for me. 

We don’t live in the same country, the same culture. I like him still, but he is a foreigner to me, now. I may as well be talking to someone from Norway or France. His issues aren’t my issues, his world isn’t my world. We’ve nothing left in common. When I talk to him, it’s just going through the motions, now. I see on his wall how much he hates Trump and thinks his supporters are racists and such. He won’t say as much to me, of course, but… it’s there. And we both know that. 

It is difficult to explain, but for me this is a major turning point. I used to be able to reach the other side. Oh, it was rare that I would change their minds. But they would listen, and nod, and understand. We could communicate. Make sense to one another.

And we can’t anymore. It’s not even the same language.

I have experienced the same thing. As a full-time ordained minister of The United Methodist Church I have many friends and acquaintances on both the left and the right. I will say that we use the same words but not with the same meaning. An examples: "justice," clearly a concern of the ancient prophets of the Jewish Scriptures. To the Left, justice always means redistribution of wealth by taking from the wealthy, by force if necessary, to give to the poor. That is, "justice" is fundamentally financial/economic in nature with force of law to define what it is and with (ill-defined) outcomes that must be achieved.

To the Right, justice is process and moral far more than outcomes and legal. Justice is not equality of outcomes, but equality of possibilities. The Right does not claim that justice can be perfectly achieved because human beings are not perfectible in this life. But justice can be structured so that all people enjoy the same opportunities as others, just that we cannot reach 100 percent level because of human fallibility, human ignorance and human sin. The Left demands that 100 percent be reached and that all human deficiencies can be overcome or at least suppressed provided the correct laws and requirements are in place.

To the Left, justice is the enforced regulation of private lives by government mandate for economic, racial, gender and ethnic equality. To the Right, justice is the moral commitment of the people to honesty, fairness, equal standing before the law, equal enjoyment of rights with as little government mandatum as necessary. To the Right, justice is a moral commitment and goal, to the Left justice is an economic policy of law.

So those of us on the religious Right and Left simply can't have a conversation that makes sense. We are not using the terms the same way to mean the same thing. Of course, my left-wing friends will insist that I have not described their vocabulary or concepts accurately. But I insist I do. And that is just another manifestation of the reason we are both seceding from one another rapidly. We do not share a common culture or common understanding of concepts and there almost always seems to be no point in trying to converse with one another.

Bill Whittle also gets to this point. Watch the whole thing.


After the Civil War, America was able to put the pieces back together because there was enough of a common culture of common ideals, aspirations and values to make it work, even though it often worked poorly. I think that commonality is gone now. Halting the ultimate dissolution of an American nation that can be called the Union is not possible any more.

Update:

Supporter Of California Secession Movement: ‘Our Values Are Different’ Than The United States.

“This is California. We’re not the United States. Our values are different,” said Shankar Singram, vice president of the California Freedom Coalition. “We’re fundamentally different in how we act and speak and think about the world globally. Whether it has to do with war, the climate, the environment. We’re just a different state.”

There is no “right” and “wrong” there; there is only “good” and “evil:”

The problem with Identity Liberalism is not that it seeks to create workplaces that are fair to men and women both, and to people of all races, and so forth. We all want that, or ought to. The problem is only partly that it’s criteria for judging the fairness of a workplace are contradictory and unfair, as Dr. Miller points out above. The core of the problem is that identity liberalism construes disagreement as heresy, and viciously punishes heretics.

And from earlier this month here at SoE: Goodbye to all that - "How Left Idiocies Drove Me to Flee," a short series of former Leftists explaining why they ran away from it.

California's secession movement continues, softly

I have posted a few times on the burgeoning secession movement of disgruntled blue states, mainly California. Formerly, we could consider "CalExit" a minority movement in the state (it is too large, though, to call it a fringe movment). But now the state's government is getting into the act, though more softly than the actual secessionists. The American Interest reports,

The fantastical push for “CalExit” might be on hold for now, but America’s Left Coast giant is nonetheless beginning to symbolically sever ties with the rest of the United States—a significant provocation that could have wide-reaching consequences down the line. The Sacramento Bee reports that California is banning publicly funded travel to a growing list of red states.

California is restricting publicly funded travel to four more states because of recent laws that leaders here view as discriminatory against gay and transgender people.

All totaled, California now bans most state-funded travel to eight states.The new additions to California’s restricted travel list are Texas, Alabama, Kentucky and South Dakota.

They join Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina and Tennessee as states already subjected to the ban.

California Attorney Xavier Becerra announced the new states at a Thursday press conference, where he was joined by representatives from ACLU Northern California and Equality California.

“We will not spend taxpayer dollars in states that discriminate,” Becerra said.

As we noted when California inaugurated this policy, American federalism is based on the agreement that different states can pursue different policies (within Constitutional bounds) while retaining equal status within the union. California’s decision to escalate the culture war with “sanctions” against states with different political orientations represents a direct challenge to America’s federal structure.

Which is the intention, not a side effect.

Update: Tennessee fires back:

Is Calexit a Russian plot?

Louis Marinelli, the American leading the California secession movement, dubbed Calexit, lives in Russia.

Louis Marinelli has received support in Russia from a far-right nationalist group that wants to break up the United States. Former intelligence officials say that association raises serious questions about his intent.

You don't have to be a "far right" Russian to want the United States to break apart. I do find it highly non-credible, though, that Marinelli lives in Russia without having Russian ties.

Is this the real goal of Calexit's leaders?

America is a "house divided" and it cannot stand

Earlier today I cited Senator Rubio's warning,

“I don't know of a civilization in the history of the world that's been able to solve its problems when half the people in a country absolutely hate the other half of the people in that country.” 

I said that what I hear and see today reminds me of the national polity of the 1850s, which ended badly.

I have before called the underlying ideology of the American Left, totalism. The label was first used by psychiatrist and historian Robert Lifton. Professor Anna Geifman explains the Totalist political world view:

... Its devotees — anarchists, Marxists, or Islamists — want to impose a new order based on an “all-or-nothing claim to truth.” They operate within distinctive parameters of a “theology of Armageddon — a final battle between good and evil” –  in which the stakes are nothing less than universal salvation. As outlined in Eric Hoffer’s classic, The True Believer, such movements have mastered the art of “religiofication,” that is, converting political grievances into messianic aspirations and “practical purposes into holy causes.” [HT: American Digest]

No one gravitates to the Left in order to let others live their lives as they see fit. The beating heart of Totalism in all its forms is power and control over others. This is the raison d'etre of the entire American Left.

Which makes me turn again to the 1850s and Abraham Lincoln's "house divided" speech.

On June 16, 1858 more than 1,000 delegates met in the Springfield, Illinois, statehouse for the Republican State Convention. At 5:00 p.m. they chose Abraham Lincoln as their candidate for the U.S. Senate, running against Democrat Stephen A. Douglas. At 8:00 p.m. Lincoln delivered this address to his Republican colleagues in the Hall of Representatives. The title reflects part of the speech's introduction, "A house divided against itself cannot stand," a concept familiar to Lincoln's audience as a statement by Jesus recorded in all three synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke).

The original text is at the link above. Below is my very slight edit of part of part of it.

"A house divided against itself cannot stand." I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half Marxist and half Jeffersonian. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of Leftist tryranny, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike common in all the states, across all the country. Have we no tendency to the latter condition? Let any one who doubts, carefully contemplate that now almost complete legal combination— piece of machinery so to speak—compounded of the Ninth Circuit's judges overturning, for no stated reason but their own personal preferences, the power that the Constitution and longstanding public law have delegated expressly to the chief executive.

In Lincoln's speech the ending of this section refers to 1857's Dred Scott decision, which buttressed slaveholding as a Constitutional right, based solely on the justices' openly-stated racist reasons. I am here referring to the quashing of President Trump's executive order temporarily halting, with some exceptions, entry into the country of anyone from seven named countries.

How bad was that decision? I could spend many paragraphs explaining why, citing legal scholars both Right conservative and liberal, but will here just point out that it was so bad that one of the other judges of the Ninth Circuit has filed for a rehearing of the case en banc.

In circulating a draft of his speech, Lincoln found his friends did not support it.

Even Lincoln's friends regarded the speech as too radical for the occasion. His law partner, William H. Herndon, considered Lincoln as morally courageous but politically incorrect. 

In fact, Lincoln lost reelection to the House that year and both his friends and opponents laid principal cause directly on this speech. Two years later Lincoln was elected president and later both his friends and opponents credited this same speech as a large reason why.

Of course, Lincoln was wrong in saying, "I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided." His election to the presidency directly cause both the dissolution of the Union and its division.

Nonetheless, the state of the United States in 1858 and in 2017 bear enough resemblances to make me shudder.

Update: "Society is more divided now than at any time since the Civil War" -- Doug Ross' Journal.

Why we are heading toward broader secession

A symptom of larger fracturing

In "Secession is breaking out all over," I observed,

...  the fracturing movements in America today are much more numerous than that. I need not point out the divisiveness of our national political culture, for which both sides will insist the other bears total responsibility from now until the sun has burned to cinder.

Comes now Roger Simon who offers a short assessment of the fracturing in our national polity in all three branches.

Nothing is debated seriously.  Hatred is everywhere from the public sphere to our split families.

As Chris Cillizza notes, Marco Rubio is to be praised for putting his finger on this situation in a speech in the Senate the other day after they finally told Elizabeth Warren to sit down and shut up. Some key Rubio quotes:

“I don't know of a civilization in the history of the world that's been able to solve its problems when half the people in a country absolutely hate the other half of the people in that country.” 

“We are becoming a society incapable of having debate anymore.”

“We are reaching a point in this republic where we are not going to be able to solve the simplest of issues because everyone is putting themselves in a corner where everyone hates everybody.”

“What's at stake here tonight … is not simply some rule but the ability of the most important nation on earth to debate in a productive and respectful way the pressing issues before it.”

But this will fall on deaf ears. I have tried to be a serious student of American history, and what I hear and see today seems frighteningly similar to the national polity of the 1850s. And that did not end well.

End note: OTOH, is the California secession movement only a Republican plot?

Secession is breaking out all over

I have posted a couple of times about California's growing secession movement, nicknamed "Calexit." I've seen reports of surveys that say a third or more of Californians support putting the referendum to proceed on the 2018 ballot.

But the fracturing movements in America today are much more numerous than that. I need not point out the divisiveness of our national political culture, for which both sides will insist the other bears total responsibility from now until the sun has burned to cinder. (Latest example: MSNBC reporter Katy Tur suggested on the air that President Trump might start having journalists assassinated.)

There are many voices on both the Left and the Right warning of (or calling for) the fracturing of America's states into several separate nations. I've seen a prediction that, despite its strident tone, actually made a fairly reasonable argument that the US will split into three nations in the next few decades and there is nothing that can be done to stop it at this point. But even if so, I doubt it will happen in my lifetime, and I've got about 30 years left. However, I don't doubt it overwhelmingly. The three nations, btw, were predicted to be the liberal coastal enclaves at one each and the relatively conservative heartland states in between.

But the fracturing cracks are appearing a little close to home to me now: "Two Large UM Churches Vote to Leave Denomination."

Two large local United Methodist churches in the Mississippi Annual Conference have taken congregation wide votes to leave the denomination. Ninety six percent of the parishioners at Getwell Road UM Church in Southaven and 99 percent at The Orchard UM Church in Tupelo supported separation on Sunday, February 5.

The senior pastors at both churches explained that their congregations are now in a process of discernment with the annual conference regarding their departures. Getwell Road UM Church, a vibrant and growing suburban congregation in the greater Memphis, Tennessee, area, averages over 800 people in worship. And The Orchard is the 15th largest United Methodist church in the U. S. in terms of worship attendance. On average, over 2,700 people attend its weekend services.

"Conference" is what Methodists call a diocese, a geographically-defined area for which a bishop exercises episcopal authority. It's certainly a lot easier for UM churches to secede from the denomination than for states to secede from the Union, but it still is not easy. The main issue is disposal of the real property. UM churches are required by church law to hold their real property in trust for the Conference, which has final say over the its disposition. Options range from the church buying it to the Conference kicking the congregation out and moving a new one in. I imagine that neither extreme will be come to pass in this case.

Funny that this came across my news feed this morning. Just last Saturday I was talking to a retired UM minister whose career was spent as a professor at Wesley Theological Seminary and Vanderbilt Divinity School (where I earned my M.Div.). He said that he was far from certain that The United Methodist Church could hang together. The cracks have long been evident and it won't take very much for them to become fissures.

And that is true, I think across almost every aspect of American life.