When the Texan lawsuit attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election failed, the local Republican Party was quick to argue for secession in response. It’s not the first time a Texan has declared a desire to secede, and it won’t be the last. The official nature of the demand, its response to the failure of a suit supported by well over a hundred House Republicans, and its part as a larger campaign against Pres.-Elect Biden’s inevitable inauguration lent it somewhat more credence than usual.
There’s been a lot of casting about for words to describe how heinous this is — sedition, treason? Well, treason of the heart, certainly, in the same way scripture tells us one can commit adultery of the heart. In a perfect world, these men and women would not be seated in the next Congress.
The outrage this provokes is such that one is tempted to simply allow secession. Amy Siskind had the displeasure of becoming Twitter’s main character recently by echoing this sentiment, posting an unfortunately out of date “Jesusland map”. I assure you, however, that as roundly as they were mocked on Twitter, this sentiments are echoed across dinner tables in “blue” homes across this country nightly.
I’ve heard things like this my whole life, growing up here in a deep-blue suburban bubble, though never reaching the pitch of sincerity it does now. “Wouldn’t we have been better off to just let the South secede?” Nothing pisses me off as quickly. I leave the room immediately. In fact, this has literally just happened, and it is the reason I am sitting in my room writing this rather than arguing with my family.
One is tempted to reach immediately for an empathetic appeal — this is what most of Twitter reacted to Siskind with. More sophisticated takes point out that civil war in modern America would not look how (we imagine) the Civil War to have looked — neat lines of soldiers drawn in Some Other State. The nature of current American civic divides is much more uniform, with red and blue pockets existing in each state. We’d be looking at Derry or Baghdad, not an empty field in Gettysburg.
Less sophisticated versions of this argument seek to appeal to the obvious partisanship of the interlocutor. We are reminded that Democratic voters live in the South, and that they should not be punished for that. Black people live there too — and surely, their lives matter. I hope that it’s evident why these arguments make me want to vomit. Valuing the lives of their fellow party members, or folks in demographic groups those parties rely on, is not humanitarianism. PEOPLE live in the states that would be lost to dictatorship in this hypothetical. Having voted for the face-eating tiger party makes one’s loss of a face ironic. It should not render one’s life forfeit.
But we have to dig a bit beyond that, I think, lest we’re stuck thinking the “amicable national divorce” folks have a point. They’re just as much part of the problem. The issue fundamentally is that secessionist thinking is secessionist thinking, and it’s treason of the heart whether it takes the form of wanting to secede, or wanting someone else to. “Those damn Republicans need to go” is indistinguishable in outcome from “Those damn Democrats need to let us leave.” It’s indistinguishable in intent, too — sure, the secessionists (in the 1800’s and today) are motivated by poisonous ideological goals. But any support for secession engages in a direct opposition to the basis of democracy. Any support for secession holds, at root, that only certain people’s votes should determine policy outcomes in this country — because what matters is those policy outcomes, and not the voting. If only we didn’t have to deal with [INSERT YOUR LEAST FAVORITE GROUP HERE], we’d get everything we wanted.
Pres. Lincoln argued in his first inaugural address:
“…we divide upon [Constitutional controversies] into majorities and minorities. If the minority will not acquiesce, the majority must, or the Government must cease. There is no other alternative, for continuing the Government is acquiescence on one side or the other. If a minority in such case will secede rather than acquiesce, they make a precedent which in turn will divide and ruin them, for a minority of their own will secede from them whenever a majority refuses to be controlled by such minority. For instance, why may not any portion of a new confederacy a year or two hence arbitrarily secede again, precisely as portions of the present Union now claim to secede from it? All who cherish disunion sentiments are now being educated to the exact temper of doing this.
…
Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible. The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.”
Once division is accepted as a remedy for electoral disappointment, the notion of a unified democracy is dead. We either retreat into ever-smaller infighting enclaves, or we enforce acquiescence to our will by dictatorial mandate.
As apocalyptic as our conflicts over policy are becoming, democracy matters in and of itself. Losing sight of that signals a future far more dire than the loss of an election (or the insufficiently grand victory of one). I think that, much as the continuing crises of the current administration have required many of us to return to basic study of our civic institutions, the apparently loss of value in democracy in itself should compel us to study the basis of our civic faith. It is not just that the alternative to democratic government is certainly violence. The assurance of non-violent shifts in power vastly broadens the number of possible futures before us, as we are not condemned to live only to fight again the wars of the past. There is always hope, and means to realize it, of change; and there is the nobility of governing one’s own life, to fight like hell but to ultimately live as one’s own self, with an identity separate from that of a supposedly pure State.
Union, Forever.
