Noxious Anti-Americanism and New Secessionist Theories

You're the biggest coward in the blogosphere. That delete key is the only thing you got going for you, and you know it.

The e-mail came yesterday. It's from Mike Tuggle ("Old Rebel") of the secessionist Rebellion-Dixienet blog. Old Rebel cross-posts at Conservative Heritage Times; his essay, "What was America?, discusses his current anger.

Considering my penchant for long and unproductive flame wars, I'm probably more a glutton for punishment than a coward!

Anyway, I'm indulging Old Rebel here as part of a broader analysis of hate-based secessionism and its surprising links to the "liberaltarian" post-conservative movement. I've ignored the secessionists - and thus Old Rebel - because these people are noxious fringe elements. Yeah, I deleted Old Soldier because I consider him an annoying troll and anti-American whose movement is in bed with the worst of the radical left BDS troop-hating contingents (literally, as it turns out). The occasion for yesterday's slur quoted at top was my deleting of his comment at my post, "July 4th: More Than Just an American Holiday..." That essay cites Willliam Bennett at the Wall Street Journal, where Bennett quotes Abraham Lincoln on the Declaration of Independence. Recall that the secessionists hate Lincoln. Old Rebel probably has a poster of John Wilkes Booth in his office.

Its straightforward to me, but Lincoln-bashing and talk of secession is fringe material. When Rick Perry made his recent gaffe on secession I ignored it as intemperate red meat for his Texas electoral base. There's nothing wrong with federalist devolution and greater reliance on the 10th Amendment. But outright secessionist talk will get you nowhere in national politics. And that's why folks like Old Rebel, and the paleoconservatives at Pat Buchanan's flagship American Conservative, are marginal at best.

That said, note that Ilya Somin, at Volokh Conspiracy, made an interesting argument about the new secessionism yesterday, "The Declaration of Independence and the Case for Non-Ethnic Secession":

One of the striking differences between the American Revolution and most modern independence movements is that the former was not based on ethnic or nationalistic justifications. Nowhere does the Declaration state that Americans have a right to independence because they are a distinct "people" or culture. They couldn't assert any such claim because the majority of the American population consisted of members of the same ethnic groups (English and Scots) as the majority of Britons.

Rather, the justification for American independence was the need to escape oppression by the British government - the "repeated injuries and usurpations" enumerated in the text - and to establish a government that would more fully protect the rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The very same rationale for independence could just as easily have been used to justify secession by, say, the City of London, which was more heavily taxed and politically oppressed than the American colonies were. Indeed, the Declaration suggests that secession or revolution is justified "whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends" [emphasis added]. The implication is that the case for independence is entirely distinct from any nationalistic or ethnic considerations.

By contrast, modern international law, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights assigns a right of "self-determination" only to "peoples," usually understood to mean groups with a distinctive common culture and ethnicity. If the American Revolution was justified, the ICCPR's approach is probably wrong. At the very least, secession should also be considered permissible where undertaken to escape repression by the preexisting central government ....

The case for allowing non-ethnic secession in cases where it is used to escape brutal repression strikes me as overwhelming. More controversial is the case for allowing it in situations where a group seeks to secede merely because they believe they can establish a better government than the status quo, even if the latter is not unusually oppressive ... For now, I will only suggest that the example of the American Revolution and other similar situations provides a strong argument for allowing non-ethnic secession in cases where it is used to escape a repressive central government.

Somin's discussion raises two questions for Old Rebel and the new secessionists: The first is whether the current U.S. governmental regime is so repressive as to justify secession. Somin notes that Taiwan's independence from China is easily justified in light of the Beijing regime's slaughter of millions of its own people. That's not the case in the U.S., and never has been. Thus the degree of repression is vital to the discussion, and normative opinion on support for the constitutional regime in the U.S. weighs heavily against Old Rebel's movement (and helps explains why these folks are truly fringe).

The second is the racial "ethnic" component. Are the new secessionist motivated by race? It's always a touchy question, since slavery and states' rights were the twin issues breaking the country in two in the 19th century. For the new secessionists, we simply need to note that the same people who are arguing for secession today are associated with some of the vile anti-Semitics in current debates U.S. policy at home and abroad. See, for example, Peter Wehner, "Pat Buchanan’s Latest anti-Semitic Outburst"; Ron Radosh, "Pat Buchanan: Still an anti-Semite"; and Joshua Muravchik, "Patrick J. Buchanan and the Jews." It's hard not to be wary of these paleocon secessionists when they continue to be flagged as propagating the most disgusting ideologies of hatred.

Indeed, one reason Old Rebel is so fired up at this blog is because I've been hammering Daniel Larison of the American Conservative (see Daniel Larison, 'Prefab Conservative'). My primary issue is Larison's endless jihad against the "evil" neocons. But it's also a matter of ridicule for his alliance with the Andrew Sullivan myrimidons at Ordinary Gentlemen. I've identified these folks as "neoclassicons." That may be too generous a term, especially if deep down this alliance is really composed of unpatriotic racists and anti-Semitics. Note that if we recall that American democracy promotion abroad does indeed support the interests of both Jews and non-white Third World populations, then the paleocon hatred of robust internationalism is all that more understandable.

Daniel Larison, for example, wrote a post in January called "My “Noxious” Views." There he defends himself against Jamie Kirchick's essay, "Ron Paul’s Real Politics: The Case of Daniel Larison." But note that Larison posted a 4th of July essay yesterday that gives us an insightful take on how awful these people are. At that piece Larison links to an attack on Ruben Navarette, Jr. Check the post for the details, but Larison's completely extraneous discussion of Navarette's immigrant background is a sure giveway to his repudiation of neocons as outside the paleocon ethnic sensibility:

Perhaps this is a problem that third-generation Americans like Mr. Navarette and even more recent arrivals have: lacking anything more substantial to connect them to their country and their national identity, they must latch on to the superficial loyalties of support for this or that government endeavour.

Reference to Rubin Navarette's "third-generation" status is completely irrelevant to a discussion of his ideas. But for Larison and paleocon America-bashers like him, it's a revealing indicator again that at base, the new secessionists may indeed be anti-Semitic white supremacists. If so, their views are rightly condemned as being not just wrong, but reprehensible.

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ADDENDUM: I have some other good blogger friends who have travelled at the edges of the same ideological circles (and the League of the South). But I see clear differences in that these people are smart, consistent, and they don't hate - they don't hate minorities and they don't hate Israel. From my perspective, the new secessionism is noxious. Forget such talk and strengthen the national government with Goldwater/"Core-Values" conservatism, which includes a central stand for a robust national security policy of moral clarity and exceptionalism.

And for me, this is what the new secessionism would imply, from the Wall Street Journal, "Divided We Stand":

A notable prophet for a coming age of smallness was the diplomat and historian George Kennan, a steward of the American Century with an uncanny ability to see past the seemingly-frozen geopolitical arrangements of the day. Kennan always believed that Soviet power would “run its course,” as he predicted back in 1951, just as the Cold War was getting under way, and again shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed, he suggested that a similar fate might await the United States. America has become a “monster country,” afflicted by a swollen bureaucracy and “the hubris of inordinate size,” he wrote in his 1993 book, “Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy.” Things might work better, he suggested, if the nation was “decentralized into something like a dozen constituent republics, absorbing not only the powers of the existing states but a considerable part of those of the present federal establishment.”

Kennan’s genius was to foresee that matters might take on an organic, a bottom-up, life of their own, especially in a society as dynamic and as creative as America. His spirit, the spirit of an anti-federalist modernist, can be glimpsed in an intriguing “mega-region” initiative encompassing greater San Diego County, next-door Imperial County and, to the immediate south of the U.S. border, Northern Baja, Mexico. Elected officials representing all three participating areas recently unveiled “Cali Baja, a Bi-National Mega-Region,” as the “international marketing brand” for the project.

The idea is to create a global economic powerhouse by combining San Diego’s proven abilities in scientific research and development with Imperial County’s abundance of inexpensive land and availability of water rights and Northern Baja’s manufacturing base, low labor costs and ability to supply the San Diego area with electricity during peak-use terms. Bilingualism, too, is a key—with the aim for all children on both sides of the border to be fluent in both English and Spanish. The project director is Christina Luhn, a Kansas native, historian and former staffer on the National Security Council in Ronald Reagan’s White House in the mid-1980s. Contemporary America as a unit of governance may be too big, even the perpetually-troubled state of California may be too big, she told me, by way of saying that the political and economic future may belong to the megaregions of the planet. Her conviction is that large systems tend not to endure—“they break apart, there’s chaos, and at some point, new things form,” she said.

I don't need a "Cali-Baja." We practically have that already in California, where roughly one-third of the population is Latino and leading left-wing organzations like La Raza continue their work to destroy the United States. It's interesting, though, that we are seeing a de facto alliance between racist interest groups like La Raza an the unpatriotic anti-Semitic paleocons who truly hate America.