Alex Wright


Secession, seriously?

November 18, 2005

While I was up in Vermont, I picked up a copy of Vermont Commons at the local coffee hut. Expecting to while away my latte over one of those strident little leftie free press rags, I was surprised to find myself reading a thoughtful, well-written journal devoted to a cause that I was not at all disposed to take seriously: secession.

Now for most of us (and especially for erstwhile Southerners like myself) the word "secession" conjures up some admittedly painful historical baggage. But the Vermont secessionists are hardly unreconstructed rednecks; they appear to be serious, thoughtful people. Professor Donald Livingston's essay What is "Secession"? nicely crystallizes the argument:

Most modern theorists follow Hobbes in thinking of political society as artificial and held together by coercion. The classical statement of the counter tradition is that of Aristotle, who taught that political society is natural and occurs spontaneously, as does the family, society, and natural languages. Neither of these requires an all-powerful artificial corporation to maintain its existence. The enforcement mechanisms are internal to the practices themselves.
...
That public corporation known as the United States has simply grown too large for the purposes of self-government, in the same way that a committee of 300 people would be too large for the purposes of a committee. There needs to be a public debate on the out-of-scale character of the regime and what can be done about it.
Now, let's face it, the prospects for anyone seceding from this union in the forseeable future are vanishingly close to nil. But these people are not the crunchie-granola crackpots I would have imagined at first glance. They are engaged citizens having a serious discussion about how to govern themselves. That's ok by me.

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