Anti-secessionists: come at me, bros!

[Mr Khan]

badgenome said:

 

 

The Texas textbook fights are pretty embarrassing all around, and so is the media coverage about it. It's not like Thomas Jefferson was stricken from existence altogether. His name was removed from a question about influential thinkers and, yes, replaced with three others who were more to the conservatives' liking. That's silly enough, but the media hyperventilation over it was sillier still. Plus, as usual the coverage was ridiculously one-sided. I thought it was just as silly when the liberals on the board pushed to eliminate a comparison between Lincoln and Jefferson Davis' inaugurational addresses (not like Davis was an important figure, or the president of a bunch of states, or anything) and call out individual WWII soldiers based solely on their ethnicities (identity politics, rah!) and delve into the influence of rap music (like kids don't already get enough rap in their day to day lives). As far as Jefferson goes, I also think the educational system's general sanitization of Jefferson's anti-federalism and pro-occasionally-overthrowing-the-government-ism is pretty silly.

Mr Khan said:

Although you're right, and I acknowledged, that it would not be a horrible thing per se, but it would be worse than the system that exists currently, which is why it should not be done. The long and short of it is that people should not be free to make bad decisions, insofar as preventing such is reasonably feasible and not overly burdensome.

Even ideology-neutral, their departure from the union would create little countries, weak countries, with few differences from the remaining United States save in that they are less able to provide better opportunities for their people due to simple matters of scale.

But only by being able to make bad decisions can we ever truly be free or ever really make progress. If you just take things as an article of faith - for example, that things would definitely be worse if some states seceded and formed their own union, therefore it should never, ever happen - then you can never find out whether or not it's actually true. You'll always just assume that it is. (1)

I'm not saying that you should personally favor secession in this or any other particular instance, or that I do myself, but the whole idea of being violently anti-secessionist just gives me the creeps. I mean, I can understand why the government is. But people who wield no power? I simply can't grok it. (2)

This thread was actually inspired by something I was reading in which Ron Paul had made the case for why secession is legitimate and inextricably tied to the concept of self-governance, so the Christian Science Monitor offered a knee-jerk response that such talk was simply unAmerican and besides, the Civil War already settled that matter.

I hear that particular line a lot, and it unnerves me how many supposedly civilized and intelligent people say it like it's the most natural thing in the world. "We had a war about this, you know! I won't hear any more about it! Now eat your sprouts!" All the Civil War settled was that the Union was strong enough and bloody-minded enough to force the Confederacy to stick with them at that particular time. It doesn't mean that they were right to do so. "Bitch, I'll kill you if you leave me" may indeed be the government's policy, but to invoke it as some kind of logical or moral argument is completely bizarre. (3)

1: That's the benefit of federalism; we can see the kinds of policies that these states might enact if they let loose: good for owners, bad for workers, and who knows what would happen to their (admittedly) solid state budgets if that net-inflow of federal dollars was eliminated?

2: I get that. You asked to explain why the viewpoint isn't hypocritical, and it could (as a lot of our debates here boil down to) come down to a case of Blue and Orange Morality, but the position I initially posited is (as far as I can tell) not

3: I'll grant you that point, which is ultimately a matter of "winners write the history books" being applied to a situation out of its time (and made hairier because the war was retroactively deemed one of slave liberation, whereas modern secession would be based on things much less cut-and-dry).

I've rather enjoyed this debate so far, though. Both interesting and blessedly civill.