If it’s so easy to rule the world at Amazon.com, how hard would it be to change the rules? The states figured out how to get their piece of the pie by taxation. What other barriers to entry are there?
There was a time when hanging out at the mall on a Friday night was a thing. Now you mention that to a teenager, and you’re met with blank stares. Why would you do that when you can shop online?
Yes, Amazon can get a package to your door, but it’s still a challenge. It’s still hard to get up and down your driveway. They haven’t solved the “local” last mile challenge quite yet. And that’s where barriers, like a front gate, can be put up like the Great Wall of China. If there’s a will, there’s a wall.
The secession movement of the future will not look like the Civil War. F.H. Buckley wrote the book on it. Here’s how he described it a year ago (incredible how much has changed since then).
The craziness of our politics makes one wonder what’s round the bend. After the “resistance,” the pussy hats, the nonstop crises and the permanent impeachment, what might be the next shoe to drop? The answer: a breakup of the country, as I argue in my new book, “American Secession.”
Americans have never been more divided, and we’re ripe for secession. The bitterness, the gridlock, the growing tolerance of violence invite us to think that we’d be happier were we two different countries. In all the ways that matter, save for the naked force of law, we are already two nations.
And if that’s where we are today, where might we be in an easily imaginable future, where impeachment fizzles and Trump wins reelection and gets a couple more appointments to the Supreme Court? If secession were to happen, it would be the left-wing states that want out, places like California and Oregon. If they think the rest of the country is populated by deplorables, why would they want to be in the same country as the rest of us?
There’s a second reason why secession beckons. We’re overly big, one of the biggest countries in the world. Smaller countries are happier and less corrupt. They’re less inclined to throw their weight around militarily, and they’re freer. If there are advantages to bigness, the costs exceed the benefits. Bigness is badness.
Across the world, just about every country is staring down a secession movement. Many have already split apart. And are we to think we’re immune from this? If you think secession is, per se, bad, what do you think of Amerexit, when we seceded from the British Empire in 1776?
If the possibility of secession hasn’t occurred to us, it’s because of the awful precedent of the Civil War and the 750,000 Americans who died in it. Would that happen with Secession 2.0? Not hardly. Modern secessions tend to be peaceful and accomplished through negotiation and some movement of people. That’s the story of the Quebec secession movement: Nobody picked up a gun, and though the province didn’t actually secede, French became the province’s official language and a lot of English-speakers moved to Toronto.
Back in 1861, one section of our country wanted out. Maybe that doesn’t sound like today’s America; secession can’t happen unless there’s a decided majority for it in one state.
But it wasn’t so simple to get to that point in 1861 either. The Virginia Convention took three votes for secession, and the first two failed. The border states were completely divided.
As for today, look at the 2016 election results. It wasn’t just that there were sectional differences between red and blue America. The reds were deep reds, and the blues were deep blues.
Then there’s the question of legality. Didn’t the Supreme Court rule that secession was impossible, holding that we were a perpetual union? Yet that was the victor’s constitution, decided after the Civil War was good and over. Its ruling might look very different if a split-up were a real possibility and the question was whether to empower the president to send in the troops.
At that point, the court would have to decide between an abstract, indissolvable union and the democratic choice of the voters in a state. Originalists on the court might recall that the Framers at their 1787 Convention thought secession was very possible. Almost every delegate conceded that if one region or state wanted to leave the union, it was perfectly possible to do so.
Many states are already bucking the federal government and Joe Biden’s avalanche of executive orders. At the American Institute for Economic Research, Jordan Schachtel explains that 16 states are now “following the science” and giving people back their rights. He writes:
It took an entire year, but lockdowns and mask mandates are officially incredibly unpopular with half of the country, to the point that governors are rapidly making sweeping changes to their year-long COVID-19 policies.
Jumping onto the coattails of pro-individual freedom leaders like governors Ron DeSantis (R-Florida) and Kristi Noem (R-SD), the governors of Mississippi and Texas decided Tuesday to announce an end to business restrictions and statewide mask mandates.
Both Tate Reeves (R-MS) and Greg Abbott (R-TX), who had long taken a nanny state approach to the COVID-19 crisis, acted almost simultaneously to announce the end of statewide restrictions.
The centrally planned solutions to COVID-19 have failed spectacularly, and the American people have taken notice of this reality. Hundreds of millions have now been through a full year of government-imposed tyranny on both a federal and state level. Whether it was a travel ban, an endless series of lockdowns, mask mandates, countless emergency orders, business closures, and the like, not a single top-down order from the federal or state level did anything productive for the wellbeing of Americans.
None of it worked. All of it served as a net negative. The people have noticed.
Now that their constituents have had enough, politicians on the Right are fast departing from the COVID tyranny, and attempting to secure what is left of their political aspirations.
If you’re about to head out on a trip, and you’re wondering what the rules are in your destination state, AARP has created a regularly updated guide on their website. According to the guide on March 4, 2021, these states were not mandating masks:
- Alaska
- Arizona
- Florida
- Georgia
- Idaho
- Iowa
- Mississippi
- Missouri
- Montana
- Nebraska
- North Dakota
- Oklahoma
- South Carolina
- South Dakota
- Tennessee
- Texas
Action Line: Is your state on the list? If not, you need to start asking hard questions about where you want to retire, and if you ought to be building you and your family a new “island life” away from the city.
