Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies

[Plushie]

Nullification and secession were always inextricably tied with the evils of Southern slavery.

Yes, which is why one of the first threats of secession came from...New England. And why Northern states in the antebellum period continuously threatened to nullify fugitive slave laws.

Nullification and secession were vital powers for all states to work at keeping the Federal government in check. Because the first states to actually make a break for it happened to be slave states doesn't discredit the powers, just the slavers.

Seriously, it seems like you're seeing what you want to see, rather than what's actually there. Secession is a vital component of being a free people: If you don't have the right to self-government, what else do you really have, in the long run?

[bobalot]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZeVqj-t1U0

Woo, Ron Paul!

Congratulations, you found an idiot on Youtube. That must have been hard.

I found an idiot candidate. Just read his newsletters.

[Panzersharkcat]

snip

Just to let you know, you screwed up the quotes.

[Plushie]

Just to let you know, you screwed up the quotes.

Quote tags on this website are pretty confusing.

[Terralthra]

Just to let you know, you screwed up the quotes.

Quote tags on this website are pretty confusing.

Assuming you have never encountered a markup tag before in your life, I suppose.

[Plushie]

Just to let you know, you screwed up the quotes.

Quote tags on this website are pretty confusing.

Assuming you have never encountered a markup tag before in your life, I suppose.

I apologize, sarcasm doesn't translate well without tone.

I didn't realize the tags were screwed up and now the board doesn't want to let me edit the post.

[Panzersharkcat]

I didn't realize the tags were screwed up and now the board doesn't want to let me edit the post.

Yeah, that was to prevent dishonest debaters from changing their posts. It kind of sucked it had to be put in, but what are you going to do about it?

They've been fixed - SCRawl

[Simon_Jester]

Nullification and secession were always inextricably tied with the evils of Southern slavery.

Yes, which is why one of the first threats of secession came from...New England. And why Northern states in the antebellum period continuously threatened to nullify fugitive slave laws.

Nullification and secession were vital powers for all states to work at keeping the Federal government in check. Because the first states to actually make a break for it happened to be slave states doesn't discredit the powers, just the slavers.

Northern states threatening to stop enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act doesn't strike me as "not tied with the evils of Southern slavery." Heh.

I'll grant the issue of the New England states discussing secession and making veiled threats to secede in 1814, which ultimately came to nothing, which was heavily disputed at the time (far more so than the secession of the slave states in 1860), and which ultimately came to nothing.

That said, what's this about 'vital powers?' No state has ever successfully exercised a right to secede, or to 'nullify-' that is, to refuse to enforce federal laws. No state has even credibly threatened to do either in a hundred and fifty years- not even when the federal government went in and literally enforced Supreme Court ruling on a recalcitrant state at bayonet point.

If the rights to secede and nullify were so vital, we would expect to see consequences of this. Imagine if for over two centuries no one had successfully exercised some other right deemed fundamental- like free speech, or the vote, or equal protection under the law, or the right not to testify against oneself in court. Surely the consequences of these rights having lapsed for so long would be a reign of bloody-handed tyranny and oppression, such that foreigners would look at the nation which had abandoned these rights and shudder at the thought of living under the yoke of its policies.

Whereas the consequences of no one exercising the 'rights' to secede and to ignore federal laws have been... well, honestly not all that onerous. Despite endless shrieking about how income taxes or desegregation or federal highway regulations or the Department of Education were going to bring about tyranny, how they were the end of freedom and state's rights, nothing particularly bad has happened.

Now, maybe you can still make some abstract theoretical argument for the rights of secession and nullification being rights. But you can hardly make the practical argument that they're important, not when dozens of countries have gone many scores of years without decaying into tyranny, even when no one ever exercised or credibly threatened to exercise that right.

Seriously, it seems like you're seeing what you want to see, rather than what's actually there. Secession is a vital component of being a free people: If you don't have the right to self-government, what else do you really have, in the long run?

I can equally well turn that around and ask: if the laws cannot be enforced upon a recalcitrant province, if there is no second layer of government to guarantee your rights if you're being oppressed by the first, what do you really have, in the long run?

Ask a southern black.

[Plushie]

Northern states threatening to stop enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act doesn't strike me as "not tied with the evils of Southern slavery." Heh.

I'll grant the issue of the New England states discussing secession and making veiled threats to secede in 1814, which ultimately came to nothing, which was heavily disputed at the time (far more so than the secession of the slave states in 1860), and which ultimately came to nothing.

That said, what's this about 'vital powers?' No state has ever successfully exercised a right to secede, or to 'nullify-' that is, to refuse to enforce federal laws. No state has even credibly threatened to do either in a hundred and fifty years- not even when the federal government went in and literally enforced Supreme Court ruling on a recalcitrant state at bayonet point.

They were vital powers. The consequence has been an ever-growing, ever-more-powerful empire of a Federal government. The United States morphed from the dieing Republic it was in 1859 into the global plutocratic empire it is today more or less because it was able to slowly peel away the protections against that very thing happening placed against it. The most powerful of those protections was secession.

It really is a shame that it was the slavers who went for it first, because they discredited the whole thing for a century or more. No one but the most ignorant white supremacist seems willing to contemplate it today, but it was really always an important aspect of the system of checks and balances that was supposed to guarantee liberty in this country.

What I'd like to see someday is have some state, say California, secede on peaceful terms and then re-acede, just to prove it can be done. It would require a level of political coordination that is probably impossible, but it would be kind of like running a test case by the Supreme Court: Somebody purposefully breaks a law with the intention of appealing straight up to Washington.

If the rights to secede and nullify were so vital, we would expect to see consequences of this. Imagine if for over two centuries no one had successfully exercised some other right deemed fundamental- like free speech, or the vote, or equal protection under the law, or the right not to testify against oneself in court. Surely the consequences of these rights having lapsed for so long would be a reign of bloody-handed tyranny and oppression, such that foreigners would look at the nation which had abandoned these rights and shudder at the thought of living under the yoke of its policies.

We HAVE seen consequences, and we continue to see consequences. The Congress just passed a bill which Obama signed giving the Fed the power to indefinitely detain US citizens for 'association' with terrorism, effectively suspending habeus corpus. They're about to hand off power to major copyright holders to single-handedly shut down websites without reference to a court or any other check if they even suspect them of copyright violation.

The Fed has had its hand around the throat of America since at least the 30's, almost always using its increasing power in the name of good and right, but always concentrating more and more power in the hands of fewer and fewer people. The potential for corruption is enormous. The potential for outright tyranny grows every year. It might not happen in our lifetimes, but the Constitutional system on which our society is built is both rotting and being actively torn to shreds underneath us.

Whereas the consequences of no one exercising the 'rights' to secede and to ignore federal laws have been... well, honestly not all that onerous. Despite endless shrieking about how income taxes or desegregation or federal highway regulations or the Department of Education were going to bring about tyranny, how they were the end of freedom and state's rights, nothing particularly bad has happened.

Sayeth the Berliner in 1934

Now, maybe you can still make some abstract theoretical argument for the rights of secession and nullification being rights. But you can hardly make the practical argument that they're important, not when dozens of countries have gone many scores of years without decaying into tyranny, even when no one ever exercised or credibly threatened to exercise that right.

And yet dozens of others have.

Imagine if Tibet's right to secede from the PRC was to be recognized. Imagine if Paris had been allowed to secede from France in the 1870's. Imagine if the Kosovars had been allowed to peacefully secede from Serbia, and the Serbs in the South of Kosovo were allowed to counter-secede back into Serbia.

Separating people into neatly defined districts where they can be ruled over by others has always been better and more convenient for the rulers than the ruled. Free sortition would be a wonderful thing to see someday.

Ask a southern black.

Indeed, why don't we? Why don't we ask some of the blacks who, after getting land and the vote during Reconstruction, were slowly driven off their new land and deprived of suffrage, if they would have liked to have their counties secede from the state governments they were losing control of as Federal troops left?

I've come to the conclusion, after spending years thinking and researching, that exit is ultimately better than voice at securing freedom. The right to withdraw from political association is only occasionally recognized these days, but it's really fundamental to a liberal worldview. If market relationships have to be truly voluntary, as some of my friends on the left insist, to be just, why do political relationships get a pass?

[Simon_Jester]

They were vital powers. The consequence has been an ever-growing, ever-more-powerful empire of a Federal government. The United States morphed from the dieing Republic it was in 1859 into the global plutocratic empire it is today more or less because it was able to slowly peel away the protections against that very thing happening placed against it. The most powerful of those protections was secession.

It really is a shame that it was the slavers who went for it first, because they discredited the whole thing for a century or more. No one but the most ignorant white supremacist seems willing to contemplate it today, but it was really always an important aspect of the system of checks and balances that was supposed to guarantee liberty in this country.

I am not convinced. The US has become plutocratic through a number of processes; for most of them, the states were willing handmaidens of the plutocracy- state militia called out to suppress strikes, states competing to achieve lowest-common-denominator regulations on corporate activity, state politics becoming just as corrupt as federal if not more so.

Likewise for global imperialism- we began our imperialism as early as the 1890s and the average person in the average state fucking cheered; this has never changed.

I don't think the state ability to secede was ever critical to either of those processes. The most you can argue is that without federalism we'd have a more confederate-style government unable to act as an imperial power upon anyone... but have you paused to consider the price of that? Would we really be better off that way? What about the cost to our standard of living? Or to our freedoms- our individual freedoms, the ones that are far more often infringed by state laws where Republicans wage the culture war, and far less often infringed by the federal government?

We HAVE seen consequences, and we continue to see consequences. The Congress just passed a bill which Obama signed giving the Fed the power to indefinitely detain US citizens for 'association' with terrorism, effectively suspending habeus corpus. They're about to hand off power to major copyright holders to single-handedly shut down websites without reference to a court or any other check if they even suspect them of copyright violation.

Are there not state governments that would do the same, given the chance? Are the states any less corruptible, by virtue of being smaller? Would removing all restraint on them make them more trustworthy than an unrestrained federal government?

In exchange for one anticipated tyrant, you would give us dozens of real ones.

Whereas the consequences of no one exercising the 'rights' to secede and to ignore federal laws have been... well, honestly not all that onerous. Despite endless shrieking about how income taxes or desegregation or federal highway regulations or the Department of Education were going to bring about tyranny, how they were the end of freedom and state's rights, nothing particularly bad has happened.

Sayeth the Berliner in 1934

I could damn well point to imprisonments and oppression in 1934 Germany- you're suffering from severe historical myopia if you don't know about what happened early in the Third Reich. Already in 1934, the long knives were coming out, the trade unionists and socialists were being rounded up, the blatant laws of the Gleichschaltung were being passed.

If secession were so vital to the health of democracy, we would expect to have seen suffering and tyranny in the US a lot sooner. It should not take a hundred years for the consequences of the lack of a truly essential liberty to become noticeable to random bystanders.

I have not forgotten that there were people much like you predicting much the same consequences from the New Deal; it didn't happen. If we are suffering a slide to tyranny now, it is not because we have a strong federal government; it is because too many of the American people have fallen into the trap of supporting pro-tyranny politicians. Devolving power from the federal to the state level would not change this much- speaking of the New Deal era, remember Huey Long?

Ask a southern black.

Indeed, why don't we? Why don't we ask some of the blacks who, after getting land and the vote during Reconstruction, were slowly driven off their new land and deprived of suffrage, if they would have liked to have their counties secede from the state governments they were losing control of as Federal troops left?

I've come to the conclusion, after spending years thinking and researching, that exit is ultimately better than voice at securing freedom. The right to withdraw from political association is only occasionally recognized these days, but it's really fundamental to a liberal worldview. If market relationships have to be truly voluntary, as some of my friends on the left insist, to be just, why do political relationships get a pass?

Because it is the dirty, unpleasant job of government to do the things that everyone would rather have done, but that all too few are honorable or humble enough to undertake themselves for the common good. All the things that cannot be made to happen by people meeting and agreeing one-on-one to do them, but that still must be done if society is not to decay or dissolve into a thousand petty local tyrannies.

I would argue that a big government is in some ways easier to hold accountable than a small one, because it is less likely to random-walk its way into extremism.

[Spoonist]

This "right" to secede if taken to extremes like Plushie gives with the Paris example is just detrimental to any sort of union, country or tribe. It would also destabilize whole regions and lead to more conflicts - not less.
It's in the interest of any umberallla org to balance rich parts with poor parts to increase overall wealth and competiveness of the whole. This gives that any rich part, if selfish, has an interest in not being in a union of poorer peers. Then it becomes an added incentive for the rich part to subjugate and exploit the poorer part, something which could only be stopped by such an umberella org.

Look at most bigger powers, they have all had minorities which have wanted to split. If splitting would have been as easy as a local referendum then europe would be about 500 countries instead of 50ish. Italy would have definately been divided into 20 to 30 subunits. In spain there are plenty of villages where the basaques have a local majority, even though they don't on a regional scale. Any trade in such an ever changing environment would be a nightmare.

Then where do we stop this madness? Should a single citizen be allowed to split from his country? Like in that Simpson episode.

Nah, what is needed is better negotiators from outside which could help an internal dispute like yugoslavia. Not greater powers to the local unit.

[Panzersharkcat]

I am not convinced. The US has become plutocratic through a number of processes; for most of them, the states were willing handmaidens of the plutocracy- state militia called out to suppress strikes, states competing to achieve lowest-common-denominator regulations on corporate activity, state politics becoming just as corrupt as federal if not more so.

Likewise for global imperialism- we began our imperialism as early as the 1890s and the average person in the average state fucking cheered; this has never changed.

Well, I won't dispute the idea that state politics are every bit as corrupt as federal politics. Politicians will be politicians, no matter what level of government. Same with the average person in the street going, "Hur hur yay Empire hur."

I don't think the state ability to secede was ever critical to either of those processes. The most you can argue is that without federalism we'd have a more confederate-style government unable to act as an imperial power upon anyone... but have you paused to consider the price of that? Would we really be better off that way? What about the cost to our standard of living? Or to our freedoms- our individual freedoms, the ones that are far more often infringed by state laws where Republicans wage the culture war, and far less often infringed by the federal government?

I would say yes. Considering one of the powers given to the federal government is to maintain smooth trade between the states, example being that states can't pass exorbitant tariffs on each other, I don't think that would affect standard of living very much, unless you mean things like safety and environmental regulations. Same with the whole culture war, bit. I'll try to find the articles later but I believe even Alabama or some other ultra-right wing state voted down an initiative to ban abortion.

Are there not state governments that would do the same, given the chance? Are the states any less corruptible, by virtue of being smaller? Would removing all restraint on them make them more trustworthy than an unrestrained federal government?

In exchange for one anticipated tyrant, you would give us dozens of real ones.

I would not remove all restraint on them. I favor even more local units of government to check those of the states, right down to individuals maintaining vigilance over their liberties. Of course, I'll admit that's a tall order coming from the "hur hur hurray for the Empire dur" crowd but I would still prefer that to an overpowering federal government, given how much more damage a centralized power can inflict, like unceasing warfare with the outside. There are roles for the federal government to play, like in the instance of the Thirteenth Amendment banning slavery. Even if I disagreed with the waging of the Civil War, the US may as well keep one of the good things to come out of it.

I could damn well point to imprisonments and oppression in 1934 Germany- you're suffering from severe historical myopia if you don't know about what happened early in the Third Reich. Already in 1934, the long knives were coming out, the trade unionists and socialists were being rounded up, the blatant laws of the Gleichschaltung were being passed.

If secession were so vital to the health of democracy, we would expect to have seen suffering and tyranny in the US a lot sooner. It should not take a hundred years for the consequences of the lack of a truly essential liberty to become noticeable to random bystanders.

Secession is only a tool. I would consider nullification of unjust laws a better solution, down all the way to jury nullification. In any case, I would considering falling standards in schools, harassment of home-schoolers, a relatively high tax burden in one form or another for those without wealth or political connections, inflation screwing over the poor, indefinite detention, perpetual war, thousands of obscure laws being passed yearly, and burdensome regulations that hit small businesses harder than those with political connections to all be fairly onerous consequences.

I have not forgotten that there were people much like you predicting much the same consequences from the New Deal; it didn't happen. If we are suffering a slide to tyranny now, it is not because we have a strong federal government; it is because too many of the American people have fallen into the trap of supporting pro-tyranny politicians. Devolving power from the federal to the state level would not change this much- speaking of the New Deal era, remember Huey Long?

Pro-tyranny politicians go hand-in-hand with powerful governments. I will concede that this applies to all levels of government, though, and the fact that too many Americans throw their support to would-be tyrants.

Because it is the dirty, unpleasant job of government to do the things that everyone would rather have done, but that all too few are honorable or humble enough to undertake themselves for the common good. All the things that cannot be made to happen by people meeting and agreeing one-on-one to do them, but that still must be done if society is not to decay or dissolve into a thousand petty local tyrannies.

Despite all my pessimism about the average American being "hur hur yay Imperialism dur," I think you underestimate their capacity to simply get along without somebody to coerce them with a gun and you overestimate the ability of the government to do those things. They are drawn from the same lot of people, after all, and I'm fairly certain a healthy chunk of them didn't go into government because of selfless desire to help the poor.

I would argue that a big government is in some ways easier to hold accountable than a small one, because it is less likely to random-walk its way into extremism.

I would counter that a big one won't randomly walk its way there because it will take the more direct path. As much as I hate to quote Mao Zedong, especially when he was saying this as a way to draw out dissidents, "[Let] a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend..."

[Simon_Jester]

I don't think the state ability to secede was ever critical to either of those processes. The most you can argue is that without federalism we'd have a more confederate-style government unable to act as an imperial power upon anyone... but have you paused to consider the price of that? Would we really be better off that way? What about the cost to our standard of living? Or to our freedoms- our individual freedoms, the ones that are far more often infringed by state laws where Republicans wage the culture war, and far less often infringed by the federal government?

I would say yes. Considering one of the powers given to the federal government is to maintain smooth trade between the states, example being that states can't pass exorbitant tariffs on each other, I don't think that would affect standard of living very much, unless you mean things like safety and environmental regulations. Same with the whole culture war, bit. I'll try to find the articles later but I believe even Alabama or some other ultra-right wing state voted down an initiative to ban abortion.

It happens sometimes, but not others. The main thing you'd see is incredible, ironclad social conservatism in much of what is now Red State territory. Under the old social conservative rules, "so it was in the days of our fathers" is a debate-winning argument; people may privately chafe against the system, but they won't keep arguing after you make your appeal to tradition. Old laws on social policy become very, very hard to repeal in an environment like that. The legal regime in the Deep South would, at best, resemble that of Ireland on social policy. It would probably be worse.

There are also economic issues- large scale federal projects that acted as a huge shot in the arm for parts of the nation that until then were always rather limited in scope, like the major federal land grants to the transcontinental railways, or the interstate highway system, or the Tennessee Valley Authority. The TVA was a blatant use of federal power to literally drown local communities, but it brought electricity to much of the Deep South and so helped bring them into the 20th century a lot faster than they'd get there on their own. Poor states would remain poor; rich states would become richer. This would be bad for much of "Red State" country, ironically including most of the places where secessionism has any sympathy from the public.

I would not remove all restraint on them. I favor even more local units of government to check those of the states, right down to individuals maintaining vigilance over their liberties. Of course, I'll admit that's a tall order coming from the "hur hur hurray for the Empire dur" crowd but I would still prefer that to an overpowering federal government, given how much more damage a centralized power can inflict, like unceasing warfare with the outside. There are roles for the federal government to play, like in the instance of the Thirteenth Amendment banning slavery. Even if I disagreed with the waging of the Civil War, the US may as well keep one of the good things to come out of it.

The problem is that attempts to enforce civil rights on the states are the hottest battlefield of the question of state's rights. If the federal government can reach into your community and enforce Brown v. Board or Roe v. Wade or the Fourteenth Amendment in general, then state's rights are basically a dead letter as a 'safeguard' against Federal authority. Economic stuff like income taxes or the Department of Education is beside the point- that just logically follows, once the enforcement power is in place for civil rights issues.

But if the federal government can't reach into your community and enforce those things, then those civil rights things will simply not be enforced over much of the country, and many, many people will suffer direct, painful oppression.

Secession is only a tool. I would consider nullification of unjust laws a better solution, down all the way to jury nullification. In any case, I would considering falling standards in schools, harassment of home-schoolers, a relatively high tax burden in one form or another for those without wealth or political connections, inflation screwing over the poor, indefinite detention, perpetual war, thousands of obscure laws being passed yearly, and burdensome regulations that hit small businesses harder than those with political connections to all be fairly onerous consequences.

Many of those things happen anyway at the state level- the ones that don't, honestly aren't the ones that impact the people the hardest. State law can be just as obscure and burdensome, and just as quick to suck up to monopolists. There are plenty of states whose school standards would fall if not for federal standards and the Department of Education- remember creationist textbooks? The traditional means of providing revenue for the states is property taxes- that falls much more heavily on the poor than on the rich in this day and age. Et painful cetera; it's just not as simple as "states good, feds bad."

I have not forgotten that there were people much like you predicting much the same consequences from the New Deal; it didn't happen. If we are suffering a slide to tyranny now, it is not because we have a strong federal government; it is because too many of the American people have fallen into the trap of supporting pro-tyranny politicians. Devolving power from the federal to the state level would not change this much- speaking of the New Deal era, remember Huey Long?

Pro-tyranny politicians go hand-in-hand with powerful governments. I will concede that this applies to all levels of government, though, and the fact that too many Americans throw their support to would-be tyrants.

Yes- and if anything it's worse without someone capable of enforcing the Constitution on the states; believe it or not there's a passage in Article IV about the federal government guaranteeing a republican (i.e. democratic) form of government for the states. Secessionism means that particular bet is off.

Because it is the dirty, unpleasant job of government to do the things that everyone would rather have done, but that all too few are honorable or humble enough to undertake themselves for the common good. All the things that cannot be made to happen by people meeting and agreeing one-on-one to do them, but that still must be done if society is not to decay or dissolve into a thousand petty local tyrannies.

Despite all my pessimism about the average American being "hur hur yay Imperialism dur," I think you underestimate their capacity to simply get along without somebody to coerce them with a gun and you overestimate the ability of the government to do those things. They are drawn from the same lot of people, after all, and I'm fairly certain a healthy chunk of them didn't go into government because of selfless desire to help the poor.

It's not the quality of the individuals, it's the structure. Good government is structured so as to force the people in it to enforce the laws. There are limits- some laws are unenforceable and it's probably just as well that they are. But all in all, the evolution of bureaucracy and the rule of law (as opposed to rule-by-decree by individual magistrates) has been one long, slow process of taking power out of the hands of individual petty tyrants like the typical European feudal lord, and putting it into the hands of organizations that at least self-check for corruption.

It's not all about coercion at gunpoint; that may be ultima ratio regum but it's not the first argument of kings, or republics. What's critical is the day to day functioning of the machine- this is the end served by the paperwork and the traffic police and the yearly tax payment. People would largely function without it if need be, we wouldn't all wander around like chickens with our heads cut off. But we'd quickly find ourselves worse off for it, as the largely impersonal and neutral hand of big government was replaced by the very personal and demanding touch of small government.

I would argue that a big government is in some ways easier to hold accountable than a small one, because it is less likely to random-walk its way into extremism.

I would counter that a big one won't randomly walk its way there because it will take the more direct path. As much as I hate to quote Mao Zedong, especially when he was saying this as a way to draw out dissidents, "[Let] a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend..."

By all means, let a hundred schools of thought contend- but have a mechanism by which we can enact N-modular redundancy, and by which the life of the people may proceed unmolested when some of the schools of thought lose the plot.

[Ziggy Stardust]

Separating people into neatly defined districts where they can be ruled over by others has always been better and more convenient for the rulers than the ruled.

What about the Civil Rights Act? What about gerrymandering, as Texas is now doing? What about woman's suffrage? Labor laws? What about all of the many, many things that require a strong federal government to prevent?

There is a reason that "Balkanization" is considered a pejorative term. What you are advocating is a slide towards tribalism, and how does that help anyone?

Free sortition would be a wonderful thing to see someday.

No, it would be horrible, for the most part. Our government does a good job of preventing the "tyranny of the masses," and protecting the rights of the disenfranchised.

Free sortition would destroy this check. Any group of people with a sense of self-interest can secede and create their own government. By definition, this group of people would be one of a single ideology, religion, race, or whatever other means of division you care to think of. Anyone that lives within this group's area of control that does not belong to said ideology, religion, race, or whatever will their rights. It has happened time and time again throughout history. And there is absolutely nothing they can do about it, because they have no recourse, save for sortition of their own. Of course, the first group is not going to want to allow a subset of itself to be self-government, because that erodes their own power. So now they will be fighting, and killing, each other.

Seriously, the entirety of human history has shown that what you advocate is a bad idea.

[Plushie]

I am not convinced. The US has become plutocratic through a number of processes; for most of them, the states were willing handmaidens of the plutocracy- state militia called out to suppress strikes, states competing to achieve lowest-common-denominator regulations on corporate activity, state politics becoming just as corrupt as federal if not more so.

Likewise for global imperialism- we began our imperialism as early as the 1890s and the average person in the average state fucking cheered; this has never changed.

I don't think the state ability to secede was ever critical to either of those processes. The most you can argue is that without federalism we'd have a more confederate-style government unable to act as an imperial power upon anyone... but have you paused to consider the price of that? Would we really be better off that way? What about the cost to our standard of living? Or to our freedoms- our individual freedoms, the ones that are far more often infringed by state laws where Republicans wage the culture war, and far less often infringed by the federal government?

Are there not state governments that would do the same, given the chance? Are the states any less corruptible, by virtue of being smaller? Would removing all restraint on them make them more trustworthy than an unrestrained federal government?

In exchange for one anticipated tyrant, you would give us dozens of real ones.

I could damn well point to imprisonments and oppression in 1934 Germany- you're suffering from severe historical myopia if you don't know about what happened early in the Third Reich. Already in 1934, the long knives were coming out, the trade unionists and socialists were being rounded up, the blatant laws of the Gleichschaltung were being passed.

If secession were so vital to the health of democracy, we would expect to have seen suffering and tyranny in the US a lot sooner. It should not take a hundred years for the consequences of the lack of a truly essential liberty to become noticeable to random bystanders.

I have not forgotten that there were people much like you predicting much the same consequences from the New Deal; it didn't happen. If we are suffering a slide to tyranny now, it is not because we have a strong federal government; it is because too many of the American people have fallen into the trap of supporting pro-tyranny politicians. Devolving power from the federal to the state level would not change this much- speaking of the New Deal era, remember Huey Long?

Indeed, why don't we? Why don't we ask some of the blacks who, after getting land and the vote during Reconstruction, were slowly driven off their new land and deprived of suffrage, if they would have liked to have their counties secede from the state governments they were losing control of as Federal troops left?

Because it is the dirty, unpleasant job of government to do the things that everyone would rather have done, but that all too few are honorable or humble enough to undertake themselves for the common good. All the things that cannot be made to happen by people meeting and agreeing one-on-one to do them, but that still must be done if society is not to decay or dissolve into a thousand petty local tyrannies.

I would argue that a big government is in some ways easier to hold accountable than a small one, because it is less likely to random-walk its way into extremism.

Sometimes I wonder if it's worth doing this kind of thing. I'll never convince you of a damned thing, and you'll certainly never convince me of anything. You've obviously put a lot of thought into your beliefs and, it might surprise you to find out, so have I. Ultimately I feel like we'd end up arguing past each other, like two people using different languages.

Whatever, I'll do the irrational thing and try anyway.

The checks of a Constitution like the American one in its original form aren't to protect against tyranny, per se, but against corruption, used in the classical republican sense of the term. Tyranny is the ultimate outcome of corruption, but the Constitution was designed (for an extremely loose meaning of 'designed') to prevent the American polity from setting foot on that road. It wasn't to protect against tyranny because it was hoped tyranny would be forestalled by entirely preventing hints of corruption.

However, it wasn't perfect because it failed. It began failing almost immediately. The very first administration saw the collapse of its politics into factions, both with deep interests that would prevent the united pursuit of the common good. Now, it's a testament to the depth and robustness of American society that we have survived so long without totally lapsing into tyranny (although we're much closer than you might think -- remember, tyrants can still do things you like and approve of -- and we have tyrannical organizations within the Executive Branch today, according to James Madison's definition of tyranny. It is not always used for entirely corrupted purposes, it might even be used for popular purposes that you like, but it's there), but the danger is and always will be there. This kind of thing isn't just an abstract worry, it's a drag on our very civilization. The kind of society that fosters vast, relatively evenly distributed wealth, relatively progressive thinking, and gradual-but-still-present evolution of American society towards something better than its past self, all depend on having an at least moderately well-functioning republic.

And that's something we cannot take for granted as long as corruption is allowed to creep in along every avenue (or boldly throw open the door and sit down at the public table, as is more common these days).

I've spent an absurd amount of time pondering the types of problems that the Founders faced. I've gone back and read a lot of the same literature they would be familiar with, or at least decent summaries. Now, I wouldn't call myself an expert, although they were themselves amateurs, and I wouldn't dare to compare my capacity to theirs, or even to that of most other people alive today, but I feel like I've done enough to have an opinion. The right of state secession is a vital component in checking corruption in a Federal Republic like ours. Without it you're not going to get an instantly corrupt, instantly tyrannical government, but it's one more layer of protection that's been pealed back. Eventually you find yourself with nothing left and then the tyranny is all too real. Hopefully, and I actually do believe this, we won't live to see that happen here, but if we leave these problems to grow un-hindered then the seeds of our sloth will grow up amongst our descendents. I don't want to die knowing I doomed my children or grandchildren to live in an un-free America.

My comments on more radical secession than just state secession are related to a sub-project within my studies, of designing a constitutional system more 'advanced' than that the Founding Generation was able to come up with. It uses most of the same mechanisms they did (Like I said, I'm not as equal to the task as they so I don't think I'm capable of truly innovating anything myself, I just have the benefit of experience with the slow failure of their own experiment), plus a few things I have stolen from political literature more modern than their own time. If you would allow me the digression, imagine a republic better than the one we have. One that is designed with the faults of our present state in mind. I can't say it's perfect, especially since I am, once more, a total amateur, but here it is.

The primary principle supporting the right of secession from the polity is non-territoriality in state jurisdiction. The state, no matter which level of government we're talking about, doesn't have jurisdiction over land but instead over people. The land itself is brought into the state by the people who own it, rather it being a part of the state's existing jurisdiction and the people being de facto tenants as the situation is at present. That means that something like Ziggy's objection of tyrannical majorities over small seceding territories wouldn't be possible because seceding groups would ONLY bring themselves and their real estate with them. Any people who were not seceding, like tenants or other kinds of semi-permanent residents, would remain a citizen within the state being seceded from, entitled to all the protections it offered.

That's a small part of the improved republic I have been imagining up for a few years now, but it's the relevant portion. I don't want to bore you with the whole thing, un-finished and un-polished as it is

Do you see where I'm coming from? I actually have considered many of the problems you (and others) are bringing up and either come up with solutions or at least tried. None of my solutions are perfect, but then again, nothing a mere human ever creates can be. Kant had that one to the T. Everything we do is an eternal work in progress. Admitting that is probably the most I really would like to get you to concede, although I imagine you might already agree, even if you still disagree on my more substantial points

Truth be told, getting closer to the original point of this thread, I'm not that huge a Ron Paul supporter. Although I've tried to leave my libertarian leanings behind as much as possible since adopting a more classical republican stance on most matters, the two are really still pretty closely tied together. Google up 'republican liberal' sometime, doing your best to ignore all the clap-trap about left-leaning members of the modern Republican Party. My more immediate preferences for 'solving' our current political problems involve calling for an Article V Convention, rather than hoping for the victory of any one candidate. I've learned far too much in the last couple years to believe anything can be solved by getting the 'right' man in office. Our problems are institutional, not personal or political.

[Simon_Jester]

Look, I'm not entirely unsympathetic, and I do agree we have a boatload of systemic problems- I just don't think secession is a good answer to them. On balance, I feel that the federal government has been more consistently on the side of creating "the kind of society that fosters vast, relatively evenly distributed wealth, relatively progressive thinking, and gradual-but-still-present evolution of American society towards something better than its past self" than the other levels of administrative unit we've had in this country.

And I don't think trying to fix this by giving states jurisdictions over people and not land is a good idea. A few problems:
-What about unclaimed property? Vacant lots, nature preserves, and so on...
-What about property owned by corporations?
-What about simple continuity? It's a lot easier to survey administrative boundaries than it is to track citizens- you do not want to know what happens when administrative units with different legal regimes get commingled because people under different jurisdictions are living side by side and mixing with each other until the boundary stops being clear. Patchwork law is bad law; witness the Holy Roman Empire.
-As a practical matter, if my neighbors wish to live under a new legal regime and I don't, what becomes of me? As soon as I travel to anyone else's property as part of routine daily activity, I am subject to the new regime. To avoid this I have to move, which creates the kind of mass exoduses of population that nobody really wants enacted in their country on a regular basis.