It’s hard to imagine anyone doing a worse job of solving most of our problems than the U.S. government.
Whoever wins on Nov. 4, few Americans will harbor any illusionsabout their national unity. No matter which pairing one chooses—red andblue, Right and Left, coastal elites and flyoversalt-of-the-earthers—there is no getting around our status as a countrydivided, a people set apart from one another as much by regionalculture as by religion or political ideology.
A perfect time, in other words, to talk about secession—which iswhat will happen when the Middlebury Institute’s Third North AmericanSecessionist Conference convenes in Manchester, New Hampshire a weekand a half after the election. Thomas Naylor, whose Second VermontRepublic is one of the country’s most active secessionistorganizations, is candid about the motive for the scheduling: “The datewas set,” he tells me, “on the assumption that Hillary Clinton would beelected—and of course that’s not going to happen.” Nevertheless, thepost-election time frame is “looking more and more important every day”as popular outrage against the Wall Street bailout and anxiety overimpending recession continue to build.
The Manchester conference brings together secessionists of alltypes. Writing in Orion, Bill Kauffman described the crowd from 2006 as“ponytails and suits, turtlenecks and sneakers, an Alaskan gold minerand one delegate from the neo-Confederate League of the South who worea grey greatcoat, as if sitting for a daguerreotype just before thebattle.” Despite—or perhaps because of—their ideological differences,they all share a common cause: to regionalize, to decentralize, todebunk the myth of a nation indivisible and replace it with a storythat gives difference its due.
That story is by no means a new one. The idea of politicalseparatism is, as Middlebury Institute founder Kirkpatrick Sale putsit, “as American as America.” From the 13 colonies declaring theirindependence from the British Crown in 1776, to the rash ofstate-splittings that took place during the early years of theRepublic, to Norman Mailer’s secessionist 1969 campaign for mayor ofNew York City, the aura of divisibility has long been a part of theAmerican tradition.