In a recent poll, one in five agreed that states have the right to peacefully secede from the Union.
By Christopher Ketcham
Sarah Palin’s secessionist sympathies sparked minor hysteria last week.Her crime was hailing with round praise the work of the cranky AlaskanIndependence Party, which advocates a statewide plebiscite on thesecession of Alaska from the Union. “The fires of hell are frozenglaciers compared to my hatred for the American government,” theparty’s late founder, gold miner Joe Vogler, once said. “And I won’t beburied under their damn flag.”
Palin’s husband was a member of the AIP for seven years, and Palinherself has courted the AIP for more than a decade. In an address tothe party convention this spring, wearing a ski parka and looking likeshe was about to decamp into the back country, Palin told thesecessionists, “Keep up the good work.” Dexter Clark, the white-beardedvice chairman of the AIP, recently explained the motivation behind the”good work”: “Through oppression, greed, corruption, incompetence andfolly, the [U.S. government] is forfeiting its moral authority.”
The thing is, it’s not just residents of the Last Frontier who favorbreaking away from the Union. According to a Zogby poll conducted inJuly, more than 20% of U.S. adults — one in five, about the samenumber of American Colonists who supported revolt against England in1775 — agreed that “any state or region has the right to peaceablysecede from the United States and become an independent republic.” Some18% “would support a secessionist effort in my state.” The motivation of these quiet revolutionaries? As many as 44% ofthose polled agreed that “the United States’ system is broken andcannot be fixed by traditional two-party politics and elections.”
Put this in stark terms: In a scientific, random sample poll ofall Americans, almost half considered the current political system tobe in terminal disorder. One-fifth would countenance a dissolution ofthe bond. This is not a hiccup of opinion. In an October 2006 pollconducted by the Opinion Research Corp. and broadcast on CNN, 71% ofAmericans agreed that “our system of government is broken and cannot befixed.”
No surprise that the disquiet finds a voice in popular movements. In2007, a small group of delegates to the second North Americansecessionist convention — the first was in Burlington, Vt., in 2006 –met in Chattanooga, Tenn., to discuss how to foment the collapse anddestruction of the United States of America. They came representing 11rebel groups in 36 states, under banners such as the Republic ofCascadia (wedding Oregon and Washington), Independent California(forging the world’s fifth-largest economy), the United Republic ofTexas (returning the Lone Star State to its aloneness), the League ofthe South (uniting the secesh states of old Dixie) and the SecondVermont Republic (separating the Green Mountain State from the U.S.).
The dominant idea among the delegates was that the U.S. experimenthad failed; it had become impractical, tragically ridiculous, itsleaders and institutions bought off, whored out, unaccountable andunanswerable to the needs of citizens. The United States would have tobe reborn smaller — our loyalties realigned to the needs of localities– if the American dream was to survive. The convention presented, ineffect, a marriage of progressives, paleo-conservatives, libertarians,Christian separatists, Southern nationalists, all united “to put an endto the American empire and reestablish freedom and democracy on thestate and regional level,” as organizer Kirkpatrick Sale put it.
The delegates settled on a list of principles they called theChattanooga Declaration. “The deepest questions of human liberty andgovernment facing our time go beyond right and left, and in fact havemade the old left-right split meaningless and dead,” the declarationread. “The privileges, monopolies and powers that private corporationshave won from government threaten … health, prosperity and liberty,and have already killed American self-government by the people.” Theanswer, it went on, was that the American states “ought to be free andself-governing.”
The Declaration of Independence 250 years earlier asked for asimilar dedication to self-governance: “[W]henever any form ofgovernment becomes destructive … ” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “it is theright of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute newgovernment…. “
It could be argued that secession is the primal American act, asold as the concept of the states themselves. What else did our foundersaccomplish in 1776 but secession from the tyranny of England? In otherwords, what the secessionists would argue is that although they areanti-United States, they are most certainly pro-American.
Secession worries the staid opinion gatekeepers of the majormedia. Sarah Palin’s “flirtation” with the AIP should make us “uneasy,”as Rosa Brooks warned in these pages. Palin’s secessionist ties raise”serious questions,” averred the New York Times. A more honestassessment is that the separatism of the Alaskan Independence Party isnot so weird or wacky — or out of keeping with what appears to be asentiment rooted in that loveliest of American predilections, ourcrotchety contrariness.