The United States at the beginning of the 21st century is an unsatisfied, confused, and increasingly unhappy place. There are many reasons for this, but the foremost one is that it is also too big a place—and has been, Donald W. Livingston, a professor of philosophy at Emory University, argues, since the Louisiana Purchase in 1804, which almost doubled the extent of the Union. Professor Livingston has been developing this argument for years, taking for his starting point Aristotle and other classical writers whose ideas regarding the optimal size of republican government were further developed by political theorists in medieval and renaissance times. His most recent essay on the subject, “Secession and American Republicanism,” appeared in the October number of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture in company with an article by Kirkpatrick Sale (the author of Human Scale) whose thesis supports Livingston’s, though he approaches his subject from a contemporary, rather than an historical, perspective. It is a statistical fact, Mr. Sale asserts, that the most efficient, productive, wealthy, healthy, and happiest of the 223 recognized political entities in the world today are also among the smallest of them. By comparing the relevant factors, Sale estimates the optimal size of a successful state at somewhere between three and five million people. Fifty percent of the world’s nations have populations of less than 5.5 million. (Ancient Athens numbered around 160,000 people.) Similarly, 12 of the 20 top-ranking nations in terms of per capita GDP are less than 35,000 square miles in area. Seventy-seven percent of the world’s economically best-off countries are small ones. Sale’s figures allow him to propose what he calls Sales’s Law: “Economic and social misery increases in direct proportion to the size and power of the central government of a nation.” Sale attributes this to the fact that a territorially extensive state, or empire, tends inevitably toward inefficiency, costliness, bureaucracy, corruption, and gross inequality in wealth. States built to a large scale are, finally, ungovernable. Certainly the United States has become ungovernable, and everyone but professional politicians, ideologues, ignoramuses, and fools know it. What is to be done? Lenin would have asked. Both Professor Livingston and Mr. Sale recommend secession through “peaceful, popular, powerful secession,” as Sale puts it. Livingston expands on this suggestion. “[The states],” he says, “must assume again what Madison called the ‘duty’ to protect their citizens from unconstitutional acts of the central government. This can only be done by prudential interposition and nullification—and by reviving the discourse of secession and division—not as the lawless, revolutionary act that post-Lincolnian nationalists view it to be, but as a necessary and lawful constituent of the republican tradition mapped to a continental scale.” It is not that the current political climate, more or less determined on the Democratic as well as on the Republican side by the completely unforeseen Tea Party, has encouraged much talk, explicit or otherwise, of secession. Rather, in this atmosphere, overt secessionist talk would not sound as radically irresponsible as previously it would have done. I, for one, have never held much hope for the prospects for secession in a country where people of so many interests, opinions, religions, and races are intermingled in each of the 50 states. But Donald Livingston’s essay has encouraged me to think again. Livingston imagines the United States divided into five separate unions: the North, Midwest, Southwest, Pacific Northwest, and South. Each of these regions is socially and politically complex in varying degrees, and none of them is homogeneous. On the other hand, each also has a unique character, displays a recognizable profile, and elicits a particular set of associations—economic, social, cultural, geographic, and climatic--answering to the icons inscribed on every country and state `in the geography books studied by Americans of approximately my age when they were children. Could these generalized characters suffice to act as the gravitational core for five new republican states in North America? But what of the substantial numbers of political and social dissenters trapped within the boundaries of the newly formed republics? Would they—could they-- find a means of coexistence with their forcible compatriots, or would they withdraw among their own kind, or would they simply up and leave for another, more congenial, neighboring republic? Of course, there is no answer to so doubly hypothetical a question. And there are, inevitably, many other problems with secession. As Professor Livingston says, the impetus for the division of the United States into smaller-scale republics would have to come from the states. But why would the state politicians provide that impetus? Most or many of them hope to use state office as a springboard to federal office, where the power, the glory, and the money are. Still, many, no doubt, prefer to remain where they are as big frogs in relatively small ponds. Who knows? Another potential difficulty is the extent to which the federal government has entwined itself in the affairs of state politics, business, and society through loans, subsidies, handouts, regulations, mandates, and many other activities. All these ties have the effect of making the 50 state governments dependent upon the federal government to fund many of the entailed expenses. Republican status, of course, would nullify these unconstitutional attachments and dependencies, at least after a certain time. But there is also the matter of the financial ill health of many or most of the states today, brought on by their own fiscal irresponsibility and political pandering, greed, federal mandates and regulations, and now the Great Recession. Can the state governments afford independence from Washington? Do they really wish to afford it? Again, these are unanswerable questions. Yet some big thing is preparing to happen in America, and sooner perhaps rather than later. Could secession possibly be it? ### |