Author: Arthur Versluis

As published in Modern Age, Summer 2007

Arthur Versluis is Professor of American Studies at Michigan State University, and author of numerous books, including Island Farm and The Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance.

The beginning of the twenty-first century saw a mostly unremarked development of considerable significance: for the first time since the founding of the Confederate States of America, the United States once again had an extensive secessionist movement. In 2003, author Thomas Naylor founded the movement for a Second Vermont Republic (the first such republic of Vermont having lasted from 1777 to 1791); and in 2006 and 2007, author Kirkpatrick Sale organized two annual North American symposiums of secessionist groups. Within a year, Sale had more than thirty North-American secessionist organizations listed in his directory, the most serious of which were in Vermont, Texas, Alaska, and Hawaii.1 Of course, it is commonplace across the political spectrum and certainly in mainstream print and broadcast media, to dismiss such movements as quixotic self-parody. As we will see, that would be a mistake.

In an article in Modern Age, “The Revolutionary Conservatism of Jefferson’s ‘Little Republics,’” we saw the extent to which Jefferson had emphasized decentralization and the primary political authority of the townships. We also pointed out how the ensuing several hundred years of American history represented a continuous, growing repudiation of Jeffersonian decentralism, and an intensifying nationalist centralism that culminated in the Behemoth of Imperial Washington, D.C., in the early twenty-first century, with its far-flung military bases, its ever-greater national bureaucracies, and its extraordinary deficit expenditures. The twenty-first century American secessionist movement emerged out of exactly this historical context - - that is, out of conscious rejection of American gigantism.

Historical Context of Secessionism

We should begin with the ur-text of American history, the Declaration of Independence. Taken in a contemporary context, what might we make of this Declaration of the Thirteen States? As we all know, it asserts forthrightly that

when in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions
of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

The Declaration continues that

To secure these rights [to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness], Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, - - That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

These words are or at least at one time were familiar to every schoolchild, but they take on a new significance when placed in the context of a contemporary American secession movement. If secession from Britain during the period of the British Empire was a legitimate act, then contemporary secessionists ask, why is it illegitimate to consider any subsequent secession from what is widely referred to today as an American Empire?
Such a question seems entirely foreclosed. But is it? Russell Wheeler, president of the Governance Institute, and a constitutional scholar associated with the Brookings Institution, ridicules the idea:

If Vermont had a powerful enough army and said, “We’re leaving the union,” and the national government said, “No, you’re not,” and they fought a war over it and Vermont won, then you could say Vermont proved the point. But that’s not going to happen.2

This puts it in a nutshell: secession and decentralization are from this sarcastic perspective indistinguishable from violent rebellion, a doomed course of action given the massive resources of the American national government and national military. The question of secession was settled by the War Between the States, and that is the end of it, or so it would seem. Without doubt, Lincoln’s war was pivotal for the centralization of American national power at the expense of the states.3

But was this centralization of power inevitable? It is revealing to compare two nearly contemporaneous civil wars: the American, and the Swiss. The bloodshed and destruction of the American Civil War are quite well known, and need only a gesture here: well over half a million dead, and a terrible toll on civilians. The Swiss Civil War was rather different. In 1847, the Swiss federal troops, under the command of General Guillaume Henri Dufour (1787-1875) of Geneva, occupied primarily Catholic cities including Fribourg, and a bloody civil war was certainly possible. But Dufour explicitly forbade his troops from unnecessary bloodshed, refrained from battlefield slaughter, and won the war with under one-hundred casualties. The following year saw the approval of the Swiss confederation, and a very different kind of union than the American one.

Before the American Civil War, it was still broadly accepted in the United States that secession was possible - - hence some Northern legislators proposed constitutional amendments to prohibit it. The desire to prohibit secession would seem to demonstrate that it was de facto possible, as the Declaration of Independence itself would suggest. Of course, the Declaration does not have the status of law – but the U.S. Constitution does, and it nowhere prohibits secession. Nonetheless, after the American Civil War, the notion of secession in effect became anathema.

The Swiss Confederation, on the other hand, does make secession at least theoretically possible, as is visible not only in the secession of Jura from the Canton of Bern, effective in 1979, but also in Article 53 of the current Swiss Constitution, which reads as follows:

Article 53: Existence and Territory of the Cantons

(1)The Federation protects the existence and the territory of the Cantons.
(2)Modifications of the number of the Cantons, of the Cantons or their status are subject to the assent of the population concerned, of the Cantons concerned, and of the People and the Cantons.
(3)Modifications of the territory of a Canton are subject to the assent of the population concerned, of the Cantons concerned, and the assent of the Federal Parliament in the form of a federal decree.
(4)Intercantonal boundary settlements may be made by treaty between the Cantons concerned.

As Thomas Fleiner, Director of the Institute of Federalism at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and a leading international constitutional scholar points out, implied in 53.2 is a series of referenda that in point of fact could allow for a peaceful secession, as indeed has happened on a cantonal level in the very recent past.4 This is not to suggest that there is any such contemporary Swiss secession movement. There is not, and it is interesting to consider why.

Comparative Federalism: Swiss and American

All the sources and individuals I have consulted on the question of Swiss federalism emphasize two key factors in the Swiss system: direct democracy, and cultural depth and complexity built over time. Important legislation is always subject to referenda, that is, subject to the direct vote of the people, and indeed, to a required double majority at the cantonal and the federal levels. Direct democracy is an essential part of the Swiss system. But there is a second dimension of the Swiss polis that is also critical, as Lidija Basta Fleiner points out: the cultural dimension.5 Swiss multicultural federalism emerged from communes and cantons; it is built, so to say, from the ground up in a typically Swiss conservative way over a relatively long period. Thus, it has developed a stability that is embedded in Swiss culture, and that is ratified by the vote of the people. Both of these tend to be quite conservative in effect: for instance, only a small percentage of referenda actually pass.

These two dimensions of Swiss federalism are mostly absent from the contemporary national American political system, which has moved seemingly inexorably toward a stronger and stronger central government over the past hundred years or so. Whereas in Switzerland, national initiatives can be constrained by a referendum process, in the United States this is only possible on the state level. Furthermore, the American system has a separate national apparatus to enforce national laws, whereas the Swiss national government can only implement laws through the cantons and communes – thus, again, emphasizing the local dimensions of Swiss governance and putting constraints on grand national schemes that can come about without any local or regional initiative, support, or response.

As that indefatigable proponent of federalism and of the importance of Switzerland Denis de Rougemont remarked in The Heart of Europe, by the onset of World War II, the United States mostly had abandoned its decentralized federalism. Already in 1941, he brings up “an obvious question [concerning] Switzerland. Why has the canton remained relatively vigorous in that country, while in the United States of America, the corresponding unit, the state, has lost so much vitality?” His answer is the uniquely Swiss cultural combination of “conservatism and a progressive spirit” that has preserved local traditions, language, religion, and the corresponding localism of the cantons and communes that safeguard individual liberty and diversity. By definition, in a decentralized state, totalitarianism cannot emerge.6 In contrast, centralized, homogenized nation-states allow no real diversity: “they are like immense frozen political deserts.”

The American system has taken quite a while to arrive at centralism. It is true that Lincoln asserted a Hamiltonian agenda through his conduct during the Civil War, but this only set in motion an emphasis that we see repeated in the course of the twentieth century. One might note Theodore Roosevelt’s speech ”The New Nationalism” is Osawatomie, Kansas, in 1910, where he said

The National Government belongs to the whole American people, and where the whole American people are interested, that interest can be guarded only by the National Government. The betterment which we seek must be accomplished, I believe, mainly through the National Government. The American people are right in demanding that New Nationalism without which we cannot cope with new problems. The New Nationalism puts national need before sectional or personal advantage. It is impatient of the utter confusion that results from local legislatures attempting to treat national issues as local issues. It is still more impatient of the impotence which springs from over-divisions of governmental powers, the impotence which makes it possible for local selfishness or legal cunning, hired by wealthy special interests, to bring national activities to a deadlock.

The other Roosevelt usually is construed as the source of American twentieth-century state centralism, but, obviously, this tendency was well established by the 1930s and the New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson’s social programs, like the Vietnam War, were also only extensions of prior Rooseveltian and Wilsonian interventionism. By the early 1970’s, one finds the term “New Federalism” emerging in relation to the Nixon era, as if Nixon might have devolved centralist authority back to the states or localities - - but of course, nothing of the sort happened. The term “New Federalism” was an empty signifier, to be sure.
Once again, from the 1980s on, historians began to refer to Reagan’s “New Federalism,” and some, like Alan Brinkley of Columbia University, took Reagan’s rhetoric seriously enough to devote a book, The New Federalism, to his and his colleagues’ alarm over what they perceived as Republican efforts at decentralization of the American political system. As we all know, however, there in fact was no decentralization. The national deficits grew to incredible proportions over the course of Republican presidencies, and under the Bush, Jr. administration of the early twenty-first century, became truly gargantuan, while all manner of new national programs and schemes proliferated. What Eisenhower at least had warned against - - the military-industrial-espionage complex - - had become vast and uncontrollable, and the national government inserted its military presence almost everywhere around the globe.

During roughly this same era, the Swiss national government did gain some minimally greater authority, but the fact remains that the Confederatio Helvetica remained exactly that - - a confederation of individual states that, in turn, are aggregated individual communes. Furthermore, the Swiss system does not feature the kind of national election circus that the American presidential cycle has become, but rather entails the sober and restrained annual choosing of a president from the federal council. Thus, the Swiss presidency could not develop into the grotesque public spectacle we see in the United States, where for four or eight long years, one is treated to countless images of the same figure strutting forth, again and again, before the ever-ready presidential paparazzi.

In other words, the American spectacle of grand-state centralism - - marked by claims of “unitary executive authority,” attempted abrogations of habeas corpus, and assertions of a millenarian American destiny to rid the entire world of tyranny - - is inconceivable in the Swiss system. One might rejoin that Switzerland is a comparatively small country, and could not undertake grand Napoleonic follies (though there was a period long ago when some citizens might have been tempted). But such a rejoinder misses the point: during the same period of intense industrialization, technicization, and financialization of society, the Swiss nonetheless did not abandon their tradition of federal decentralization of power. The Swiss had no need for a “New Federalism” because they had not misplaced their original one.

American Secessionism

And so we begin to see how the twenty-first century American secessionist movement emerged within larger historical and international contexts. The most important of these contexts is the growth of centralized national governmental authority in the United States, which by the early twenty-first century, gave many citizens the sense that nothing could be done, that Behemoth will do what Behemoth will do, and that no individual or even community cold effect even a small change in its course. This sense of individual powerlessness was intensified by the widely unpopular invasion and occupation of Iraq, which has dragged on year after year without any likelihood of cessation, and which neither Democrats nor Republicans have seemed capable of bringing to a close.

Since the secession movement arguably began, and certainly was nurtured in Vermont, it is worth noting that in 2006-2007, many towns in Vermont held votes for the impeachment of the president. If American federalism more closely resembled the Swiss variety, these votes would not seem quite so far-fetched, because they very well might have led to a national referendum on the Iraq War. Instead, however, one is treated to the spectacle of Vermont citizens being ridiculed for their assertion of the New England town-hall-meeting tradition that in fact corresponds exactly to Swiss communally and cantonally-driven federalism. Local and regional authority thus is shunted aside as if it were irrelevant to anything.

Hence, one is unsurprised to find a Vermont and, indeed, a broader American secession movement. The very existence of the secession movement (or, to be more accurate, counter-movement, since it is a reaction) tangibly indicates how far the American federalist system has gone in the direction of centralization. When citizens no longer feel that they have any say over the decisions of the national government, one could expect that some would turn their attention to creating regional autonomous zones where their voices can count. While one may or may not take seriously the notion of Vermont’s or Hawaii’s potential status as an independent republic, the very broaching of the topic is itself significant.

What likelihood is there that such an American secession movement might build strength, let alone be successful? One might be tempted to dismiss such movements out of hand, but that would assume the permanence of the early twenty-first-century American status quo, with its far-flung military bases, its de-industrialized heartland, its rising national, corporate, and individual debt, in short, its tell-tale signs of imperial overstretch all ignored. A secession movement may seem quixotic, but the fact that proponents of regionalism are emerging across North America certainly suggests that something more than tilting at windmills is afoot here.

Secessionist proponents argue that the industrial-technical system is based on diminishing coal, oil, and natural gas reserves - - that is, on comparatively inexpensive sources of energy. If, as some modern-day prophets have it, the end of the oil age will mean the end of modern hyper-industrial globalism, it is entirely possible that this will result in a corresponding movement toward regional and local autonomy.7 In such an event, perhaps secession would be moot - - vast global, national, or imperial systems eventually would be unsustainable anyway.

This is very much the argument of Kirkpatrick Sale, convenor of the First, Second, and Third Secessionist Conventions. Author of several books on bioregionalism, Sale believes that the current industrial-technological system, based on transport of goods over vast distances, is unsustainable and will collapse. As industrial-technological centralism breaks down, regional decentralization will become inevitable.8 Thus, secessionism is not so much an ideal toward which one might strive, as it is descriptive of what will inexorably emerge when the gigantic apparatus of modernity breaks down. This catastrophism means that the movement itself is non-violent, more a matter of preparing for an inevitable decentralization. Such remarks belong to the realm of speculation, of course, but they do represent a characteristic way of thinking among leading secessionists.

Secession and Conservatism

At this point, we might turn our attention to the essentially conservative nature of the American secession movement. The Vermont Republic movement in particular harks back to the period of the founding fathers, and terms itself the Second Vermont Republic in deference to the First Vermont Republic, which predates the United States itself. The proposed flag of the new Vermont Republic is green and, in the upper left-hand corner, has thirteen stars. Supporters of the Vermont Republic advocate a return to a decentralized constitutional Jeffersonian vision, to genuinely limited government. In other words, the American secessionist movement in general, and its most well-known proponents, espouse a return to founding American principles.

Secessionist conservatism only seems at first glance to be radical. A closer inspection suggests that its insistence on local and regional authority represents an effort to re-assert the principle of genuinely limited national government. By advocating secession, proponents thus assert as forcibly as possible a principle that is generally unrepresented either in the Republican or in the Democratic parties, candidates, legislators, and judges. One looks in vain for indications of any national movement toward decentralization of power: in every sphere, one sees a consistent and continuous emphasis on centralization. In such a context, secessionism appears to be the only avenue to asserting an agenda of decentralization.

Underlying and impelling the nascent American secessionist movement is not just the assertion of regional or local autonomy, but, even more, the expression of disgust with the remoteness and rule-by-fiat of the national government and its two-party hegemony. In this and related respects, the secessionist movement is fueled by what ultimately is a conservative instinct to return to a stricter constitutionalism. Proponents are not easily categorized politically because, fundamentally, they do not fit into the binary division between Democrats and Republicans, both of which parties, for different reasons, prefer centralized national power and themselves as dispensers of the national spoils. One can understand, then, why those who seek decentralization would be inclined to look outside the two hegemonic political parties, and why secessionism is the almost inexorable result.

Conclusions

One cannot make too many generalizations about international decentralizations of power in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Of course, the Soviet Union disintegrated into some independent and some federated states, but in the early twenty-first century under Vladimir Putin, there was an increasing tendency toward re-centralization. The former Yugoslavia disintegrated into independent states, and there are a few other examples. But secessions are very rare, even for a member of a relatively loose federation like the European Union. For instance, if Switzerland were to join the European Union, it is interesting to consider that the EU offers no opportunity to leave it. One can understand why, given the conflicts of mid-twentieth-century European history, the EU would be disinclined to develop processes for secession. But if even the EU makes no provision for secession, how much more unlikely would such a course be for an American state like Vermont? For the most part, centralized states do not give up authority except when, like the Soviet Union, they disintegrate from within.

Why, then, is an American secessionist movement worthy of attention? The answer is above all because of the other questions that such a movement raises. Perhaps the most important aspect of the American secession movement is to throw into relief the extent to which the American federal state has departed from its originary model. When one begins to think about local, state, or regional authority, when one begins to ask whether the American national government has gained too much power, grown too large and become too remote from the people, when one begins to wonder whether Swiss confederated decentralism might make a great deal more sense than the current vast national bureaucracies, then the secession movement arguably has begun to have its most important effect. The nascent American secession movement compels us to as far-reaching and profound questions, and it will be interesting indeed to see the answers that emerge.

Such answers emerge not immediately, but over generations. At heart, we are discussing the grand political opposition revealed by the twentieth century. On the one hand, we see the totalitarian temptation, the desire to standardize and to unify a gigantic space and population, to centralize power and to mobilize the masses through pseudo-mythological ideology and through fear and, if necessary, terror. On the other hand, we see the federalist model, which represents entirely the opposite pole: decentralization, a refusal of the centralizing temptation, an insistence on the value of the individual, of the humane and the human.

Decentralized federalism is the ideal politico-cultural model of the West, as figures as diverse as Wilhelm Ropke and Denis de Rougemont have recognized. At its heart is a profound respect for individual liberty and an abiding awareness of individual civic responsibility. From this federalist polis, all centralizations are deviations that in turn derive from the enduring temptation to make over others, to make over the world so that it might conform to some monstrous fantasy. Dostoevsky captured this temptation perfectly in The Brothers Karamazov with his chilling character, the Grand Inquisitor, whose defining impulse is to take away the freedom of others for what he claims is their own good. The federalist polis is precisely the opposite: its essential characteristic is the preservation of individual, communal, and regional liberty and responsibility. Federalism insists on individual and local authority; totalitarianism obliterates these.

Ultimately, the new American secessionist movement’s most important contribution may be to remind us not only of the original vision of the American polis, but beyond that, of the ideal polis of the West, and of its essential contribution to humanity. It is true that we live in an era prone to gigantism and ideology. What Denis de Rougemont wrote during the Second World War is still true today.

Our era is delirious, and this delirium is called politics. Lost in gigantic masses given over to murderous myths, playthings of powers he cannot see, and by whom he cannot make himself heard, the individual feels himself more despised and helpless than he has ever been in the course of history. He has no hold on the realities or unrealities which determine his life, send him off to war, rouse his passions, demand his sacrifice. Either his opinion is not asked, or he has no way of expressing it. Everything is too big for him, everything escapes him. But if a group is formed somewhere, at once the real world, the human world, takes on again its density, its consistence.9

Here, in this last sentence, is the turning point, the forming of what Jefferson termed the “little republic,” based in the recognition of the dignity, liberty, and responsibility of the individual citizen. In the end, it is of this profoundly Western ideal that the secessionists remind us, and for that service above all, we must respect them.

1. See Middlebury Institute, Registry of North American Separatist Organizations (Cold Spring, N.Y., 2007). 2. John Curran, “Vermont Nascent Secession Movement Grows,” AP story, 3 June 2007 . 3. See James Randall, Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln (Urbana, 1964); Thomas Dilorenzo, The Real Lincoln (New York, 2003) and Lincoln Unmasked (New York, 2006); see also Walter Brian Cisco, War Crimes against Southern Civilians (Gretna, La., 2007). 4. Swiss Constitution, adopted by public referendum, 18 April, 1999. 5. See Lidija R. Basta Fleiner, Thomas Fleiner, eds., Federalism and Multiethnic States: The Case of Switzerland (Fribourg and Bale, 2000), 1-36, also Erich Bapst, “The Autonomy of Communes,” 213-230 on the complexity of Swiss society. 6. See Denis de Rougemont, The Heart of Europe (New York, 1941), 92. 7. See, for instance, James Kunstler, The Long Emergency (New York, 2005). 8. Interview with Kirkpatrick Sale, Coldspring, N.Y., May 14, 2007. 9. Denis de Rougemont, The Heart of Europe, 255.