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Michael Anton in The Asylum has a semi-imaginary dialogue between himself (he calls himself Tom) and a woke man named Malcolm. Subject: separation of Red and Blue. Trigger warning: there are a lot! of exclamation points!
Anton argues the case for a dissolution of Empire as best as he can, but is never convincing. We on the Reality side of the debate will agree with Anton on all symptoms of our declining culture, and even on the desirability that we go our own way, and let the Woke fend for themselves.
But they will never let us go.
The side that screeches about and weeps cataracts over “colonialism” must be our master. There is no point showing them the hypocrisy of this. They eat hypocrisy for breakfast. All must submit to them, here and everywhere. Only when all are made to toil under one rule, and profess belief in one idea, will there be true Diversity. They must impose their beliefs.
I think Anton, in his heart of hearts, knows this, too, because he puts into Malcolm’s mouth most of the reasons the left will never peaceably relinquish power. More on that in a moment.
Still, Anton give’s the old college try. By invoking nice legalities based on the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution.
Look, friends, if we could reason and have pleasant debates over arcane law with the Woke and their undead DIEite Army, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. They are not going to read pieces like his, no matter how tightly argued, and announce, “Say, the legal reading of these curious historical documents is right. We admit we’re flummoxed. We have to let them separate. After all, the words in these documents meant something to those who wrote them. We must respect that. The law is the law.”
Sigh.
Anton next attempts tossing a Lincoln-wrench into the discussion, arguing that the Great Emancipator of War strangling the life out of the Confederacy is not at all equivalent to the New Confederacy’s longing to escape nouveaux Yankee puritanism. He hinges this foray on this claim: “The nation was divided on one issue during the Civil War: slavery.”
This is not so. But that doesn’t matter. Almost everybody now thinks it is so, and what is the old saying, perception is Reality? If there is any culture that lived by that dictum, we are it. (I do not apply this type of fantastical thinking to Anton, though I do disagree with him on the Civil War: a moot point.)
Grant his slavery-was-the-sole-issue ploy, and let’s next see Anton’s argument of how we are not now in a similar situation as Lincoln (ellipsis original).
[Anton-Tom says:] Now, the South in 1860 could not appeal to the right of revolution because the ground, the basis, for the right of revolution is human nature, the twin principles of equality and consent. Obviously, those are incompatible with slavery…whatever you want to call it, separation today would be justified on the basis of the right of revolution while secession in 1860 was not.
And:
Lincoln and his followers hated slavery, but everyone except the most radical abolitionists were willing to tolerate it where it existed. They just didn’t want it to expand. They had three basic reasons. First, they thought that slavery is simply morally wrong. It’s one thing to tolerate it where it exists when it’s very difficult to get rid of, but quite another to choose it for its own sake or as a ‘positive good.’…
The Woke hate “racism”, “sexism”, “homophobia”, “transphobia”, “climate change”, and on and on and on, which of course Anton well knows. The Woke are not willing to tolerate these in their own ranks, and they certainly are not willing to tolerate them in ours. Or in those in foreign lands.
The Woke believe in Equality, the idea that all are interchangeable, and that the only “real” differences that exist are caused by accident of birth, and so all measured differences must necessarily be caused by some kind of “discrimination”. They must export and enforce and mandate this cancerous egalitarianism. This is the full and final fruit of the so-called Enlightenment.
The passions of anti-slavery were nothing to the combined white-hot emotional turmoil of Woke causes. They will never agree that “racism”, or anything else, should be allowed by deplorables in their own nations, should we be allowed to escape. Secession is even more unjustifiable to our modern Lincolns as it was to the original.
Anton has his Malcolm admit this: “You want us to agree to a separation so you can oppress minorities! How can you expect us to agree to that?”
We cannot. Malcolm said Blues will keep us imprisoned “To prevent you from imposing your racist utopia.”
Anton does have a sense of humor about this:
“OK, if you’re so worried about how we’ll treat minorities, here’s a simple solution,” Tom said. “You take them all.”
“So we’re back to ethnic cleansing?” Malcolm said. “You just denied you were going to do that! Now the truth comes out! This is, I have to say, truly monstrous: the creation of an all-white state through ethnic cleansing.”
Anton goes to great pains to deny this, but even if newly created Red nations would be racial paradises, the horrors the Blue leaders would imagine the Reds are up to are intolerable to them. We already have ample evidence that it is their imaginations that drive them.
Anton is so desperate for his argument, he is willing to have Red nations pay the Blue Danegeld in perpetuity:
Tom said, “…But just for the sake of argument, hear me out. Suppose I or someone could convince Red America to pay some kind of reparations, as the price of separation. I think it’s a terrible idea, and expect most Reds would hate it, but just suppose. What then?”
“How much?” Malcolm asked.
“That would be a matter for negotiation,” Tom said.
“I suppose you’re proposing some one-time payoff?” Malcolm said. “But why should you get off that easily? Centuries of racism can’t be paid off with a single check.”
“OK,” Tom said, “we’ll make it ongoing.”
Malcolm isn’t buying it, because he doesn’t have to. He, and the Woke, just can’t abide the idea of “racists” being “racist” anywhere in the world, but especially not their cousins.
Not only that, of course, but they’ll fret, as Malcolm does, of the “sexist dystopia” that will evince in Red nations. And this, too:
“OK,” Malcolm said, “here’s one last consideration, absolutely non-negotiable. Climate change. Emissions will kill this planet, and all of us with it. Your Red rump state will be a gigantic polluter. That will kill us. We can’t allow it. There is no ‘live-and-let-live’ with you on that issue.”
Anton, exasperating himself over what will certainly be the Woke’s real-life responses, finds some relief in reminding Malcolm that “the right of revolution is a fundamental natural right enshrined in the Declaration of Independence”.
Though he says, many times, it won’t be our side that initiates the violence. With the FBI’s help, it can sure be made to look like it, though. I’m sure they can get some rubes, à la the Gretchen Whitmare (a kind of nightmare) case to fire on a new Fort Sumter.
And, of course, all this is before considering how the oligarchs would never willingly set free a major source of their wealth.
Do read the piece. There is a lot of fun to be armchair generaling as you move the pieces of the once-United States into new configurations. For my own part, I will settle for nothing less than Emperor of Michigan, William the Red. I will separate the Ann Arbor-to-Detroit corridor as a Woke state: let them destroy each other: then move in and reconquer the territory.
Para vinum.
Good piece. As was Anton’s. One of the overlooked reasons why the left cannot abide a separation is in part due to the nature of technical thinking. In many ways technique is more of an operating system for the left than is left wing political ideas. The technocratic is always striving to encompass all things into its system, which, at bottom works feverishly towards working out the single best way of doing things. For all their talk of diversity, their idea of the concept remains utterly superficial or a thing relegated into the private sphere. In the common public realm, all things must be seeking the monad, the singularity, the comprehensive “best way.” The very thought that some group might desire to do things differently is an offense against everything they stand for.
It was smart of Briggs to discuss this central dilemma of conservatism: If 40% of the country which has little economic power, little federal legal authority, and no control of the military and police forces wishes to separate, why would the 60 %'ers, who control everything, let 'em go without a fight? The easy answer lies in HISTORY: they did not let 'em go the 1st time the matter was raised. Instead, the side with all the power fought and destroyed the separatists. "Union Forever!"
HUMAN NATURE provides the rest of the answer." Relinquishing power, when power is one's raison d'etre, means that the 60 %ers will not let 'em go, now or ever. To do so flies in the face of their reason for being, which is to obtain, wield and retain total power over the lives of others.
Anton is a rare gift of practical insight for moribund American political conservatism. He's primarily a man of thought and reason. So it's reasonable for him to apply logic to the disunion matter. But reason has no bearing on matters of the heart. Power is a matter of the heart. THE MATTER of the heart. Power, the getting of it and the holding onto it, is all heart. To the extent reason plays a role, the only rational question is: why would the certain winner in a disunion war ignore US and constitutional history, willingly relinquish its dominant power, turn over its wealth, allow its laws to be flouted, surrender arms to a weakened, privileged, white minority, and then concede military and political defeat without firing a shot?
Look at the violent, thieving, lying, scheming, power-hungry mob that runs the DemocRat Party! Do they look like Napoleon or George Washington, Mao or Sun Yat Sen, Hitler or Hindenburg, Beria or Gorbachev, Reagan or Biden?