It’s Secession Week at Let A Thousand Nations Bloom.
I wish them the best of luck, but secession won’t work.
Secession was tried before in the US and it failed. If part of the US tries to secede, the Protestant-Hippie-Communist-Jesus types get offended and their blood lust knows no bounds. They were fine with the death of hundreds of thousands to prevent secession. Then they took property, installed new governments and destroyed local economies for the better part of a century.
Secession in the US is only a long, drawn-out suicide.
Foseti 
I don’t think so, I think moldbug’s right on this, the hyper bloodlust is gone. Progressivism is in its decaying, bureaucratic stage. It is in its Brezhnev stage, not its Stalin stage.
If a secession movement plays its cards well, a state could get out of the union without bloodshed. It would especially help if the seceding state dressed itself in leftist clothes. For example, if I was trying to secede as the formalist CEO of my reactionary state, I would at least make the government outwardly look like a democracy (the Augustus strategy). And in seceding I would emphasize the war on drugs, corporatism, corruption, no child left behind, etc.
The other iron rule to follow for a seceding state is to not fire the first shot. In fact don’t fire any second or third shot. A seceding state succeeds the same way anti-cololialism works – by convincing the internal political movements in the U.S. to call off the Feds.
Why would a leftist secessionist movement secede? It can just wait a while until the whole country follows it. The early abolitionists talked a lot about seceding, but they realized that there was no need to do so.
I don’t think democracies ever truly get out of the hyper-bloodlust phase. WWII was only 60 years ago.
It’s not a leftist secessionist movement. It’s reactionary secessionist movement that in the public media battle dresses as a bi-partisan or even leftist movement.
Even as a reactionary, there a number of issues where I agree with the left wing (such as the war on drugs), or I believe that a reactionary government could make some leftist policies actually work rather well. For instance, I don’t actually have a problem with healthcare that bundled with renting land from an alloidial property owner (or in layman’s terms, I don’t have a philosophical problem with universal healthcare). The university I attended is essentially its own government, and it ran free healthcare for everyone, and it was actually quite convenient. The problem is a healthcare system run by a democracy.
So when the reactionary government secedes, it plays up how the new, seceded government will be much better for black people and poor people because it will end the war on drugs and provide actual universal health insurance (not simply a mandate to buy insurance from evil corporations).
Even if the media doesn’t completely buy the sheeps clothing, it creates enough doubt that the chance of violent resistance if far, far lower.
I don’t think democracies ever truly get out of the hyper-bloodlust phase. WWII was only 60 years ago.
Think of how much more pacifist textbooks are than in the 40’s and 50’s.
And I actually think the South could have seceded in 1860 had it played its cards better. The public of the north only grew in favor of using violence after the South fired the first shots.
The South fired the first shot because the North occupied Southern territory and refused to leave. Lincoln would eventually have found another way to make the South fire the first shot. If he hadn’t, I’d bet the North would have just eventually invaded. They could have spun it as a defensive war given enough time.
Ron Paul tried the whole “my ideas are better for black people” line and he still was called racist *by Reason Magazine*!
The problem with trying to act like a lefty is that the left doesn’t give partial credit.
If he hadn’t, I’d bet the North would have just eventually invaded.
The norther people were against using violence against the south. I mean, maybe he would have used predation until he forced the South to use violence (like Wilson in World War I), but I think the South could have pulled it off. The union occupied forts in the South, but the South could have simply ignored them. The U.S. has a base in Cuba, yet the Cubans still maintain their independence.
The problem with trying to act like a lefty is that the left doesn’t give partial credit.
Look at Romer, who is trying to phrase a return to colonialism in PC terms. Sure he’s still considered a bit politically correct, but he’s still invited to give TED talks and considered a mainstream cathedral figure. So I do think the left gives partial credit.
Also, obviously for this scheme to work, reactionary ideas must be far, far, far, far more popular than they are today.
The question is – does this path to a restoration have a better shot than any other. It certainly seems to me its easier to do it in one, seceded state, than to get the entire country to have a restoration. It’s still highly improbable, but I can’t think of any other way that’s more probable.
Slightly off topic: I saw this and thought you might appreciate it:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/africa/10465527.stm
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