The Paths to Secession

It looks like a national divorce will be very difficult to avoid.  On one side is the political establishment who look like they stole an election and who seem determined to dominate and impoverish the working class.  This attempt to dominate has been going on for decades, as American manufacturing has been off-shored and millions of illegal workers have flooded the labor market.  This combination of cheaper foreign and domestic labor has fattened corporate bottom lines but it has hollowed out entire regions (c.f. the "Rust Belt").

The Biden Administration looks to be dialing this up to 11, perhaps because they fear the 2022 elections when redistricting will eliminate a bunch of Democratic House seats.  Or maybe they think that after stealing an election they don't have to respect the traditions of unity and governing in the interests of all citizens.  But the agenda is radical indeed, not just banning oil drilling on federal lands but preventing oil drilling at all in the country.

Doubling the price of gasoline is a massively regressive tax.  Combined with the loss of millions of jobs, it's hard to see how those on the losing end would want to stay in a union with a party who they suspect did not legitimately win the election, and who they seeing as governing illegitimately.  And so to the "What comes next" part of the question.  What will come next will be very, very messy.  You see, we're not divided along "Red State/Blue State" lines, we're really all mixed together.

This is a map of the 2020 election returns by county.  The size of the circles represents the number of votes for Joe Biden (blue) or Donald Trump (red).  What you see are very few states that are almost all one color or another.  A few, yes, but not many.  And so to the breakup scenarios.

The Slovenian Option

On June 25, 1991 the province of Slovenia seceded from Yugoslavia.  The Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) invaded the province but were defeated in a shockingly short 10 day conflict.  Slovenian police blocked key road junctions and blockaded JNA barracks.  The JNA forces never were able to establish unit or territorial cohesion.  You could see something similar playing out in, say, West Virginia.  Even though it is only an hour or so from Washington D.C. most of the state is very rough terrain.  Local sheriffs would likely be able to block passage to unfriendly forces.  The Slovenian option is the cleanest option, but is also the most limited - a fairly cohesive population (almost all red, almost no blue) combined with difficult terrain make this unlikely for most of the country.

The Croatian Option

 Fighting in Croatia actually started before fighting broke out in Slovenia, when Serbs opposed to Croatian independence pre-emptively seceded from the province of Croatia.  Things escalated and by the summer of 1991 it was a full scale shooting war between the JNA and the Croatian forces.  This was no 10 day war; fighting continued into 1995 and much (perhaps most) of the ethnic Serb population became refugees.  We might be able to term this the "Texan Option", where multiple enclaves of Blue voters exist in a sea of Red voting neighbors.

The Sarajevo Option

The siege of Sarajevo lasted four years and destroyed much of that city.  It was famous for attacks on the civilian population, and indeed thousands of civilians were killed in the conflict by artillery and snipers, among other horsemen of the Apocalypse.  This is what Civil War would look like in Atlanta, Detroit, Pittsburg, and Denver.  The ugliness here will be proportional to just how hard the Democrats push the working class red state populations - and right now it looks like they want to push pretty hard.

The Mixed Option

Nothing says that these options are mutually exclusive.  Indeed, they would probably all be seen although in different locales.  But looking at the map it's hard to see a stable Blue government outside of New England/Mid-Atlantic and Pacific Coast.

In Yugoslavia something like 150,000 dead and 4M refugees were the result, from a starting Yugoslav population of 24M.  It's hard to extrapolate those losses into what we would see but it's hard to imagine that there would not be many millions - maybe tens of millions - of refugees and hundreds of thousands dead.  That's quite a butcher's bill for today's Progressive Left who seemingly will not just leave half the country alone.

I wish this didn't look so plausible

Six years ago I posted The Inevitability of Secession which laid out how it seemed that the wheels were fixin' to come off the Republic.  Donald Trump - despite the insanity suffered by the left - gave a 4 year breather for this, by directly addressing the legitimate grievances of those most likely to leave the Union.  Now with the Democrats back in the White House and Congress - and the insanity not one whit less than before - it looks like we're maybe going to accelerate into a great national divorce.

As with all divorces, it will be very, very messy.  I have some thoughts on that for a later post but for now this looks pretty prescient.

(Originally posted 20 March 2015)

The inevitability of secession, part 1: Introduction

Chief Justice Salmon Chase was wrong.  In Texas v. White (1869), he wrote the majority opinion on secession:

The Union of the States never was a purely artificial and arbitrary relation. It began among the Colonies, and grew out of common origin, mutual sympathies, kindred principles, similar interests, and geographical relations. It was confirmed and strengthened by the necessities of war, and received definite form and character and sanction from the Articles of Confederation. By these, the Union was solemnly declared to 'be perpetual.' And when these Articles were found to be inadequate to the exigencies of the country, the Constitution was ordained 'to form a more perfect Union.' It is difficult to convey the idea of indissoluble unity more clearly than by these words. What can be indissoluble if a perpetual Union, made more perfect, is not?

Except the Republic did not date its governing principles to the Articles of Confederation, which were clearly a failure - a failure clear at the time, in fact.  Instead, it dated to the Constitution.  That was ratified by all original thirteen States, and it is clear that it would not have been ratified if the States hadn't thought that they couldn't leave if they had needed to.  Indeed, the ending of the Articles of Confederation were essentially an act of secession.

Chase was an interesting bird.  He founded the Free Soil movement - "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men".  It was an unabashedly abolitionist party, and reflected what was very probably the real cause of the American War of Southern Independence (the "Civil War" to you Yankees).

And Chase wasn't just one of the chief proponents of the political position, he was Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.  One of the charges leveled at the post war Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals was that it was "Victor's Justice"; America had an 80 year history of Victor's Justice, dating back to Texas v. White.

And so secession was ruled illegal.

The problem, of course, is that it was only illegal because "Honest Abe" Lincoln determined that it was better that 10% of the military age population be killed or wounded in battle than a set of States should choose to leave the Republic.  For a while, it worked.

For a while, the Fed.Gov demonstrated that it could deliver - more growth, more prosperity, freedom increasing through the 1960s.  In 1969, the Fed.Gov landed a man on the moon.  It was the high water mark of government legitimacy.

What we've seen since then is an intentional fracturing of the Republic, based on race, gender, and class.  Political careers have been made for those who have done this - Al Sharpton is a particularly loathsome example of this, but he is by no means alone.  Barack Obama may be the most successful of these, parlaying racial themes of guilt and offered redemption into two terms in the White House during which he has thoroughly politicized the Federal Agencies.  Eric Holder was the chield law enforcement official in the land but ran the Department of Justice along racial grievance lines.  If you have any doubts about this, read up on the New Black Panther Party, George Zimmerman, and Ferguson MO.

Obama reflected a small but well organized segment of society determined to fundamentally reshape society.  Unsurprisingly, this hasn't turned out to be popular with much of society who overwhelmingly voted Democrats out of House and Senate seats - historical defeats for Obama's Democratic Party.  The voters gave significant majorities to the Republican Party in both houses of Congress, because GOP candidates ran on a platform of overturning Obama's overreach on health care, immigration, and general weakening of the USA on the international stage.

So how's that working out for GOP voters?

Conservative talk show host Glenn Beck on Wednesday announced he is leaving the Republican Party.

“I’ve made my decision — I’m out,” Beck said Wednesday on “The Glenn Beck Program,” his broadcast on TheBlaze.com. “I’m out of the Republican Party. I am not a Republican. I will not give a dime to the Republican Party. I’m out.”

The host said Republicans lost him with their inaction on both ObamaCare and illegal immigration.

“All this stuff that they said and they ran and they said they were doing all of these great things and they were going to stand against ObamaCare and illegal immigration — they set us up,” Beck added. “They set us up. Enough is enough. They’re torpedoing the Constitution and they’re doing it knowingly.”

Can't really argue with any of that.  And he's not the only one:

Yes, Establishment GOP, you can teach us that you will always lie to us, stab us in the back, humiliate us and crush us; but if you teach us that, be aware we are learning another lesson, too. Not just that "The Establishment Will Always Crush You," but the lesson that There is no hope in any kind of conventional politics for those of us who want better than this Pile of Shit the two parties give us.

And the mutterings have been going on for years:

1. Many inner-circle strategists in the Republican Party machine basically believe the game is over demographics wise. They’ve believed this for a long time. Call them the “We Are Doomed” Machiavellians, trying to make a barely-palatable lemonade out of some very nasty lemons.
2. Privately, personally, they probably agree with everything Richwine and all the rest have ever said. But it doesn’t matter, because, on the strategic time scale, we’ve already crossed the Rubicon.
3. Tactically, short-to-medium term, you could follow the Sailer Strategy and, maybe, squeeze out a few Revanchist wins for Republicans, but it would be counterproductive. The Cathedral (they don’t call it that, of course) would make easy hay of “the hateful white party” in due time, and it would go the way of the Know-Nothings in Boston – permanent obsolescence.
4. So, the best you can do, if you care at all about the long-term survival of anything like even a fake opposition party in out decadent democracy, is to embrace the Latin American / Texan model, an increasingly Brazil-esque society, but one in which, in some places, at some times, you can still get some Hispanics to feel fondly about and vote for the Republicans.
5. To do this, you must absolutely, positively, and, most importantly, preemptively cave to everything you think the Democrats could possibly leverage against you. Which, in practice, means being the volunteer auxiliary PC-enforcer on your own side. It also helps when you’ve got big business on your side.

Salmon Chase had been a member of the Whig Party, which fractured under the strain of abolitionism.  The Republican Party looks like it's headed for the same crack up.

But it doesn't really matter: it's clear that the citizens of this Republic will not vote themselves out of this mess.  The Establishment is united - across both Parties - against the population which holds them in increasing contempt.

So if there's no way to vote in representatives who will represent the will of the People, what remains?  It's hard to see any alternative to the country splitting into two or more parts that will eliminate the Washington D.C. Establishment as something that can impose unpopular laws on them.

Not everyone believes this will happen:

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. 

This time, it's hard to see a politician willing and able to sacrifice 10% of the military age population in a War of Secession.  And so Chief Justice Chase's decision is more or less irrelevant.  He had the legitimacy imposed by a victorious army at the point of the bayonet; the current Establishment doesn't have that and doesn't seem to be fixin' to get it anytime soon.

And so if reform is not possible, exit is the obvious result.  The Republic has large parts what are tired of having a left wing ideology rammed down their throats - and an ideology that enriches Wall Street and the big banks, at that.  These people have played the game the way it has been laid out, by the rules that were what everyone had been told were just - one man, one vote.  And that vote clearly is a waste of time.

Okay, then.  But things will not continue as they have.  

The Democrats' "Lost Cause" myth

We live immersed in a world of lies.  I've posted about how history as taught today about the Civil War* is retarded.  Nowhere is this on better display than the Wikipedia page about the "Lost Cause Mythos":

The Lost Cause of the Confederacy, or simply the Lost Cause, is an American pseudo-historical, negationist ideology that holds that the cause of the  Confederacy during the American Civil War was a just and heroic one. The ideology endorses the supposed virtues of the antebellum South, viewing the war as a struggle primarily to save what they view as the beneficent and ethical Southern way of life,^[1] or "states' rights" in the face of overwhelming "Northern aggression." At the same time, the Lost Cause minimizes or denies outright the central role of slavery in the buildup to and outbreak of the war. [my emphasis on this last sentence - Borepatch]

This is retarded.  A simple scanning of the dates of secession confirms this:

South Carolina: December 20, 1860

Mississippi: January 9, 1861

Florida: January 10, 1861

Alabama: January 11, 1861

Georgia: January 19, 1861

Louisiana: January 26, 1861

Texas: February 1, 1861

Missing from this list is the Virginia Secession Convention which voted to remain in the Union on 6 December 1861.  Also missing is Lincoln's attempt to break the blockade of Ft. Sumpter at the beginning of April 1861.  Up until this point, secession had been limited to the deep south; after what was seen as an act of war by the Federal government against a state, four other southern states seceded.

Virginia: April 17, 1861

Arkansas: May 6, 1861

North Carolina: May 20, 1861

Tennessee: June 8, 1861

Kentucky: Ordinance passed by people in 1861

Missouri: Ordinance passed, but not presented to people

But this isn't the limit of the Wikipedia article's retardedness.  Look at that last sentence, and ponder that the following slave states never seceded: Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky (mostly because of force of Northern arms) and Missouri (ditto).  So the best you can say is that 7 slave states seceded over slavery, 4 more seceded over Federal aggression (but not over slavery), two more never seceded at all, and two were occupied by the Federal army and so the issue became moot.

In a world where we're continually informed by our betters that we're not well educated enough to correctly interpret all the nuance of the world, it sure would be nice to get a little nuance from historians.  But they have their red, white, and blue cardboard history cutout and so we once again find ourselves swimming in an ocean of lies.**

Democrats don't seem to like nuance, no matter what platitudes they mouth.  It's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to abortion or the Ivy League or antipathy to people who live in Fly Over Country or anti-American sentiment or pro-impeachment sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.***

The impeachment circus will circle back to bite them.  The word that nobody in the press is saying today is "Nineteen" - that's how many House seats Republicans have to pick up to win back the majority.  There are 29 Democrats holding seats in House districts won by Donald Trump in 2016.  It looks grim for the Democrats.

Nancy Pelosi started rolling out a Lost Cause mythos for the Democrats yesterday, with the "solemn" vote on a bag of nothing.  It will come to nothing, but the victory laps being taken by the Democrats show that politics is now a game of humiliating your enemies.  Unfortunately, people have noticed and the American electorate is pretty unhappy with the whole Democratic charade.  We shall see how many more than nineteen districts flip next year.

The Democrats will need their Lost Cause mythos.  Unlike the Civil War* one, this one will not be based on a noble cause like Virginia choosing to resist Federal aggression.  Rather, it will be based on a small and mean desire to humiliate an opponent.  Worse, it targeted an opponent who punches back.

* It wasn't a Civil War at all: the Southern states weren't trying to take over and dominate the northern ones.  They wanted independence.  My preferred name for that conflict is the American War of Southern Independence.

** Note that I say this even though I'm not southern.  I'm from firmly midwest yankee stock and grew up in Maine.  As I like to joke, where we were Boston was in the south and New York was in the deep south.

*** Yes, this was modeled on another famous quote.

Sic Semper Tyrannis

The only thing that would make this better was if Northam were in blackface ...

Quote of the day on this matter goes to Aesop, with advise to the Virginia National Guard:

Incoming fire always has the right of way.

It will be interesting to see how next year's elections end up.  The Democrats haven't let the mask slip, they've pulled the damn thing off, shredded it, and are daring everyone to say anything about it.  The 2020 elections are a fork in the road: one way leads to saner heads prevailing in a much-reduced Democratic Party humbled by a Boris Johnson style landslide by a Donald Trump with long, long coat tails.  The other branch leads to Sarajevo.  I guess we'll see.

UPDATE 16 December 2019 11:34: Endorsed:

pic.twitter.com/LvUUBDCEsm

— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) December 14, 2019

Most of what you're taught about the Civil War is wrong

I've been saying this for a while now, but Brock Townsend has another (great) example.

The Unauthorized history of America's Centennial

We are coming up on America's Independence Day celebration, which has me thinking about the difference between the red, white, and blue cardboard history that is pushed on the public, and the real history of the period.  The real history is, of course, a lot more interesting.  And it is never taught in school, and history professors rarely write books about it.

The most plausible explanation for this is that the American Narrative as taught is a morality play, one that leads to ever more progress.  Indeed, to look at the motto of New York State is to see this emblazoned on the very flag: excelsior, ever onward and upward.

History, of course - even American history - does not work that way.  I've written before that the history of what is vulgarly known as the "Civil War"* is nothing that would be recognized by those who lived through it.  The interesting actual history has been twisted, pulled into an excelsior upward arc of morality play.  Twisted beyond recognition, actually.

Because you can't know where you are without knowing where you came from, and so the 1865-1890 gap in American History as taught today is an interesting puzzle.  There's actually a lot that's important that happened then, a lot that historians of today don't really want to dwell on.  And the midpoint of this "there be dragons" region on our historical map was the first centennial, 1876.

There was a lot that was going wrong in the American Republic.  Reconstruction was a failure, and seen as such by both its supporters and opponents.  Corruption in government was the norm - you hear vague echoes of this in the standard history (typically a brief passage about scandals in the Grant Administration), but the whole age (and basically each administration) was mired in this.  Boom times rapidly alternated with recessions or depressions as the great transcontinental railroads repeatedly went out of business.

I highly recommend the following podcast which goes into a lot of detail - detail that you very likely never were taught - about all these topics.  The only dispute that I have is the brief mention of the lack of a Grover Cleveland fan club.  He's the only post-war President who actually took a run at governmental corruption.  This is an extended interview, so you might want to find it on your podcast app and listen in the car or some such.  Podcast aficionados will recognize Patrick Wyman from the excellent Fall Of Rome Podcast, now hosting the very interesting Tides of History.

Tides of History: The Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age: An Interview with Stanford's Professor Richard White

1876 was interesting because of the Indian Wars.  Most famous is the disaster of Custer's 7th Cavalry at Little Bighorn - which started on this day in 1876.  The news of the disaster arrived just as the Centennial celebrations were starting.  The American public was shocked that hundreds of US Cavalry troopers were killed by "naked savages".  More bad news followed in 1877, when the Nez Perce stood toe to toe with the Army at the Big Hole and bloodied the Army's nose.  These setbacks would not have been a surprise to anyone paying attention: way back in 1866, Crazy Horse and nine other braves completely wiped out a force of 81 soldiers at the Fetterman Fight.

While Phil Sheridan may or may not have said "The only good indian is a dead indian", it's a True Fact that William T. Sherman ended the Indian Wars in the good old fashioned Roman way, making a desert and calling it "peace".  His December 18, 1890 letter to the New York Times makes it clear that Congressional interference was the only reason he didn't kill every indian, down to women and children.  Par for the course for American's first War Criminal.

None of this is taught in history class.  It is violently anti-excelsior.

So why bring this up, especially at this time of the year?  It's not to harsh your Independence Day celebration**, it's because all of this is still relevant to events of our day.  Crony capitalism has still corrupted government beyond recognition (just look at the Trillion dollar "stimulus" that built nothing, or the F-35 program).  Congressmen are still handsomely compensated for sponsoring the right legislation.  The Progressive era (approvingly referenced in the podcast above in one of the few mistakes in their discussion) co-opted the segregationist Democrats for seven decades - today's Democrats simply don't seem to know that it was their party (and not the Republicans) who kept the Coloreds in their place.  Gun control continues to be pushed to get firearms away from minorities.

Excelsior isn't how things happened, but that sure is how teachers want you to think.  If you don't understand the past, there's a very good chance that you'll keep making the same mistakes.  Dad (who was a history professor) liked to say that history keeps repeating itself because nobody listened the first time.  I mean, how can we excelsior if we keep making the same dumb mistakes?

Like I said, I highly recommend the podcast.  Listen to that, and read the links and you'll know more about how America became how it is than just about anyone.

 * It wasn't a Civil War because the Confederate States did not want to take over the north. "War Between the States" is ambiguous, losing the underlying motivations. "The War of Yankee Aggression" misses the point that a lot of folks on both sides were spoiling for a fight in 1860. I like the term "American War of Southern Independence" because it describes the rationale for the conflict precisely.

** Indeed, the Queen Of The World and I are quite looking forward to the celebration.

Separation of Powers - half gone?

Aretae is back, with a post pondering Separation of Powers as envisioned by the founders and as recognized today.  His take: half of the original mechanisms are now gone:

Overall, there were at least eight elements built into the fabric of the federal government for the purpose of balancing the states’ power against that of the federal government. There are still four left.

Actually, by his count there are three left.  His first one is Secession, which Foseti dealt with some time back.  That link is well worth a read.

In unrelated-but-related news, we are told that the grandsons of John Tyler - the 10th U.S. President - are still alive:

The Tyler men have a habit of having kids very late in life. Lyon Gardiner Tyler, one of President Tyler’s 15 kids, was born in 1853. He fathered Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. in 1924, and Harrison Ruffin Tyler in 1928.

And so back to Aretae's list.  All eight elements were in full force when Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr's father was born.  Five were left when he was born, and he has watched another two be eliminated.

TL;DR: it only took two generations for the majority of the pillars of Separation of Powers to be eliminated.  Moldbug said something similar, although in eleventy million more words.

But hey, Aretae's back!  Go leave him some welcome-back comment love.

Musings about Hillary

The law in its majesty bows to the throne.  Queen Hillary beat the rap.

This will not work out well for her.  Consider:

The entire western world  is suffering from a crisis of governmental legitimacy, as an increasingly isolated technocratic governing class can no longer hide its incompetency and venality.  The populations see the game is rigged, and increasingly are rejecting the elite.  We see this explicitly with the UK voter's Brexit choice (and the related constellation of exit from other EU countries: Frexit, Nexit, Auexit, etc).  The elite can only respond by clamping down even harder, further fanning the flames consuming perceived governmental legitimacy.  Where this dynamic ends is clear even to the dim wit talking heads.

On these shores, Donald Trump will use this mercilessly in his "Crooked Hillary" campaign.  And quite frankly, she is crooked, and the optics are inescapable for her.  After all (as she put it so many years ago), what did she know and when did she know it?  The drip, drip, drip of Trump's water torture (along with likely FBI leaks from career bureaucrats enraged at the subversion of the law of the land) may cost her the Presidency.  We shall see, but none of this is good for her.

If she wins, the twin memes of "Crooked Hillary" and "the game is rigged" will make it very difficult for her to govern.  The bonfire of governmental legitimacy will burn much brighter - after all, perhaps 40% of her own party thinks that the game is rigged and that she's a crook.  The numbers are certainly higher with non Democratic voters - they may vote for her, but they will never like her.  As she pays off her big money donors they will like her less.

And she is perhaps the most paranoid public figure of the last 40 years.  She is likely to keep a very small group of insiders as a ruling cabal, each of which will collect big money for access to her royal throne.  This will further alienate the public.

As she cracks down on her enemies - gun control, anyone? - expect to hear the first serious rumblings of secession.  After all, if the ruling center is illegitimate and unpopular, this opens opportunities for regional figures to gain at the center's expense.  The UK just seceded from the EU; other EU member states may follow.  There's nothing that says this can't happen here, for the same reasons as there.

The end of Big Oil

And Russia, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia:

“Fracking” plays (Oil Speak Note: Play = producing oil well) are normally for four years, with most of the oil in the first two years. They cost $10 to $15 million. They are profitable at $50 a barrel for a new play and already fracked wells cover their costs at half that price. The “new revolution” technique the oil service firm mentioned doubles those times to four years of high flow with a further four years of declining flow. Depending on whatever drilling costs are involved, this effectively earns them profit at a price as low as 1/2 of the per barrel cost of previously fracked wells over the new well’s longer productive lifetime.

A Big Oil drilling play in the deep ocean, arctic, or politically unstable/corrupt 3rd World nation (This now includes Putin’s Russia) runs between $1 and $5 billion because of all the infrastructure Big Oil has to build to extract and move the large quantities of oil from howling wilderness at the edge of civilization. They run 7 to 15 years.

The disinvestment that this Saudi-caused oil price crash is bringing on will see declines by corruption of existing big-oil-type production in various national oil companies, followed by a massive market share shift to fracking when the reduced-by-disinvestment Big Oil production curves start bumping reduced oil supply into increased oil demand.

CONFIRMING FRACKING IMPRESSIONS
These facts left me with several impressions that I later confirmed.

First, this new extended frack technology is what is driving the “Fracking to Frack-log” drilling decline by the mid-to-large oil industry players in the last 9 to 12 months. Effectively, mid-to-large fracking firms have stopping current style fracking to get a piece of the new technique for the next oil price rise, AKA when the Saudis have burned through their foreign investments and sovereign-debt credit rating.

Second, cheap fracking-type drilling also moves all future oil extraction to places that have certain legal and regulatory regimes for quick market moves. Places like private lands in Texas and other traditional American oil states that have existing transportation infrastructure, laws and regulations for land use plus a stable & (relatively) honest political culture adapted to running them.

And also, the Big Green environmental movement:

Big Green has a March-of-Dimes-after-the-Salk-Polio-vaccine problem. 

The environmental movement arose in part due to real and imaginary environmental abuses of Big Oil, notably its huge infrastructure requirements generating “Not in my back yard” (NIMBY) resistance in many American states. The size and scope of these infrastructure programs required multiple levels of local, state and federal regulatory approval which allowed protracted opposing environmental lobbying and media campaigns. Those campaigns required huge standing organizations, raising and spending money on political lobbying and public education/awareness. This in turn created huge INCOME STREAMS with a familiar pattern of fund-raising consultants getting a percentage of the take, plus ditto for related lobbyist and publicity staff, all of whose livelihoods and identities are wrapped up in environmentalist political action. Big Green is merely one of, albeit now the largest, of many such self-licking ice cream cone institutions in America.

If most of the new production is on private land and transported/refined in existing infrastructure, then this is a big, big problem for all the Green mouthes that are used to eating high off the hog today.

Left unstated is whether a successful effort by Big Green to stifle a Texas-only economic development might spur talk of secession.

This is a very interesting article.

How Abraham Lincoln caused the Civil War

I ran across this while researching the series on secession.  First, it sets the stage:

The 15 slave states can be thought of as comprising three tiers from south to north. The first tier to secede was the southernmost, led on December 20, 1860 by South Carolina, home of the ideological spokesmen of the pro-slavery “King Cotton” interests. English mills’ demand for cotton had created vast wealth and self-righteousness in the six Deep South cotton states. Inspired by South Carolina’s Fire-Eater orators, the states of Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas soon followed.
But then, secession ground to a halt.

It is unknowable whether a seven-state Confederacy would have survived the next downturn in world cotton prices, or, disheartened, would have asked for readmission to the Union. We can see now that King Cotton proved to be a bubble. With the North declaring a blockade and the South an export embargo in 1861, the British ramped up cotton growing in Egypt and India, leaving the South impoverished after the war.

A rump Confederacy confined to the Deep South might have eventually been bought off by the plan Lincoln floated in the middle of the war for ending slavery voluntarily by compensating slave-owners with the proceeds from the sale of Western lands. At minimum, a seven-state Confederacy would have been easier to defeat on the battlefield than the eleven-state South that fought for four years.

The next tier of states northward—North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas—didn’t secede until May or June, well after the outbreak of fighting at Fort Sumter, South Carolina on April 12, 1861.

Finally, in the northernmost tier of slave states, above 36.5 degrees latitude, four states never seceded—Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri.

So what did Lincoln do to address the greatest crisis in the Republic's history?

But Lincoln took few steps to ready himself for this task. His main response to his election in November 1860 was to hire a second secretary to help answer his increased mail from politicians seeking patronage.

During the interregnum, Lincoln kicked around the notion of maybe adding one Southerner to the Cabinet, what with the secession and all, but nothing came of the idea. After Lincoln finally took the oath of office on March 4, 1861 he devoted much of his first six weeks to conscientiously interviewing the long line of Republican job-seekers that stretched out of the White House and down Pennsylvania Avenue to determine which would make the best local postmasters.

Malice or incompetence?  But not everyone was ignoring the crisis:

While Lincoln waited out the five-month interim in Springfield, Seward, his incoming Secretary of State, had been energetically warning European diplomats to heed the Monroe Doctrine and stay out of the Western Hemisphere during the American troubles. Within the cabinet, the New York statesman advocated abandoning indefensible Fort Sumter because the Union fighting a losing battle might emotionally propel indispensable Virginia into the Confederacy.

On April 1, 1861, Seward sent Lincoln a memo, Some Considerations for the President, advising Lincoln to stop wasting time on jobs-for-the-boys. Instead, the administration should reunite Americans, North and South, by ginning up a foreign-policy crisis over France’s ambitions in Mexico and Spain’s recolonizing of the Dominican Republic:

I would demand explanations from Spain and France, categorically, at once.…And if satisfactory explanations are not received from Spain and France, would convene Congress and declare war against them.

Lincoln smacked him down, aggressively defended Ft. Sumpter, and the shooting began.  Virginia and the rest joined the Confederacy based on the attack, and 750,000 lives were thrown away.  The reaction of historians these days?

Today, historians seem to side wholeheartedly with Lincoln in his waging of office politics against Seward while ignoring the substance of the Secretary of State’s audacious attempt to rescue the nation from civil war. The considered judgment of scholars such as James M. McPherson and Doris Kearns Goodwin upon Lincoln’s response to Seward is, roughly, “Ooooh, diss.”

 The reaction of observers closer to the time?

“The American people, North and South, went into the war as citizens of their respective states, they came out subjects of the United States.”
– H. L. Mencken

“No war ever raging in my time was to me more foolish looking.”
– Thomas Carlyle

Doris Kearns Goodwin is no Thomas Carlyle, or even an H. L. Mencken.

The inevitability of secession, part 2: Implications for the States

The Constitution gives no guidance on secession, but at least it is a starting point that helps explain some of the political landscape.  Wikipedia has a good time series breakdown of Red States (those that vote Republican) and Blue ones (those that vote Democrat:

This presumably would be the starting point for any fracturing of the Res Publica in a secession crisis.  An initial view is that the Red States are the old Confederacy with the lower midwest and the mountain states thrown in.

The problem is that the Red/Blue divide is not so clean.  The Constitution recognizes States, and the Electoral College tallies by State vote, but the breakdown is at a much lower level.  Many "Blue Staters" live in Red States, and vice versa.  A map showing the 3000 or so US Counties makes this plain:

The mapping shows a mostly rural vs. urban divide, although there are some clear exceptions to this - the Indian Reservations in New Mexico, for example, or the southern border of Texas are strongly Blue.  The Mississippi river runs Blue for most of its length.

And so when we consider the possibility of secession, things are very messy for the States.  Much of Georgia might be eager to secede, but would Atlanta?  Probably not.  There would be considerable unrest in any State that seceded, and likely much unrest in many of those that didn't.

That actually is pretty much what happened in 1861.  There were many in the South who did not want to leave the Union - Robert E. Lee was one; Virginia was late to join the Confederacy, and until it did, the Union Army courted him to be its commander.

There are regional grumblings about Counties seceding from the States: several northern California counties have voted to create the State of Jefferson; upstate New York has long been a hotbed of secession talk, with several communities looking to join Pennsylvania; the Pacific northwest has groups proposing the nation of Cascadia which would include some of British Columbia (it even has a redit group!).

We should also remember that both Vermont and West Virginia are the result of secession (from Virginia and New York, respectively).

And so secession isn't really a State issue.  It's regional, just like in Europe (Scotland, Catalonia, and northern Italy all have active secession/devolution movements).

Given the fragmentation that would be the necessary result of a secession movement, we can expect the prospect of chaos to act as a break on any action until there is overwhelming support.  Right now the political elites are happy with the current situation - the GOP establishment is content to take the bribes and rake offs that the Democrats enjoy, and so don't rock the vote.

It will take a crisis, and external shock to change this - an financial crisis.  I expect that there's one coming:

I think that this road that we are on leads to secession.  We've already seen a geographical divergence of governance, with Blue states increasingly pushing the Salad Bowl grievance identity politics (limited growth with government distributing the jobs) and with Red states pushing pro-business, pro-growth politics (i.e. melting pot with enough jobs to go around).  This will not continue forever: a middle class increasingly under financial pressure will flee the Blue states, increasing the fiscal strain that those governance models experience.  At some point the Blue states will demand to be bailed out en masse, and the Red states will refuse.

At this point the split will occur.  I expect it will happen within my lifetime.

California is the place to watch, with a public pension crisis of epic proportions boiling right now.  Already cities are going bankrupt, and the State is (like the EU and the Eurozone) frantically trying to paper over the mess.  But since no actual reform is taking place, the old adage is true: what can't go on forever, won't.

At the risk of speaking for my fellow Georgians, I can't see support in the Peach State for bailing out a bunch of Blue State governments who spent way more than they should have.  Even Atlanta will likely not be enthusiastic (and note that Atlanta has its own secession movement in north Fulton County, so the part supportive of a bailout is likely going to shrink over time).

It's possible that the bailout will be done by stealth, with deficits funding the program.  The problem is that the dollar is in a crisis, and when financial corrections come, history shows that they come suddenly.  The crisis in this scenario will be no different, other than much bigger.

I see one likely path to a split: a crisis causes local and regional political elites to seize on the public disgruntlement.  As with all elites, they are part of the problem, but the crisis of confidence in the current national governance will give them an opportunity to retake power from the center.

Really the only question is whether the crisis will be small (pension bailout) or large (crisis of the dollar).  Fewer States will secede in a small crisis; a large crisis will likely leave nothing standing as the Blue regions decide that this is their chance to go full throttle Euro-Welfare-State.

I expect there will be a lot of migration after the breakup.  We see lots of people moving south from Blue States to the better climate and economic opportunity of the southern Red States.  Californians are leaving for Texas today.  This will be a lot bigger after the breakup, as Blue regions get bluer and Red ones get redder.

Tomorrow will discuss the International Implications of secession.

The inevitability of secession, part 1: Introduction

Chief Justice Salmon Chase was wrong.  In Texas v. White (1869), he wrote the majority opinion on secession:

The Union of the States never was a purely artificial and arbitrary relation. It began among the Colonies, and grew out of common origin, mutual sympathies, kindred principles, similar interests, and geographical relations. It was confirmed and strengthened by the necessities of war, and received definite form and character and sanction from the Articles of Confederation. By these, the Union was solemnly declared to 'be perpetual.' And when these Articles were found to be inadequate to the exigencies of the country, the Constitution was ordained 'to form a more perfect Union.' It is difficult to convey the idea of indissoluble unity more clearly than by these words. What can be indissoluble if a perpetual Union, made more perfect, is not?

Except the Republic did not date its governing principles to the Articles of Confederation, which were clearly a failure - a failure clear at the time, in fact.  Instead, it dated to the Constitution.  That was ratified by all original thirteen States, and it is clear that it would not have been ratified if the States hadn't thought that they couldn't leave if they had needed to.  Indeed, the ending of the Articles of Confederation were essentially an act of secession.

Chase was an interesting bird.  He founded the Free Soil movement - "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men".  It was an unabashedly abolitionist party, and reflected what was very probably the real cause of the American War of Southern Independence (the "Civil War" to you Yankees).

And Chase wasn't just one of the chief proponents of the political position, he was Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.  One of the charges leveled at the post war Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals was that it was "Victor's Justice"; America had an 80 year history of Victor's Justice, dating back to Texas v. White.

And so secession was ruled illegal.

The problem, of course, is that it was only illegal because "Honest Abe" Lincoln determined that it was better that 10% of the military age population be killed or wounded in battle than a set of States should choose to leave the Republic.  For a while, it worked.

For a while, the Fed.Gov demonstrated that it could deliver - more growth, more prosperity, freedom increasing through the 1960s.  In 1969, the Fed.Gov landed a man on the moon.  It was the high water mark of government legitimacy.

What we've seen since then is an intentional fracturing of the Republic, based on race, gender, and class.  Political careers have been made for those who have done this - Al Sharpton is a particularly loathsome example of this, but he is by no means alone.  Barack Obama may be the most successful of these, parlaying racial themes of guilt and offered redemption into two terms in the White House during which he has thoroughly politicized the Federal Agencies.  Eric Holder was the chield law enforcement official in the land but ran the Department of Justice along racial grievance lines.  If you have any doubts about this, read up on the New Black Panther Party, George Zimmerman, and Ferguson MO.

Obama reflected a small but well organized segment of society determined to fundamentally reshape society.  Unsurprisingly, this hasn't turned out to be popular with much of society who overwhelmingly voted Democrats out of House and Senate seats - historical defeats for Obama's Democratic Party.  The voters gave significant majorities to the Republican Party in both houses of Congress, because GOP candidates ran on a platform of overturning Obama's overreach on health care, immigration, and general weakening of the USA on the international stage.

So how's that working out for GOP voters?

Conservative talk show host Glenn Beck on Wednesday announced he is leaving the Republican Party.

“I’ve made my decision — I’m out,” Beck said Wednesday on “The Glenn Beck Program,” his broadcast on TheBlaze.com. “I’m out of the Republican Party. I am not a Republican. I will not give a dime to the Republican Party. I’m out.”

The host said Republicans lost him with their inaction on both ObamaCare and illegal immigration.

“All this stuff that they said and they ran and they said they were doing all of these great things and they were going to stand against ObamaCare and illegal immigration — they set us up,” Beck added. “They set us up. Enough is enough. They’re torpedoing the Constitution and they’re doing it knowingly.”

Can't really argue with any of that.  And he's not the only one:

Yes, Establishment GOP, you can teach us that you will always lie to us, stab us in the back, humiliate us and crush us; but if you teach us that, be aware we are learning another lesson, too. Not just that "The Establishment Will Always Crush You," but the lesson that There is no hope in any kind of conventional politics for those of us who want better than this Pile of Shit the two parties give us.

And the mutterings have been going on for years:

1. Many inner-circle strategists in the Republican Party machine basically believe the game is over demographics wise. They’ve believed this for a long time. Call them the “We Are Doomed” Machiavellians, trying to make a barely-palatable lemonade out of some very nasty lemons.
2. Privately, personally, they probably agree with everything Richwine and all the rest have ever said. But it doesn’t matter, because, on the strategic time scale, we’ve already crossed the Rubicon.
3. Tactically, short-to-medium term, you could follow the Sailer Strategy and, maybe, squeeze out a few Revanchist wins for Republicans, but it would be counterproductive. The Cathedral (they don’t call it that, of course) would make easy hay of “the hateful white party” in due time, and it would go the way of the Know-Nothings in Boston – permanent obsolescence.
4. So, the best you can do, if you care at all about the long-term survival of anything like even a fake opposition party in out decadent democracy, is to embrace the Latin American / Texan model, an increasingly Brazil-esque society, but one in which, in some places, at some times, you can still get some Hispanics to feel fondly about and vote for the Republicans.
5. To do this, you must absolutely, positively, and, most importantly, preemptively cave to everything you think the Democrats could possibly leverage against you. Which, in practice, means being the volunteer auxiliary PC-enforcer on your own side. It also helps when you’ve got big business on your side.

Salmon Chase had been a member of the Whig Party, which fractured under the strain of abolitionism.  The Republican Party looks like it's headed for the same crack up.

But it doesn't really matter: it's clear that the citizens of this Republic will not vote themselves out of this mess.  The Establishment is united - across both Parties - against the population which holds them in increasing contempt.

So if there's no way to vote in representatives who will represent the will of the People, what remains?  It's hard to see any alternative to the country splitting into two or more parts that will eliminate the Washington D.C. Establishment as something that can impose unpopular laws on them.

Not everyone believes this will happen:

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.

This time, it's hard to see a politician willing and able to sacrifice 10% of the military age population in a War of Secession.  And so Chief Justice Chase's decision is more or less irrelevant.  He had the legitimacy imposed by a victorious army at the point of the bayonet; the current Establishment doesn't have that and doesn't seem to be fixin' to get it anytime soon.

And so if reform is not possible, exit is the obvious result.  The Republic has large parts what are tired of having a left wing ideology rammed down their throats - and an ideology that enriches Wall Street and the big banks, at that.  These people have played the game the way it has been laid out, by the rules that were what everyone had been told were just - one man, one vote.  And that vote clearly is a waste of time.


Okay, then.  But things will not continue as they have.  Tomorrow will be part 2, implications for the 50 States.

The political bands connecting us weaken

One of the best arguments that Progressives are not very smart is that they cannot deduce the easily foreseeable consequences of their actions.  The Obama years are really nothing other than an orgy of progressive ideas forced on a (mostly) unwilling Republic.  So where does that lead?

Progressives do not suffer from this curious blind spot when discussing what they see as social problems.  They can wax eloquent on "externalities" and the Tragedy of the Commons when discussing pollution.  In many ways they are correct when they do this; it's just odd that they do not see externalities and the Tragedy of the Commons on their preferred nostrums: the firing of Brendon Eich, the canceling the bank account of a couple of christian brothers, the suppression of scientific papers "unhelpful" to the current Anthropogenic Global Warming mania.

This may be happening not because Progressives are stupider than those one or two generations ago, but because Progressives who could (or would) reason this way have been purged:

Earlier this evening an Instapundit reference reminded me of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s insightful essay Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs, in which he uses a clever physics analogy to explain why cult-like groups often respond to strong evidence against their core beliefs by becoming more fanatical.

...

Here’s a major sign of evaporative cooling: the American Physical Society has since appointed a committee of working scientists (one of whom is Curry herself) to reexamine and possibly reverse its public commitment to AGW alarmism. As well it should; the alarmists’ predictions have failed so massively that they no longer have a scientific case – they’re going to have to rebuild one with a set of models that at least retrodicts the actual data.

Whatever findings the APS committee issues, the very fact that it has been convened at all is a sign that (in Yudkowsky’s analogy) the higher-energy molecules have become excited by the counterevidence and are exiting the cold trap. Or, in the metaphor of an earlier day, the rats are looking for a way off the sinking ship…

This is happening at the same time that the IPCC’s AR5 (Fifth Assessment Report) asserts its highest ever level of confidence that the (nonexistent for 15+ years) global warming is human-cased. What Yudkowsky tells us is that AR5′s apparently crazed assertion is a natural result of the mounting counterevidence. The voices of sanity and moderation, such as they are in the AGW crowd, are evaporating out; increasingly, even more than in the past, their game will be run by the fanatics and the evidence-blind.

So where does this lead?  What will be the easily foreseeable reaction to an increasingly despotic and increasingly unpopular - and, dare I say it, an increasingly foreign - ideology?

The sooner the correction is made, the less jarring the turn.  The longer things drag out, the sharper and more jolting it will be.

The Media used to be a firm brace against any correction, but they are moribund - not dead, but coughing up blood and a shadow of their former strength.  They won't help the Progressive cause.  The Universities have been fiercely Progressive of late, but there's a Bad Moon rising in higher education with unsustainable cost structures and massively online courses that will wipe out the current establishment withing a decade or two.  They won't be able to help the Progressives after that happens.  The government bureaucracies are staffed with what increasingly seem to be political hacks.  There's the problem.

The IRS, the BLM, the EPA, the CDC, the Justice Department, the ATF - all have been on Progressive crusades.  A purge is needed, but is unlikely to happen.  So where do things end?

This will not end well.  If Progressives use the only remaining tool in their toolbox (the Organs of the State) to impose their will on a resistant country, then that road leads straight to secession.  There isn't any question where it ends, only whether one or the other party turns aside before the destination.

Evaporative cooling theory suggests that Progressives won't.  As they increasingly (and rightly) feel under counterattack, they will double down.

This will not end well.

The inevitable collapse of the Washington DC bureaucracy

The spirit of secession is alive and well, and is global in scope:

THE list of organisations withdrawing from CBI Scotland over its stance [opposing] the [Scottish independence] referendum grew yesterday, with two more universities among those quitting.

Scotland will vote soon on whether to leave the UK.  A friend in Edinburgh tells me that it's all over but the vote counting.  The periphery is, for better or worse, poised to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with the sassenach.

They're joined by Catalonia:

Catalonia’s president has vowed to press ahead with a fiercely contentious referendum on independence from Spain, warning that he now saw little chance of a negotiated settlement with Madrid that could tackle the region’s economic and political grievances...

And the restive populations of Wales, Brittany, and Northern Italy watch with increasing impatience.  Belgium looks fair to break apart within a decade, as the unnatural marriage of french speaking Walloons and dutch speaking Flemings continue to keep that national government vapor locked.

Europe, for all its grandiose centralizing plans to counterbalance the American hyperpuissance is falling apart before our eyes.  Devolution is the game.  Here, we call that secession.  The path to that end is not (quite) inevitable, but is where the smart money is betting already in Edinburgh.  Soon it will be betting that way in Dallas.

I first broached this topic four years ago:

Kings of [Dark Ages Britain] were Ring Givers, as described in Beowulf and echoed in J.R.R. Tolkien's novels. Simon Schama writes about how the system worked in his A History Of Britain:

Their political power rested on the spoils of war and on the unwritten custom of the clan. The blood feud and the inhumation of bodies were standard practice among them. This does not mean, however, that the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were places of sub-human brutality and ignorance, perpetuated by thugs in helmets. War was not a sport; it was a system. Its plunder was the glue of loyalty, binding noble warriors and their men to the king. It was the land, held in return for military service, that fed their bellies; it was the honour that fed their pride; and it was the jewels that pandered to their vanity. It was everything.

And so it is today.  The modern Kings - David Cameron, Barack Obama, M. van Rampouy - are failing because they struggle to be Ring Givers.  Europe has led the charge down this blind alley, and so are running out of rings faster than here in the Colonies, but the plain fact is that Scotland and Catalonia wouldn't even be considering striking out on their own if the political establishment could buy them off.  The used to be able to do this, for the last two decades.  Now an enormous and enormously expensive bureaucracy in London and Strassbourg has consumed the surplus while tamping down economic growth with stifling regulation.  We've see on these shores where that leads.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

The European centralizing experiment is collapsing.  You'll watch it happen this year.  Sic transit gloria mundi, and good riddance to bad rubbish.  And so to our shores, and the inevitable collapse of the Washington centralizing bureaucracy.

Inevitable is the proper term, and this isn't just me being long on sunshine and kittens.  Barack Obama is without doubt the most European US President in history.  His use of power is straight out of the playbook of the European "Elite".  They're running into massive resistance in Europe and Obama is running into it here on these shores:

“I am about ready,” [Texas Attorney] General Abbott told Breitbart Texas, “to go to the Red River and raise a ‘Come and Take It’ flag to tell the feds to stay out of Texas.”

...

In an exclusive interview with Breitbart Texas, General Abbott said, “This is the latest line of attack by the Obama Administration where it seems like they have a complete disregard for the rule of law in this country ...And now they’ve crossed the line quite literally by coming into the State of Texas and trying to claim Texas land as federal land. And, as the Attorney General of Texas I am not going to allow this.”

In a more prosperous day, Washington would have just bought him off.  But they can't now, any more than David Cameron can buy off the Scottish politicians or Señor Rajoy Brey can buy off the Catalan politicians.  There's no money left.  It's all been spent on the coalition that supported each of these leaders ascent to power - the notorious "Stimulus" program was essentially a Trillion dollar payoff to Obama's allies, and he certainly would have not been reelected without that.

But that's all spent now.  And to the Dark Ages reference above, plunder is the glue of loyalty.  In that post I predicted the current conundrum for the leaders of the Western world:

The modern Regulatory State has a more subtle (and less brutal) method of getting plunder, but at its heart the system is the same: politics is still about feeding bellies, vanity, and pride. Regulations need Regulators, which gives ample opportunity for patronage. New regulations can be crafted with the help of powerful allies, which gives ample opportunity to flatter egos and let them show their followers that they too can deliver results. Plunder must be distributed, even it it takes the form of intellectual booty.

...

The Regulatory State has led us, step by step, vanity project by vanity project to a massive bubble of Sovereign Debt. Like someone who refinanced their house to take a vacation, the industrialized world is facing a crisis caused by a dynamic that Rædwald understood: the need for rulers to cater to their supporter's money, pride, and vanity.

What I missed in that post is the bureaucracy as the natural ally of the centralizing power.  The bureaucracy has shown itself to be the creature of the centralizers, with the IRS and the BATF as the poster children for intrusive politization of the organs of the government.  And they have been well rewarded for it as 7 of the 10 richest counties in the US are in the Washington DC area.

But power exists to be used, and the bureaus are either slipping beyond Obama's control - running on the autopilot which is the Iron Law - or it's all part of the plan to subjugate the hinterlands.  In any event, it's not working as a self-organized Nevada militia stared down the BLM and the states become increasingly restless.  This means that smart State politicians see a way to get ahead by getting tough with Washington.  Increasingly, it pays to flip the bird to the king.

The Center cannot hold, because a wildly expensive bureaucracy is stifling the Periphery.  The Periphery doesn't like it.  The cost of the people who keep the Center in power makes it impossible to buy off enough politicians to defuse the Periphery's unrest.  It's a dialectic in action.

The natives are restless, and are increasingly so.

And so the smart politics is increasingly one of defiance to the Center.  We shall see it later this year in Edinburgh and Barcelona.  We will see is to a lesser - but growing - extent in Austin and Pierre.  But the trajectory is locked because Obama needs every scrap of his base for this (and the next) election cycle.  He'll double down because he has to.  That will be throwing gasoline on the fire. And it won't be enough now, as it wasn't in the Dark Ages:

War was not a sport; it was a system. Its plunder was the glue of loyalty, binding noble warriors and their men to the king. It was the land, held in return for military service, that fed their bellies; it was the honour that fed their pride; and it was the jewels that pandered to their vanity. It was everything.

To keep a large kingdom's fighting men in booty, you had to fight a lot. You also had to fight smart - a king that loses a lot of battles loses his men's loyalty and ultimately his life. The chronicles tell us that the Merovingian boy king Sigebert wept in his saddle as his army was routed. That's what led to the Mayors of the Palace becoming the war leaders and Ring Givers, and that led to the replacement of the Merovingians by the Carolingians. You might say that the Merovingian bubble burst.

As is the centralizing bubble.  In the end, Washington DC will collapse because there is no alternative.  There's no plausible scenario where the growth in power and control over the States is sustainable.  Things that can't continue don't.  I believe that the Class Warfare in this Cold Civil War have so weakened the bands that have bound together the Red and Blue States that the easiest solution will be a split.  The Blue States will get Washington, and its bureaucracy, and its cost.

I don't expect that they will ultimately enjoy that.

Bootnote: if you believe that the two political parties are but the two wings of the same bird of prey, then this suggests that President Romney will see this same dynamic continue in 2017 ...

The Secession all-you-can-eat buffet

Fondue is a strange thing - it's made from lots (at least three or four) different types of cheeses, along with various spices and other alchemical ingredients.  And yet is all melts into a smooth and entirely consistent dish, suitable for sharing in a crazy-hipster-1960s communal vibe.  It's essentially a socialist dish, from each according to his cooking ability to each according to his hunger.  Which is odd, because it's by definition a melting pot.

Recipes here

Salad is the opposite extreme, and not just because it's veggies instead of milk fat.  Each component keeps its own separate identity - carrots are not tomatoes.  It gets tossed together, but the sum is composed of the constituent parts which remain separate and essentially distrustful of each other.

Image source

The Res Publica Cafe used to feature a melting pot, where people from all sorts of backgrounds came here but blended with a common Americanness.  This worked for two centuries as the bonds that brought diverse people together were strengthened, and those who wanted to remain stand offish were shunned until they joined the common weal.  America was an idea: We hold these truths to be self-evident, whether you came from London or Bremen or Napoli or Dublin.

No longer.  For a generation the melting pot has been double-plus ungood crimethink.  The "Salad Bowl" is now what our moral and intellectual superiors favor.  Each group (never individuals, always groups) remain their own non-American identity as they are tossed together with other diverse groups.  And what we see from this is that the trust required to keep a single society functioning is breaking down.

The Democratic Party's coalition requires a set of victim groups to give it political power.  As a result, their favored policies have tried to inhibit the melting pot and reinforce group differences.  Minorities are penalized from diverging from accepted behavior for the group - "don't act so White", that sort of thing.

And so the feeling that we're all in this together that was so common in my youth is pretty much used up.  The question is, what comes next?

I think that this road that we are on leads to secession.  We've already seen a geographical divergence of governance, with Blue states increasingly pushing the Salad Bowl grievance identity politics (limited growth with government distributing the jobs) and with Red states pushing pro-business, pro-growth politics (i.e. melting pot with enough jobs to go around).  This will not continue forever: a middle class increasingly under financial pressure will flee the Blue states, increasing the fiscal strain that those governance models experience.  At some point the Blue states will demand to be bailed out en masse, and the Red states will refuse.

At this point the split will occur.  I expect it will happen within my lifetime.

We face a crisis of governance, a crisis of trust, and a crisis of philosophy.  Political groups have gotten ahead by fostering these crises: public sector unions with unsustainable pension benefits, race baiting politicians always pushing the "raciss" line, and a post modern university where racism can only come from whites (even, or perhaps especially, if they are poor).  These groups will not try to heal the split; indeed, they have every incentive to make it worse.  The "us vs. them" of the salad bowl will see to it that the greens up and leave to a different table, just because they're tired of hearing the carrots tell them what a bunch of bigots leafy vegetables are.

Notice that none of the typical "culture wars" issues will be the driver of this split, it's all the economics of bailout.  Where a bailout might have been possible in a higher trust melting pot environment, the bank of social capital will have been exhausted.  Long simmering resentments will flare in the strained fiscal environment and suddenly both sides will realize that a divorce will be a relief.

It a massive tragedy of the commons, as the Democratic party squanders the communal capital built up over 200 years.  In the span of 50 years it will all have been used up, and the polity will splinter.  The irony is that the parts left with the Democrats will look a lot like Europe, but not in the good way of fancy aristocratically commissioned architecture with great food and wine; rather, a society of General Strike, zero job growth, and capital flight.

Damn, I'm sure glad I got out of Massachusetts before they built a Wall.

The North has used the doctrines of Democracy to destroy self-government. The South applied the principle of conditional federation to cure the evils and to correct the errors of a false interpretation of Democracy...[and the inevitable result of an unfettered federal government will be] the initiative in administration; the function of universal guardian and paymaster; the resources of coercion, intimidation, and corruption; the habit of preferring the public interest of the moment to the established law; .............. a public creditor; a prodigious budget these things will remain to the future government of the Federal Union, and will make it approximate more closely to the imperial than to the republican type of democracy.

- Lord Acton, correspondence to Robert E. Lee