I suspect this post will upset most of my readers.  It may be written off as a rant.  If that’s your inclination, before writing it off, please consider the actual arguments I make, because doing so will encourage  rethinking  some very basic issues that we supposedly celebrate on July 4. I personally would prefer drawing conclusions different than where this piece ends, and would appreciate being convinced my diagnosis is wrong.  The final straw was an article I recently read.

In Mississippi and Alabama if a pregnant woman has a miscarriage she now needs to demonstrate to the police she was not responsible. These “small government” beasts would intrude into one of the saddest and most intimate tragedies in many women’s lives in the name of their demon god and the depraved morality they practice.  If she was responsible in the eyes of the savages who wrote the law, she can be tried and imprisoned.  This law is being enforced

There is only one word for the law, and for the people who advocated it, and that word is “evil.”  The law could only be put forward by malignant human beings. And when I read about it, the seeds of this post were planted.

These “pro-life” places are also among the benighted places where women’s life span is actually declining in the United States. Look at the map and think about it: everywhere else in the industrialized world, lifespans are increasing.  In the South, dominated by people claiming to be “pro-life,” women’s life spans are decreasing.  And Americans are already neither the longest lived  people in the industrial world nor keeping up with the overall rate of increase. They are falling behind.   This problem is centered in the South.

The very same people responsible for these outcomes, with their allies elsewhere, also seek to make it difficult for women to have access to contraception, and have cut back on state assistance to poor families and to education.  At a time of high long term unemployment they campaigned with promises to improve the job situation, and once in office ignored those promises.  They prefer picking on the poor and on women.  At the same time they oppose taxing the filthy rich even back up to the levels they paid under President Clinton.  For them it is far better to make the least powerful members of our society pay the full brunt of any changes in policies.

When this pattern is considered as a whole, again there is only one word for the policies and the people responsible for them. Evil.  For they are utterly without compassion, integrity, or a sense of fair play.

As Independence Day approaches we learn a disappointingly large minority of Americans do not know the country from which we declared our independence.  The largest percentage of Americans with such abysmal ignorance is in the South.  Southerners have suffered longest under the NeoConfederate politicians and Satanic religious leaders who dominate the place, and their ignorance is symbolic of this misrule.  I wish it were better known that Dixie is the only region of the US where its leaders explicitly rejected the reasoning within in our Declaration of Independence and declared our Founding Fathers mistaken – because it could not be used to support slavery and they almost universally agreed it was wrong.

If this were entirely a matter of policies within their own benighted states we could live with it.  After all, travel is relatively easy, and people are free to leave the place.  Or move there if that’s what makes them feel at home.  But we are not so fortunate.  These people also destroy our attempts to govern ourselves as a nation.

The people responsible for their states moving in the opposite direction from the civilized world are the same moral and political degenerates who prevented decent medical care for millions of Americans nationally, prevented measures to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, have sought to destroy Social security and Medicare and Medicaid and have most fervently supported our aggressive wars. Absent them we would have better environmental laws, better health care, better education, and fewer wars. They have deliberately made our country ungovernable except on their terms, regardless of majority opinion.  And their terms are depraved.

These states and the people they elect are crucial players in the destruction of the United States.  Their support has been crucial in adopting catastrophic policies and, far worse – because we all make mistakes – in preventing any efforts to learn from these catastrophes and adopt wiser ones.  Their people in Washington have made it clear they would rather see the country fall into ever deeper crises than adopt policies different from their own.  As Kevin Drum put it,

“…over the past ten years. Republicans got the tax cuts they wanted. They got the financial deregulation they wanted. They got the wars they wanted. They got the unfunded spending increases they wanted. And the results were completely, unrelentingly disastrous. A decade of sluggish growth and near-zero wage increases. A massive housing bubble. Trillions of dollars in war spending and thousands of American lives lost. A financial collapse. A soaring long-term deficit. Sky-high unemployment. All on their watch and all due to policies they eagerly supported. And worse: ever since the predictable results of their recklessness came crashing down, they’ve rabidly and nearly unanimously opposed every single attempt to dig ourselves out of the hole they created for us.”

As we see in states the Republican right controls, and no where more than in the NeoConfederate parts of the South, they are attacking the principle of democratic elections.  In the name of fighting nonexistent election fraud, across the country Republicans are attacking Americans’ right to vote.  They want to cement their rule, and that is more important than democracy. As E. J. Dionne explains,

“In Texas, for example, the law allows concealed-handgun licenses to work as identification, but not student IDs. Nationwide exit polls show that John McCain carried households in which someone owned a gun by 25 percentage points but lost voters in households without a gun by 32 points.

“Besides Texas, states that enacted voter ID laws this year include Kansas, Wisconsin, South Carolina and Tennessee. Indiana and Georgia already had such requirements. The Maine Legislature voted to end same-day voter registration. Florida seems determined to go back to the chaos of the 2000 election. It shortened the early voting period, effectively ended the ability of registered voters to change their address at the polls and imposed onerous restrictions on organized voter-registration drives.”

This issue is more serious than simply political disagreement.  It is a sustained attack on a free society.  Vital and creative cultures have been destroyed from within as well as from without.  In the Middle Ages Islamic societies were more creative than European ones.   But today Islamic societies are benighted backwards places made rich only because they sit on oil deposits.  They contribute nothing much themselves.  Why?  While there is no settled opinion, it appears to many that when what calls itself conservative Islam came to triumph in these societies, they ceased to be centers for creative thought.  Much closer to home, it also appears to be the case that William Penn’s hopes for a tolerant Pennsylvania that treated Indians well was undermined from immigration by intolerant Christians into the region.

I suggest we consider similarly unpleasant outcomes as disturbingly possible here in the United States, at least for a period long enough to do enormous lasting damage to our country and its better nature.  We certainly have our home grown barbarians.

The Significance of Alabama and Mississippi

Alabama and Mississippi are extreme examples of what the contemporary Republican Party wants for us all.  Its leadership is dominated by enemies of the principles this country was founded upon, and its base of support is in the most benighted parts of the South.  When we look at the policies these people would pursue if they had complete power, look no farther than Alabama and Mississippi.  Other states have similar people in power, but particularly outside the South their hold is more tenuous, and they are often subject to recall by a population that on balance has proven itself willing to abide by democratic norms.

In making this charge I do not put the rest of the United States on a pedestal. Even without the worst of the South dragging us down we have serious problems.  Lots of them.  We have many different points of view about the extent of those problems and even when we agree, we do not necessarily agree how to address them.  But on balance we respect one another enough that we will not try to destroy our common political system if we do not get our way. We do not insist “My way or the highway.”  We realize that democracy requires enough respect for other points of view that compromise is a essential part of collective life.

Absent the theocrats and authoritarians in Dixie we would have the chance to actually deal with the issues that confront us.  Outside the South the political and social disease of the nihilistic anti-American Right is not so strongly embedded.  It would not be strong enough to destroy the country as a whole.

Someone should leave

There sometimes comes a sad moment when we need to read a person out of our lives, and make clear that we have neither time nor room for them until they return to becoming decent members of the human race.  Many families face this painful dilemma when a member gets involved in serious drug abuse, especially alcoholism. When matters get that far they usually need to hit rock bottom before they ultimately turn their lives around.  They are beyond help from human beings on the outside.

On far more rare occasions a portion of a society so loses its moral bearings that they are better cast off until they change than continue with common membership. To keep association as political equals legitimates their depravity and hamstrings us in living our lives.

They also need to experience the full consequences of their beliefs and behavior.  The worst parts of the South receive far more from the rest of us than they contribute.  In a very real sense we subsidize those who despise us and wish to rule over us. They insist their way is so superior that they would prevent the rest of us from living as we deem best. They should be allowed to walk their talk, but without the test of us being dragged along in the same moral and political muck.

The Declaration of Independence

On July 4 we should do more than celebrate with fireworks.  We should think about the principles our country was founded on.  The core logic behind the Declaration of Independence’s argument for secession from Britain is increasingly applicable to the United States today:

“governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to 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. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”

The constitution has no means by which Americans can periodically affirm their common identity, or leave it.  I think it should.  But one part of the country has already seceded in almost every way that matters to people who are inspired by our highest ideals.  I think we need to consider declaring independence from these people.

Someone will argue that even the most benighted parts of the South has many good people, and they will be right.  But as it currently stands, while these good people benefit from the Southern elite’s being somewhat limited by our constitution in what they can do, at the same time the South as a whole prevents American self-government.  If Mississippi and Alabama  were kicked out of the Union, along with any states who wish to follow, the civilized portions of these states could and in many cases would leave, to join good Americans elsewhere. And perhaps our worst citizens would move to where they would feel more at home.

In time their society, rooted as it is in lies and hypocrisy, would decline so far that  new generations would reject their ways.  Perhaps they would then build free societies at home, or perhaps they would seek to rejoin.  That would be their choice.  But to achieve either outcome they could no longer romanticize the corrupt elites who dragged their societies down.

Today we are far from seceding from these places, or having them secede from us, though I’d vote for it either way in a second.  But we should begin thinking about it an talking about it.  We should make it clear to those who support these people where the logic of their actions leads.  We should be clear that when we deal with those who rule Alabama and Mississippi, and those like them elsewhere, we know we are not dealing with fellow citizens who disagree about policies but with vowed and dedicated enemies who will stop at nothing until they have established absolute dominion over the rest of us. That they claim to be patriots and continually claim to follow a constitution they do not understand only adds fraud to their assaults against this country.

Is it practical?

Someone will worry that a smaller and freer part of this current country would not last.  To them I answer “Look at Europe.”  It is more prosperous, more humane, freer, more peaceful and healthier than this country.  Further, the smallest European states are among the most successful.  They are not perfect, they have their problems, but what societies don’t?  And on balance they are doing better than we are.  Many American states would be doing as well were we not continually hobbled by the barbarians rooted in the cultural blight of the old slavocracy.  Or if Europe seems too far away, look at Canada to our north.  It’s not heaven, Canada also has problems, but it’s better run than here.

I think we should seriously consider casting the neo-confederates free like they say they want to be, or that failing, leaving ourselves. If the majority of people in those states do not want to sever political ties with the rest of us, they have a simple solution. Stop voting these people into office.

If it ultimately comes to secession, the way to self government is not through violence.  Violence was a tactic of the Confederacy, very fitting with its ethos, and ultimately a failure.  A peaceful exit is possible, and the more it is discussed the more possible it becomes.

For me who should leave and who should stay is secondary to the more basic point that important forces within the American South have deliberately cut themselves off from willingness to play by traditional democratic rules, impose evil laws when given the chance, and left to their own devices will do this country irreparable harm.  Better to expel them or, that failing, leave ourselves.