Years ago, the concept of secession (I prefer the term “self-determination”) interested me greatly. My first re-introduction to a concept that I thought had been politically decided and, thus, historically banished was through meeting a few prominent members of The League of the South, including the then-president (he may still be president) Dr. Michael Hill, at tiny Presbyterian church in Alabama in the late 90s. Though I was never really comfortable with their yearning to restore the Confederacy, I must declare that they never showed any traces of disrespect or suspicion toward my racially mixed (white/Asian) family. In fact, the then-pastor of the church saw some promise in me as a potential Reformed–as in Calvinistic, not as in recently released from prison–seminarian and wanted me to join his home-spun seminary with his seminarian-in-residence, a young Hispanic with much good faith and nervous energy, once–with gravitas–telling my mom in very own our home that a commitment to the Faith often requires great sacrifice. (Yeah, growing up in our circles, we met some pretty interesting people–all without the help of the Internet. Remind me sometime to tell you of when I used to pal around with a radical anti-abortionist Catholic sidewalk counselor who also supported secession–and advocated shooting abortionists…. Part of me misses all the non-Internet-subsidized zanies.) According to my mom, Dr. Hill even invited my Japanese father to join, though I do not believe that occurred.  (Not that I am accusing her of lying–merely of remembering incorrectly….) Relieved to find out that there were pro-secessionist thinkers outside of the pro-Confederacy camp, I looked into the writings of thinkers like Kirkpatrick Sale; however, my favorite work on secession, though the author–while sympathetic–does not advocate it, is the always amusing and rhetorically ennobling Bill Kauffman and his raucous Bye Bye, Miss American Empire. In case you are wondering, I was never invited to join The League (though I probably could have charmed my way in), did not become a Presbyterian seminarian–or remain Protestant for that matter, nor did I go on to agitate politically for the implicit conclusions of the Constitution.

I still think of secession from time to time, though not as an endgame goal to be pursued through cultural and political resistance, but rather as what now seems to be a cultural and political inevitability. Two recent articles from the Unz Review brought this to my mental foreground. In Boyd Cathey’s “Is It Time for American to Break Apart,”  he asks:

The question comes down to this: Is the fragile American experiment in republicanism begun in Philadelphia in 1787, which required a commonly-shared understanding of basic principles, now over, or at the very least is it entering its agonizing death throes?

Of course, many would say that was answered in the affirmative after the War Between the States…. He continues:

Increasingly, we live in a country that has become de facto little more than a mere geographical entity. True, it is still formally a nation, but a nation where there are in fact at least two very distinct Americas, with radically differing visions of what is real and what is not real, radically differing conceptions of what is moral and what is not, radically differing views about truth and error, and radically differing ideas about using whatever means are available to reach a desired and posited end. For all the talk of equality and racism, the revolutionary side in actuality seeks to replace one oligarchy—which it calls “white supremacist”—with another oligarchy of its own making, in fact, a brutal, vicious and soulless “utopia’’ that would make Joseph Stalin’s Communist state seem like a Sandals Retreat in the Bahamas.

Though I would go further to say that we are more than two very distinct Americas, his basic point remains: we (in the loosest possible sense) are a nation deeply, deeply divided. His prognosis will please very few–or please some for the wrong reasons:

(1) Either there must be some large mass conversion of one side or the other (a ‘Road to Damascus’ conversion?), probably occasioned by some immense and earth-shaking event, war, depression, disaster; or (2) there must be a separation into independent jurisdictions of large portions of what is presently geographically the United States, including possible massive population exchanges—this separation/secession could be peaceable, although increasingly I think it would not be; or lastly, and worst, (3) the devolution of this country would continue into open and vicious civil and guerrilla war, followed by a harsh dictatorship. Disorder always abhors a vacuum, and that vacuum will be filled one way or another.

The essential taste of his doom-laced drink is that we have allowed ideology divide us to the point that we no longer see each other as fellow citizens. (Allowing any and all from other regions does not assist with stability, either.) In fact, the cohabitating (not even well) in a region seems to be the only sine qua non for citizenship–and the bedrock upon which the American identity is now built.

Closely related to Cathey’s concerns, decline-seen-through-vignettes author Linh Dinh weighs in: (I have written before about Dinh–here and here.  If you have not, treat yourself to his travelogue-of-decay Postcards from the End of America.)

The first step is to stop thinking of yourself as an American, for there’s no America left to save, much less “make great again,” and there are no Americans left either, for if anybody can be a defacto American just by showing up, then the concept is meaningless. That’s like me landing in Tel Aviv tomorrow and declaring I’m a Jew.

Your average American hardly has a hometown, just a homepage, and his neighbors are the anonymous, pseudonymous, hasbarists and trolls he compulsively chats with. If you don’t even belong to your neighborhood, how are you the citizen of any nation?

Coming full circle, Dinh advocates what Kauffman has been advocating for his entire writing career: localism. The American experiment may have been too grand to begin with; however, at least when it began, it was united, more or less, by people of a common stock and ideology. Though a nation founded upon a legal document, there was an organic cohesiveness at its inception. Such cannot be now said about the US. Not only do we not share a common vision of the common good based upon a common vision of ourselves, we glorify the mixture of incompatible visions. Granted, I know that I have grossly simplified US history, but anyone who wants to point to various grievances in the past in order to normalize the current chaos needs to wipe the obtuseness from his/her eyes.

With a son on the way, all these concerns have assumed a new profundity. Do I think that he will experience a united array of states in which to grow? I greatly doubt it. If anything, like the dying father from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, I hope to teach my son what it means to be a virtuous man in both a country and civilization in decline–and to find a handful of people whom he can trust.