For a century and a half, the idea of secession has been
systematically demonized among the American public. The government’s schools
spin fairy tales about the “indivisible Union” and the wise statesmen who fought
to preserve it. Decentralization is portrayed as unsophisticated and
backward, while nationalism and centralization are made to seem progressive
and inevitable. When a smaller political unit wishes to withdraw from a
larger one, its motives must be disreputable and base, while the motivations
of the central power seeking to keep that unit in an arrangement it does not
want are portrayed as selfless and patriotic, if they are considered at all.
As usual, disinformation campaigns are meant to make potentially
liberating ideas appear toxic and dangerous, and conveying the message that
anyone who seeks acceptance and popularity ought to steer clear of whatever
it is — in this case, secession — the regime has condemned. But when we set
the propaganda aside, we discover that support for secession means simply
this: it is morally illegitimate to employ state violence against individuals
who choose to group themselves differently from how the existing regime
chooses to group them. They prefer to live under a different jurisdiction.
Libertarians consider it unacceptable to aggress against them for this.
The libertarian principle of secession is not exactly
embraced with enthusiasm by the people and institutions I call “regime
libertarians.” Although these people tend to be located in and around the
Beltway, regime libertarianism transcends geographical location, which is why
I coined this special term to describe it.
The regime libertarian believes in the market economy,
more or less. But talk about the Federal Reserve or Austrian business cycle
theory and he gets fidgety. His institute would rather invite Janet Yellen
for an exclusive cocktail event than Ron Paul for a lecture.
He loves the idea of reform — whether it’s the Fed, the
tax code, government schools, whatever. He flees from the idea of abolition.
Why, that just isn’t respectable! He spends his time advocating this or that
“tax reform” effort, instead of simply pushing for a lowering or repeal of
existing taxes. It’s too tough to be a libertarian when it comes to
antidiscrimination law, given how much flak he’s liable to get, so he’ll side
with left-liberals on that, even though it’s completely incompatible with his
stated principles.
He is antiwar — sometimes, but certainly not as a general
principle. He can be counted on to support the wars that have practically
defined the American regime, and which remain popular among the general
public. He sups in happy concord with supporters of the most egregiously
unjust wars, but his blood boils in moral outrage at someone who told an
off-color joke twenty-five years ago.
I suppose you can guess where our regime libertarian stands on secession.
Since the modern American regime emerged out of the violent suppression of
the attempted secession of eleven states, he, too, is an opponent of
secession. If cornered, he may grudgingly endorse secession at a theoretical
level, but in practice he generally seems to support only those acts of
secession that have the approval or connivance of the CIA.
Mention secession, and the subject immediately turns to
the southern Confederacy, whose moral enormities the regime libertarian
proceeds to denounce, insinuating that supporters of secession must be
turning a blind eye to those enormities. But every libertarian worthy of the
name opposes any government’s support for slavery, centralization,
conscription, taxation, or the suppression of speech and press. That goes
without saying.
As Tom Woods has pointed out, the classical liberal, or
libertarian, tradition of support for secession can boast such luminaries as
Alexis de Tocqueville, Richard Cobden, and Lord Acton, among many others. I’d
like to add two more figures: in the nineteenth century, Lysander Spooner,
and in the twentieth, Frank Chodorov.
Spooner presents a real problem for the regime
libertarians. Every libertarian acknowledges the greatness and importance of
Spooner. The trouble is, he was an avowed secessionist.
Lysander Spooner was born in Massachusetts in January
1808, and would go on to become a lawyer, an entrepreneur, and a political
theorist. He believed that true justice was not so much a matter of
compliance with man-made law, but a refusal to engage in aggression against
peaceful individuals. His American Letter Mail Company competed successfully
against the US Post Office, offering better service at lower prices, until
the government forced him out of business in 1851. His work No Treason
(1867), a collection of three essays, took the position that the
Constitution, not having been agreed to by any living person and only ever
expressly consented to by a small handful, cannot be binding on anyone.
In a work called The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, Spooner had
argued that the primary interpretive key in understanding the Constitution
was what we now call “original meaning.” This is different from “original
understanding,” the concept referred to by figures like Robert Bork and
Antonin Scalia. According to that view, we should interpret the Constitution
according to the original intent of those who drafted and ratified that
document. Spooner rejected this.
What mattered, according to Spooner, was not the
inscrutable “intention” behind this or that word or passage, but rather the
plain meaning of the word or passage itself. Furthermore, given that human
liberty was a mandate of the natural law, any time constitutional language
might appear to run contrary to the principle of liberty, we ought to prefer
some other meaning of the words in question, even if we have to strain a bit
to do so, and even if the anti-liberty interpretation is the more natural
reading.
Thus Spooner could claim, contrary to the majority of
abolitionists, that the Constitution was in fact an antislavery document, and
that its oblique and fleeting references to slavery — a word never used in
the Constitution — did not have to carry the meanings commonly attributed to
them. Frederick Douglass, the celebrated former slave turned abolitionist
writer and speaker, adopted Spooner’s approach in his own work.
Spooner’s anti-slavery work went well beyond this
exercise in constitutional exegesis. He provided legal services, sometimes
pro bono, for fugitive slaves, and advocated jury nullification as a means of
defending escaped slaves in court. His 1858 “Plan for the Abolition of
Slavery,” called for northern-backed insurrection in the South, as well as
such lesser measures as flogging slaveholders who themselves used the whip,
and encouraging slaves to confiscate their masters’ property.
Spooner was also a supporter of John Brown, and in fact
raised money and formulated a plan to kidnap the governor of Virginia until
Brown was released.
In other words, it would be difficult to deny Spooner’s dedication to the
anti-slavery cause.
And yet here is Spooner on the so-called Civil War.
On the part of the North, the war was carried on, not to
liberate slaves, but by a government that had always perverted and violated
the Constitution, to keep the slaves in bondage; and was still willing to do
so, if the slaveholders could be thereby induced to stay in the Union.
According to Spooner, the US regime waged the war on
behalf of the opposite principle. “The principle, on which the war was waged
by the North, was simply this: That men may rightfully be compelled to submit
to, and support, a government that they do not want; and that resistance, on
their part, makes them traitors and criminals.”
Spooner continued:
No principle, that is possible to be named, can be more
self-evidently false than this; or more self-evidently fatal to all political
freedom. Yet it triumphed in the field, and is now assumed to be established.
If it really be established, the number of slaves, instead of having been
diminished by the war, has been greatly increased; for a man, thus subjected
to a government that he does not want, is a slave. And there is no
difference, in principle — but only in degree — between political and chattel
slavery. The former, no less than the latter, denies a man’s ownership of
himself and the products of his labor; and asserts that other men may own
him, and dispose of him and his property, for their uses, and at their
pleasure.
By the logic of the regime libertarian, Spooner was a
“neo-Confederate” defender of slavery — after all, he asserted the southern
states’ right to withdraw from the Union! What other motivation
could he have? But this is too preposterous even for them.
Spooner was correct about all of this, needless to say.
The war was in fact launched not to free the slaves, as any historian must
concede, but for purposes of mysticism — why, the sacred “Union” must be
preserved! — and on behalf of economic interests. The regime libertarian
expects us to believe that the analysis we apply to all other wars, in which
we look beneath the official rationales to the true motivations, does not
apply to this single, glorious exception to the catalogue of crimes that
constitute the story of mankind’s experiences with military aggression.
Let’s turn now to the second libertarian figure. Frank
Chodorov, by all accounts, was one of the great writers of the Old Right.
Liberty Fund published a collection of his writings called Fugitive Essays. Chodorov founded what was then called the Intercollegiate
Society of Individualists, and served as an editor of Human Events,
where the early presence of Felix Morley ensured that noninterventionist
voices, at least at the beginning, would get a hearing. Murray N. Rothbard
considered Chodorov’s monthly publication analysis to be one of the
greatest independent publications in American history.
Naturally, Chodorov supported both secession and “states’
rights.” In fact, he thought every schoolchild should “become familiar with
the history and theory of what we call states’ rights, but which is really
the doctrine of home rule.”
Ralph Raico, the great libertarian historian and Senior
Fellow of the Mises Institute, has documented how the decentralized political
order of Europe made possible the emergence of liberty. The lack of a single
political authority uniting Europe, and to the contrary a vast multiplicity
of small jurisdictions, placed a strict limit on the ambitions of any
particular prince. The ability to move from one place to another meant that a
prince would lose his tax base should his oppressions grow intolerable.
Chodorov made the same observation:
When the individual is free to move from one jurisdiction to another, a limit
is put on the extent to which the government may use its monopoly power.
Government is held in restraint by the fear of losing its taxpaying citizens,
just as loss of customers tends to keep other monopolies from getting too
arrogant.
No tyrant ever supports divided or decentralized power,
which is why twentieth-century totalitarians were such opponents of
federalism. The US regime, too, has devoted over two centuries to dismantling
the barriers that the states once imposed to their untrammeled exercise of
power. As Chodorov put it, “The unlikelihood of getting the states to vote
themselves out of existence turned the centralizers to other means, such as
bribing the state authorities with patronage, alienating the loyalty of the
citizenry with federal subsidies, establishing within the states independent
administrative bodies for the management of federal works programs.”
Here’s how Chodorov concluded:
There is no end of trouble the states can give the
centralizers by merely refusing to cooperate. Such refusal would meet with
popular acclaim if it were supplemented with a campaign of education on the
meaning of states’ rights, in terms of human freedom. In fact, the
educational part of such a secessionist movement should be given first
importance. And those who are plumping for a “third party,” because both
existing parties are centralist in character, would do well to nail to their
masthead this banner: Secession of the 48 states from Washington.
Now that is a libertarian speaking.
Secession is not a popular idea among the political and
media classes in America, to be sure, and regime libertarians may roll their eyes
at it, but a recent poll found about a quarter of Americans sympathetic to
the idea, despite the ceaseless barrage of nationalist propaganda emitted
from all sides. A result like this confirms what we already suspected: that a
substantial chunk of the public is willing to entertain unconventional
thoughts. And that’s all to the good. Conventional American thoughts are war,
centralization, redistribution, and inflation. The most unconventional
thought in America today is liberty.
[Excerpted from the inaugural issue of The Austrian.]
