The Northwest has a bit of a history of threatening secession. Would a win by Romney push us over the edge?

By Knute Berger

Crosscut

“If you want to leave a nation you think is corrupt, inefficient, militaristic, oppressive, repressive, but you don’t want to move to Canada or France, what do you do? Well, the way is through secession, where you could stay home and be where you want to be.”

— Kirkpatrick Sale, secessionist scholar and activist, New York Times, 2007

With a Romney bounce in the polls, now might be a good time to ask whether a Mitt win would give impetus to the Cascadia secession movement, for those Northwest Americans who don’t take up JetBlue’s offer of a free ticket out of the country.

While secession is usually the province of neo-Confederates, disgruntled Tea Partiers and those reviving nullification of Obamacare, it is not wholly a rumble on the far right.

In recent years, grassroots activists, bloggers, academics, and regional advocates have been giving voice to secession from the left. The desire is often expressed as wanting to re-divide the continent — or at least the U.S. and Canada — by bioregions. This is expressed in terms of creating an independent state that is more sustainable, sensitive to indigenous peoples, less corporate, more democratic, perhaps anti-globalist. A place where corporations aren’t persons. Cascadian ideas and ideals have also been touted in terms of economic and trade cooperation.

Wisconsin, Vermont, Washington, Oregon and British Columbia all have their secession discussion groups, the latter three entities under the Cascadian umbrella. It certainly draws inspiration from Ernest Callenbach, author of the seminal eco-secessionist novel Ecoptopia (1975), who painted a picture of a region from Northern California to the BC border that had broken off the from the United States and sheltered itself behind a green wall while it re-made itself as an environmental utopia.

Bad elections often bring out a kind of secessionist urge, even if not expressed in Ecotopian terms. There’s the Red-Blue political map, or concepts like “The Urban Archipelago,” a classic rant in Seattle’s The Stranger after the defeat of John Kerry by George W. Bush in 2004, that declared a culture war between Red (rural) and Blue (urban) America: “It’s time to state something that we’ve felt for a long time but have been too polite to say out loud: Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America.”

That sense of alienation could amplify if Obama loses. As The Stranger wrote in ’04, the Republicans have no urban agenda to speak of. Today’s more extreme Republican party generally rejects many of the federal subsidies, earmarks and initiatives that have made our region boom: investment in infrastructure, public power, land reclamation, even defense initiatives. And, as a party, one wonders whether the GOP grassroots even believe in science anymore. The party is captive of too many climate deniers and Creationists.

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