Increasingly, I am coming across more and more articles of this kind, both in the liberal and conservative media, including in publications like GQ that aren’t primarily political. When I first started promoting the idea of pan-secessionism, most sympathizers were, as Matthew Lyons pointed out, “a wide variety of rightist currents such as white nationalists, Patriot/militia groups, Christian rightists, and National-Anarchists — and even some left-wing anarchists, liberal bioregionalists/environmentalists, and nationalist people of color groups. ” Nowadays, however, sympathizers with pan-secession include nearly 2 in 5 Americans, and are primarily liberals, conservatives, moderates, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, as opposed to adherents of “extremist ideologies.”
I am a pan-secessionist for two primary reasons. First, there is the triage issue of the need to overthrow US imperialism, as this recent report from Mother Jones points indicates. Second, as my late friend Thomas Naylor pointed out years ago, smaller more localized political systems tend to be better at maintaining economic prosperity, individual liberty, functional institutions, harmony between cultural groups, and international peace. Decentralization also allows for persecuted or despised social groups to achieve some degree of sovereignty and self-determination in their own enclaves. The religious colonies of escapees from England during the colonial period, Maroons or the Underground Railroad during the slavery era, the original Mormon colony in Utah, African-American cities like Eatonville, Florida in the pre-civil rights era, the gay enclave in San Francisco in the pre-gay rights era, draft resisters who escaped to Canada during the Vietnam War, and sanctuary cities, Second Amendment countries, and drug decriminalization in some states or localities in the present era are examples. And, of course, as anarchists, we should be skeptical of concentrated power, whether governmental, economic, or otherwise, on a general level.
By Freddy Gray GQ Magazine
From ‘Calexit’ to ‘Cascadia’, secession movements are spreading in the US. Can Joe Biden hold together a country increasingly divided over values, culture, race, economics and history?
If you think America went mad after Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, imagine what might have happened if he had won. Trump’s opponents would probably not have stormed the Washington Capitol, as Trump’s fans did on 6 January, but large parts of the country would have exploded in rage, cities would have burned and serious pundits would have declared America finished.
The Democratic Party could well have outdone even Trump in refusing to accept the result, claiming that foreign interference and “voter suppression” meant the election wasn’t valid. The largest media organisations would have taken these allegations far more seriously than they did Trump’s madcap talk of mass voter fraud. If you think that’s hyperbole, consider how credulous most journalists were in 2016, when Democratic operatives said Trump was in hock to Vladimir Putin because the Russian leader had a secret tape of the 45th president being urinated on by sex workers. The 2020 meltdown would have been far greater.
Some Democrats may well have thrown their tantrum further and called for secession, a break-up of the United States. After all, the process is already underway. After 2016, a growing number of Californians, disgusted by the idea of President Trump, called for “Calexit”. The word was, obviously, taken from “Brexit” – yet the concept is more inspired by Scottish nationalism. “Yes California” is a group that, much like the Scottish National Party, argues that their state is and always has been different to the rest of the US. It is more progressive and independent than, say, Alabama.
