The Ominous “S-Word” – Secession

Just one year into his [President Obama's] tenure, however, America has become more resentfully divided than any time in generations.

After 230 years, are the American people coursing toward eventual divorce?

Our polarized society increasingly ponders what would happen if American conservatives and liberals simply agreed that their differences had become irreconcilable, and redivided the nation to go their separate ways. Which side would prosper and experience an influx of migration from the other? Conversely, which side would likely become a fiscal and socio-political basket case?

Any reasonable person already knows the likely answer. One need only compare the smoldering wreckage wrought by liberal governance in such states as California or Michigan with the comparative prosperity created by conservative governance in such states as Texas or Utah. We can also examine the past 400 years, during which immigrants abandoned Europe for an America founded upon the fundamental principles of limited government and individual freedom.

Regardless, the above hypothetical has become increasingly frequent among both conservatives and liberals in recent years.

Following the 2004 election that they confidently expected would vindicate their 2000 rage and send President Bush back to Texas, liberals only half-jestfully proposed that “blue” states secede and join a new “United States of Canada.” Conservatives replied with a collective, “don’t let the screen door hit you in the [posterior] on your way out.”

Now, with this week’s passage of ObamaCare despite ferocious and widespread public opposition, the faint reverberations from that restive elephant in the room became even more pronounced. Consider the words of Dennis Prager, an intellectual whom no serious observer would label a bomb-thrower:

We are in a non-violent civil war. I write the words ‘civil war’ with an ache in my heart. But we are in one. Thank God this civil war is non-violent. But the fact is that the left and the rest of the country share almost no values. The American value system and the leftist value system are irreconcilable. If the left wins, America’s values lose. If American values prevail, the left loses. After Sunday’s vote, for the first time in American history, one could no longer confidently believe that the American system will prevail. And if we don’t fight for it, we don’t deserve it.

Or consider the commentary of Reason’s Tim Cavanaugh, who references the “s-word” in his article “The Rise of Decline:”

The recession has not just hustled the U.S. economy back to a late-20th-century state of nature that resists all efforts at reinflation, stimulus, and outcome management. It has created a conviction that American society itself, rather than just its institutions of government and public/private rent-seeking, is in collapse… We tend to miss something obvious: The problem isn’t that things are collapsing. It’s that not enough things are collapsing.

Even the mainstream Wall Street Journal ran a June 2009 weekend commentary on secessionist backlash entitled “Divided We Stand.” Complete Story: