Tag Archives: Devolution

Secession Fever in Today’s America: What Would Lincoln Think? by Thomas DiLorenzo

Posted on February 27, 2020 | 1 comment

Lincoln prevented secession in America by going to war, but it’s an idea whose time has come. From Thomas DiLorenzo at lewrockwell.com:

A February 19 article in The Washington Times announced that “Secession Fever Spikes” in five states where “conservatives” are attempting to escape neo-Stalinist policies of the Democrat Party majority there, now that the mask is finally off and the Democrats are the proud party of socialism and omnipotent government.  Long gone are the days when they hid their true beliefs by calling themselves “liberals” and their brand of fascism “The New Deal.”  They are now the party of the Green New Deal, the crazed, Soviet-style government plan to totalitarianize all of American society under the dishonest guise of “saving the planet.”  In other words, they are all card-carrying “watermelons” – green on the outside, red on the inside.

As soon as they took control of the Virginia state government, helped along with mega-donations by billionaire fellow totalitarians Michael Bloomberg and George Soros, among others, they immediately waged political war on the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution.  Their governor, Ralph Northam, is on record in a publicly-recorded video as supporting infanticide in cases where babies survive abortions.  That’s just for starters in the first month of their rule.

Virginia politics is now dominated by the heavily-populated D.C. suburbs composed of hundreds of thousands of deep state bureaucrats, government contractors, and Third World immigrants promised the riches of the American welfare state by the Democrats.  Most of the rest of the counties in the state have declared themselves to be Second Amendment sanctuaries.  Most strikingly, there is a “Vexit” movement whose goal is for those counties to secede from Virginia and become a part of more Constitution-friendly West Virginia.  The governor of West Virginia, Jim Justice, joined with Liberty University president Jerry Falwell, Jr. in a press conference at which they invited the more conservative Virginia counties to secede.  The West Virginia legislature is on board.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Governments, History, Politics, Secession

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Localism in the 2020s (Part 3) – Scaling Politics, by Michael Krieger

Posted on January 21, 2020 | Leave a comment

Politically, small is beautiful. Michael Krieger continues his series on localism at libertyblitzkrieg.com:

Part 1

Part 2

Today’s post will outline a framework through which I’ve come to view politics, as well as life in general. It will identify and examine various units of sovereignty as they exist in the contemporary U.S., since that’s the political system I’m most familiar with. Nevertheless, the overall framework should prove useful to people living all over the world.

Let’s start from the beginning. The most basic and meaningful unit of sovereignty is the individual, followed by the family, the municipality/county, the state (California, New York, Texas, etc) and finally the federal government (Washington D.C.). It’s my view that within a healthy society the scope of governance should decline as you add more and more individuals to the mix. It’s at the most basic unit of sovereignty (the individual), where authority over most of life’s decisions should reside. This runs the gamut from the really big decisions, such as what sort of work to do, who to marry, what religion (if any) to believe in; to the completely mundane, such as what to eat for breakfast.

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How to Avoid Civil War: Decentralization, Nullification, Secession, by Ryan McMaken

Posted on December 5, 2019 | Leave a comment

The US should break up before we all kill each other. From Ryan McMaken at mises.org:

It’s becoming more and more apparent that the United States will not be going back to “business as usual” after Donald Trump leaves office, and it is easy to imagine that the anti-Trump parties will use their return to power as an opportunity to settle scores against the hated rubes and “deplorables” who dared attempt to oppose their betters in Washington, DC, California, and New York.

This ongoing conflict may manifest itself in the culture war through further attacks on people who take religious faith seriously, and on those who hold any social views unpopular among degreed people from major urban centers. The First Amendment will be imperiled like never before with both religious freedom and freedom of speech regarded as vehicles of “hate.” Certainly, the Second Amendment will hang by a thread.

But even more dangerous will be the deep state’s return to a vaunted position of enjoying a near-total absence of opposition from elected officials in the civilian government. The FBI and CIA will go to even greater lengths to ensure the voters are never again “allowed” to elect anyone who doesn’t receive the explicit imprimatur of the American intelligence “community.” The Fourth Amendment will be banished so that the NSA and its friends can spy on every American with impunity. The FBI and CIA will more freely combine the use of surveillance and media leaks to destroy adversaries.

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A Deplorable Strategy Beyond 2020, by Angelo Codevilla

Posted on December 4, 2019 | Leave a comment

Some sort of breakup or divorce is probably in the US’s future as the country splits into two or more pieces. From Angelo Codevilla at amgreatness.com:

In 2016 and since, we have learned that our ruling class has amassed the power and developed the taste to revel in making us miserable. We have also learned that to avoid this, we must undo or separate ourselves from them, their structures, and priorities.

Regardless of who wins in 2020, the mega-issue that drove the 2016 elections will grip the country more intensely than ever.

From President Obama on down, the political, educational, media, and corporate establishment had long since taken for granted that placing the opinions, interests, tastes, and the rights of the rest of America on the same plane as their own amounts to “false equality.” They had come to regard us as lower beings. No matter whether they attributed our purported inferiority to our alleged racism, sexism, etc., or just plain stupidity, they negated the possibility of common citizenship with us. The moment that Hillary Clinton’s reference to those disinclined to vote for her as “deplorables” and “irredeemables” made this unmistakable, Donald Trump’s victory became possible.

The people who voted for Trump, many despite reservations about him, did so seeking a shield against insult and injury from above. But the 2016 results confirmed the ruling class in its judgment, and emboldened it to act in “resistance” and in ways no one had ever imagined.

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Doug Casey on Trump… and an Impending Civil War?

Posted on November 2, 2019 | Leave a comment

President Trump may be the catalyst for a civil war. From Doug Casey at caseyresearch.com:

Chris’ note: Chris Reilly here, managing editor for Casey Daily Dispatch.

A couple of weeks ago, I flew out to Aspen, Colorado to catch up with legendary speculator and bestselling author Doug Casey.

It was a fantastic trip. I asked Doug about everything from technology… to the economy… and the resurgence of gold.

Doug also shared his thoughts on President Trump… and more importantly, what could be in store for America.

Like usual, Doug didn’t hold anything back. Today, I want to share our discussion with you…

Read on for this week’s special Conversations With Casey…

Chris: Doug, you predicted that Trump would win the election long before most people even thought he had a chance. Now, almost three years in, how would you rate his presidency?

Doug: Well, on the one hand Trump is a good thing simply because he’s not one of the lunatic fringe Democrats. He’s a cultural traditionalist at heart; he wants to see the US return to the “Leave It to Beaver” days of the 1950s. That’s essentially why he was elected, and why he’s still so popular. Despite the fact he’s culturally conservative, he has no core values. He runs strictly on gut feeling. He has no central philosophy or intellectual beliefs. It’s just whatever seems like a good idea at the time. He knows a lot about real estate speculation on high leverage. But he knows absolutely nothing about economics.

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Is It Time for America to Break Apart? by Boyd D. Cathey

Posted on July 29, 2019 | 1 comment

It is way past time for the US and other superstates to break apart. They will do so by choice or by circumstances as devolution and decentralization are already rendering mega-governments obsolete. From Boyd D. Cathey at unz.com:

There is a question that increasingly arises, uncomfortably, in our conversations…from brief exchanges at work at the water cooler, at home with family, after church on Sunday, with our email messages to friends and associates. To watch any amount of television news these days, to switch back and forth between, say, CNN and Fox, and to listen to their interpretations of any event or issue, no matter what, that same question clambers in the background like an unchained wild beast:

What has happened—what is happening—to the geographical entity we call the United States, to its people, to its culture? Does it not seem like the country is coming apart at the seams, in just about everything, from its once-established moral base in a more or less historic Christian framework to its very vision of reality, of what is real and what is not?

Millions of “woke” social justice progressives now control the Democratic Party and most of our media; they dominate our entertainment and sports industries; they push for open borders and what amounts to “population replacement” of natives by illegal aliens; and they have a stranglehold on the near entirety of our educational system, from the primary grades to our colleges.

Each year those institutions turn out millions of freshly-minted automatons—intellectual zombies—who think like their unhinged teachers and professors have trained them, and who then take up responsible positions in our society and increasingly support and vote for a type of veritable madness which, like an unstoppable centrifugal force, is tearing this country apart, creating unbridgeable divisions that no amount of misdirected pleading or faux-compromise can repair.

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Posted in Collapse, Government, Politics, race relations, Trade

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Could Germany Fracture? by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on June 29, 2018 | Leave a comment

It is SLL’s contention that damn near any country or political subdivision can fracture in the coming devolution and decentralization, and in fact most of them will.  From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

All sorts of centralized organizations that appear rock-solid may well melt into air as the disintegrative dynamics gather momentum.
Rising political and social discord that is generally being attributed to “populism” may actually be the re-emergence of ancient geographic and cultural fault lines. An often-overlooked manifestation of this might be the nation-state of Germany, a possibility fleshed out by longtime correspondent Mark G.
It’s both convenient and expedient for politicos to blame “populism” for the fracturing of the status quo. Given the unsavory undertones of ethnic/religious bias of “populism,” this allows the media-savvy politico (and aren’t they all media-savvy?) to paint his/her opponents as racist via the code-word “populist.”
Labeling dissenters “populists” doesn’t explain or predict anything. In terms of economic classes, it’s more insightful to distinguish between the Protected Class (insiders and favored elites) who benefits enormously from the status quo and the Unprotected Class (outsiders, marginalized workers, those without privilege or access to cheap capital).
But this doesn’t exhaust the sources of profound social discord. As historian Peter Turchin explained in his recent book Ages of Discord, historical eras are either integrative periods in which people find reasons to cooperate and join forces, or disintegrative periods in which reasons to split apart become dominant.
Clearly, the world-system of this era is entering a disintegrative phrase, and dismissing dissenters as “populists” solves nothing. For insight on how the disintegrative phase may manifest in Germany, let’s turn to Mark G.’s commentary:
The breakdown of the Bavarian CSU and German CDU center-right coalition (refounded post WWII by Konrad Adenauer) is historic. And it has definite regional implications. I think we could be watching the beginning moves not in a “German Brexit” but in the political collapse of the modern German state into multiple components. As I mentioned last year, I personally expect this because modern Germany is a rump survival of Bismarck’s Wihelmine German Empire. It has lost all strategic rationale for its existence. And under Frau Merkel it has almost no military forces and no control of its own borders. Such a ‘state’ cannot long endure.
To continue reading: Could Germany Fracture?

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Government, Immigration

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Splitting California into 3 Pieces Is Long Overdue, by Ryan McMaken

Posted on June 16, 2018 | 3 comments

If California is split into multiple pieces, maybe sanity will reign in at least one of them. From Ryan McMaken at mises.org:

It now looks like California voters will have the chance to vote on whether or not the state ought to be split up into three pieces. The Los AngelesTimes reports :

If a majority of voters who cast ballots agree, a long and contentious process would begin for three separate states to take the place of California, with one primarily centered around Los Angeles and the other two divvying up the counties to the north and south.

This latest move is just one of many efforts over many decades to split California up, and make its constituent parts more responsive to the people who live there. This effort, however, is more successful than past ones — for example, the 2016 proposed ballot measure breaking up California into six states. That one failed to qualify for the ballot.

To say the least, breaking up California into smaller pieces is something that is long overdue. The population of California is a massive 39 million, making it larger than either Canada or Peru. And the GDP produced by that state is enormous as well. If California were an independent country, it would have an economy larger than that of the United Kingdom.

This means the California government — which can (and does) skim off substantial portions of that wealth — is among the richest governments in the world.

Moreover, the government holds a monopoly of power over a vast area which includes some of the best real estate in the world. Much of North America’s best coastlines, mountains, natural harbors, forests, and mountains are contained within California.

And, here’s one of the best things about being a huge state (from the government’s perspective): the government can make it extremely inconvenient to escape it: “You don’t like our policies? Well, then, feel free to move hundreds of miles away to Phoenix or Reno.”

It’s no wonder then, that the government of California has been able to abuse its taxpayers so freely. California has one of the highest tax burdens in the nation, and many leave the state because of it. More and more, the state is become a playground for the wealthy who have enough of a surplus to endure what ordinary people cannot. Thanks to endless regulations on development via environmental regulations and other measures, housing supply has been artificially limited, and thus the cost of housing in California has skyrocketed. This has led to a situation in which, as the Sacramento Bee put it “California exports its poor to Texas… while wealthier people move in.” But California apparently isn’t exporting all its poor — the state has the worst poverty ratein the nation when the cost of living is taken into account.

To continue reading: Splitting California into 3 Pieces Is Long Overdue

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Civil Insurrection: A Modest Proposal for Ending the United States, by Fred Reed

Posted on March 20, 2018 | 1 comment

The US needs to downsize. It will happen, sooner or later. From Fred Reed at theburningplatform.com:

I see  that a man named Sessions, apparently  Washington’s Attorney General, threatens to unleash the coercive powers of the federal government against the state of Colorado, his reason being that he does not like the state’s policy with regard to marijuana.  This is most curious. Why he believes the policies of Colorado to be his concern is not clear. Equally mysterious is why he thinks the police of Colorado should arrest Coloradans for doing a thing that the people of the state have determined to be acceptable.

Mr. Session’s expansive view of his importance in the universe is seen again in his menacing of the state of California because he does noi approve its policy toward its immigrants. Common sense suggests that if he does not like California’s policies, he should live in another state. I am sure this would suit California well.

What justification does this feral busybody have for meddling in what is not his business? Mr. Sessions wraps himself in the Constitution and, thus emparchmented, asserts that the Supremacy Clause gives him the authority to overrule the states. Reasonable men may disagree on this matter. I assert that the states have no duty to observe the Constitution since the federals do not.

As one instance among many, the Constitution ordains that the country shall not go to war without a declaration from the Congress. In fact the federals make war constantly with neither a declaration nor any reference to the will of people, draining their substance for purposes which are not theirs. If the Constitution is not binding on the central government, it is not binding on the states.

In any event the federals do not represent the people of the country. How many of us in the various states want to spend trillions on distant wars at the command–for that is what it is–of Israel, the petroleum industry, and Empire? Yet we have no choice.

To continue reading: Civil Insurrection: A Modest Proposal for Ending the United States

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Doug Casey on Why Race Will Break the U.S. Apart, Part I

Posted on November 15, 2017 | Leave a comment

If the US splits apart into smaller entities, the split will be partially along racial lines. From Doug Casey at caseyresearch.com:

Justin’s note: “America is a marvelous idea, a unique idea, fantastic idea. I’m extremely pro-American. But America has ceased to exist.”

Longtime readers will recognize this. It’s one of Doug Casey’s more memorable quotes.

I’m sharing it with you today because Doug said something last week that touched on this radical idea. He said the United States could break apart due to racial tensions.

Most people haven’t considered this possibility. After all, the U.S. is supposedly a “melting pot” where different races can coexist peacefully.

So, a few days ago, I called Doug to learn why he thinks this. Below is the first part of our discussion. Tomorrow, I’ll share Part II…

Justin: Doug, the last time we spoke, you said the United States could break apart because of racial tensions. Why do you think that?

Doug: Well, I used to know a guy by the name of Michael Hart. He would come to our Eris Society meetings in Aspen. Eris was a private annual event I ran for 30 years, for authors, scientists, and people who were well-known for something. It enabled people who might not otherwise meet to get to know each other and exchange ideas. Michael was a university prof, best known for his book The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential People in History.

One year, he gave a speech about how the U.S. was going to break up into smaller countries, and part of it would be on racial lines.

I thought that unlikely at the time; it was about 1990. Now, I think Michael may have been right.

I’ll explain why in a minute. But we should first discuss the origins of democracy.

Democracy originated in 6th-century BC Greece. It was a unique and workable method of governance for city-states of a few thousand people. And in the case of Athens, as many as 40,000 people.

But these people all shared a common language. They worshipped the same gods. They were the same ethnicity. They had the same customs and beliefs.

They were like an extended clan with many similarities. Differences were among individuals, not groups.

To continue reading: Doug Casey on Why Race Will Break the U.S. Apart, Part I

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