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10 November 2005
Yankee Secessionists
The decentralist paradigm has spread beyond the old Confederacy, it seems. Here's an article about the Second Vermont Republic, an organization trying to get Vermont to secede from the United States. God bless 'em; at least they can't be smeared as being simply apologists for slavery and/or racial segregation. The article cites Don Livingston of Emory at length. Livingston argues for "the politics of the human scale," a localism derived primarily from Aristotle and classical republican theory.
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2 comments:
I'm really confused about this reading. It seems that Vermont is claiming a desire to secede based on the overexpansion of the government, but they were a democrat state, and were in opposition to Bush's win. I thought that one of the platforms of the Democratic party was expanding the national government. If it is simply individual policies they do not like, then I would have to agree with Lincoln that people can't just decide to not be under the government every time it decides something they don't like. If it is really the expansion of government in ways that are unconstitutional, it might hold that the contract under which the state entered the union has been violated, and so the state's responsibility to the union no longer stands. Someone who knows more about this explain it further to me.
Rachel, there was no major-party "shrink the government" candidate in 2004. Both Bush and Kerry announced plans to expand the State, just in different ways. Vermonters voted for the guy they thought would expand the State in a manner that was more friendly to their culture. This does not in and of itself negate the secession argument; this group would still be active even if Kerry had won (although it might not be getting as much of a hearing). If you go to the group's website and read some of the articles there, you will see that their desire to secede is at bottom not based on sour grapes that a Republican is in the White House.
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