Thoughts on Secession

In a recent column, Pat Buchanan noted that secession is in the air:

While no one takes this movement as seriously as men took secession in 1861, the sentiments behind it ought not to be minimized. For they bespeak a bristling hostility to the federal government and a dislike bordering on detestation of some Americans for other Americans, as deep as it was on the day Beauregard’s guns fired on Fort Sumter. “Stirrings of Secession”

Buchanan frames the issue as part of a general trend:

The West is decomposing. British Tories seek to cut ties to the European Union. Scots want to leave Britain. Catalans vote to divorce from Spain, to which they have been wedded since the 15th century. Flemish talk of leaving Walloons behind in Belgium. Northern Europeans are weary of carrying their profligate southern brethren and muse about cutting Greece adrift and letting it float out into the Mediterranean.

And Americans are already seceding from one another — ethnically, culturally, politically. Middle-class folks flee high-tax California, as Third World immigrants, legal and illegal, pour in to partake of the cornucopia of social welfare benefits the Golden Land dispenses.

High-tax states like New York now send tens of thousands of pension checks to Empire State retirees in tax-free Florida. Communities of seniors are rising that look like replicas of the suburbs of the 1950s. People gravitate toward their own kind. Call it divorce, American-style.

Even if unsuccessful, a vigorous secession campaign in just one state would raise White consciousness, especially if explicitly linked to White interests. Huge nation-wide publicity would be generated if campaigners managed to force a referendum. It follows that this is a prime political goal for the White advocacy movement. Limited resources should be devoted to finding the best candidate state, then getting behind the secession movement.

The criteria for judging eligibility are, firstly, the viability of the secession movement, e.g. in the presence of capable and high-status organizers and some initial popular support, and secondly objective signs of viability, such as voting and opinion patterns (e.g. red states, Southern states, etc.).

The point to be emphasized is that the realistic objective is not actual secession but raising White consciousness. With that in mind, the campaign should be conducted to minimize the demoralization of a no vote, e.g. by pitching the referendum question for limited devolution of federal powers to the state. That would also increase the likelihood of voter support. Also, the secession campaign would need to avoid overshooting public imagination, e.g. by balancing overt ethnic themes with conventional red state ideology. One policy I think should go into the campaign is that those supporting secession want to reclaim control of immigration and shape it to retain a predominantly White population. Another would be the demand to cease anti-White discrimination (Affirmative Action) and cease the White taxation burden for minority welfare. The number of policies should be strictly limited.

So far secessionism is pie-in-the-sky stuff. “We should secede!” is about as nuanced as it gets.

My starting point is that a campaign for secession should be seen as an end in itself, because the campaign would potentially raise White consciousnessacross the country.

The problem is getting such a campaign off the ground. One such method would be to shape the goals of a putative campaign. If it is the campaign itself that matters, not success (at least in the first instance), then almost anything that facilitates the campaign should be grasped. What would properly facilitate a secession campaign?

Obviously, much attention should be payed to the goals. Many good people might join a campaign to limited goals who would shy away from a one with radical goals. So why not pitch the referendum question at limited devolution of federal powers instead of a complete break with the U.S.A.? For example, the referendum might ask the voters of a state whether they support reclaiming state sovereignty over immigration and participation in welfare, while remaining within the free-trade zone of the United States? They might be asked to affirm their state to be a constitutional White republic for the purposes of immigration and banning anti-White discrimination, while participating in the U.S.’s highway and railway system, or even its military system on a volunteer basis, etc.

This should be a matter of intense debate now so that the White activist movement can clear away secondary issues and concentrate of forging a simple referendum question that contains the essentials.

What is non-negotiable? That question should also lie at the heart of the discussion.

The explicitness of ethnic goals should be non-negotiable, because without that the campaign would fail to raise ethnic consciousness. It is imaginable that a fierce and even successful secession campaign could be fought without mentioning White interests. It would tie the secessionist movement to a doomed formula of implicit ethnicity and continued minority infiltration.

Furthermore, keeping the ethnic demand explicit would help White activists determine the ways in which devolution could be limited. E.g. A break-away state could remain in the communications grid but must not concede sovereignty over immigration. The latter is the first consideration because it will (1) raise ethnic consciousness towards explicit Whiteness; and (2) if successful in future referendums, lay the demographic foundation for an explicitly White republic. Welfare is important but secondary. I can imagine a break-away White state which allows only White immigration from surrounding states and from overseas and allows only pro-White affirmative action (or none), but which continues to pay taxes to Washington. It is not a situation many state citizens would like and it would be inherently unstable. But it would nevertheless achieve a vital first step towards national survival. Taxation and welfare independence could be dealt with later. (My guess is that it will be all-or-nothing, that even a push for limited sovereignty will end up lumping ethnic independence with financial sovereignty. But the distinction between first and secondary priorities remains.) A major factor determining what goes into the referendum is the preconditions for a serious campaign, i.e. what would initially motivate enough quality organisers and citizens to force a referendum.

Another suggestion is to set up a new committee to deliberate these questions and organize the secession process. It should be a new body dedicated exclusively to pursuing secession. Such a body should not be thrown together from the usual suspects, but should be treated as a critical step in mobilization. For example, the Committee for National Secession should contain leading White advocates. But it should go further by recruiting so-far unaffiliated individuals of substance: mayors state legislators and academics and lawyers and sheriffs and the individuals who gathered those 25,000 votes in the recent secession petitions.

But first the core principles must be formulated to act as the movement’s colours around which a cadre of activists can assemble.

Raising the Committee should be seen as a critical first step and one requiring significant investment. Determining its terms of reference, for example keeping it explicitly ethnic, would be vital. By the way, the name Committee for National Secession is meant to capture the idea that the historical American nation seeks to secede from the American state because the latter has become an unreformable tyranny and existential threat to the nation.