Yes, G. Pascal Zachary, Please Go

Bay Area politicos would fit comfortably under the rubric of European "social democrats," favoring a humane welfare state, multilateralism and a ban on offensive military force.

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Think of the advantages of having our own country. We wouldn't have to apologize to people of conscience for being Americans any more. We wouldn't go to war against Arab dictators (or anyone else).

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Our greatest national myth remains the inevitable rightness of the Northern victory in the Civil War. We are taught again and again about the greatness of Abraham Lincoln, who held our nation together. Yet at what price? Lincoln freed the African American slaves, but they fell victim to "Jim Crow," the peculiar institution, to paraphrase historian Kenneth Stampp, that maintained racial separation in the South (and sanctioned violence against blacks) well into the 1960s. With the South in tow following the Civil War, the United States subdued the Native Americans in the West in the most brutal fashion, seized Cuba and the Philippines from Spain in 1898, thus ushering in an era of imperialism. American hegemony in the second half of the 20th century might have been impossible without a Northern victory in the Civil War.

Maybe Lincoln would have been an even greater president if he had let the South leave the Union in 1861. In the absence of Southern racists in Congress, the North would have become an industrial democracy of the European sort. American global power would have been moderated, humanized and democratized -- because urban voters in the industrial cities of Pittsburgh, Chicago and New York would have insisted on solidarity with workers of the world. Our roster of presidents would have included the populist William Jennings Bryan, the Socialist Eugene Debs and the one-worlder Henry Wallace. A more compact, social-democratic America would have still struggled mightily with the legacy of slavery and discrimination against African Americans, but a movement for racial equality would have begun decades earlier.

Might the liberation of the Bay Area unlock similar positive change? Think of the model social legislation that a Bay Nation could enact: bans on guns altogether, full legalization of same-sex unions, an expansion of public television and radio, complete decriminalization of marijuana, basic health care for all, environmental protections that would be the envy of North America.

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By the same token, undocumented Americans (a.k.a. "illegal aliens") could gain immediate citizenship in the Bay Nation. Bye-bye INS, hello multicultural justice.

I'll take the two gems of marijuana decriminalization and discriminationless marriage out of that pile of steaming turds and dump the rest. The sooner some folks take their ideas, demands, and dreams out of the system I live in and into one of their own creation, the better. Let them poison a different country with the collectivism and altrusim they so desperately preen for.

I support someone's right to declare themselves sovereign and independent from the nation they currently are citizens of, providing they don't steal the property and liberty of those who don't submit themselves to the seperation. The freedom of choice I support, not their underlying rationalizations. It's the same thing as saying I support someone's right to speak their mind regardless of the idiocy that mind may put forth.

Such idiocy includes the absurd declaration that a fully independent "Bay Area" nation-state would have a relatively productive and healthy economy after enacting a bargeload of growth-hampering and personal disincentivizing regulations and bringing about the kind of welfare state so beloved by responsibility-fearing Europeans and our more addle-minded neighbors to the north and south of us. It would be amusing to watch them choke themselves to death, moreso because the solutions they'd choose to fix the problems would only make them worse. Pulling the blade across the skin harder in order to stop the bleeding.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

Posted by Drizzten at April 21, 2003 01:21 PM