Catalonia’s unofficial referendum has 81 percent voting for independence according to preliminary reports, though many pro-Madrid groups boycotted it. The government also moved in a significant amount of military assets prior to the vote. How Madrid is making things worse.

California + Oregon + Washington = Cascadia. Secede & instantly become Scandinavia of North America: prosperous, sustainable, liberal.

— David Roberts (@drgrist) November 5, 2014

Go read that whole thread, it’s a nice overview of progressives’ ambiguous feelings about secession.

Don Gonyea:

Well, for the Republicans, they are in their best position in the states in a century. For Democrats, they’re in their worst position since something called the Civil War.

The North-South divide is deepening

Marriage and union membership

Why the GOP should embrace Rand Paul’s “conservative realist” foreign policy

Hawaiian restoration activists are continuing to hold the bootlicking Office of Hawaiian Affairs accountable

Independent joins the Arlington County Board

Secessionist joins the Anne Arundel County Board

Left-wing secessionist calls for Portland to leave Maine

Interesting New York partition thread

Ed Sebesta gets quoted in this story on UDC renting a Richmond church

Matthew McConaughey signs on for a movie about the Free State of Jones

Malibu wants its own school district

Rod Dreher: “No bishop will die for religious liberty”

Patrick Deneen in Cato Unbound:

Those Christians and other religious believers who resist the spirit of the age will be persecuted – not by being thrown to lions in the Coliseum, but by judicial, administrative, and legal marginalization.  They will lose many of the institutions that they built to help the poor, the marginalized, the weak, and the disinherited.  But finding themselves in the new imperium will call out new forms of living the Christian witness.  They will live in the favelas, providing care for body and soul that cannot not be provided by either the state or the market.  Like the early Church, they will live in a distinct way from the way of the empire, and their way of life will draw those who perhaps didn’t realize that this was what Christianity was, all along.  When the liberal ideology collapses – as it will – the Church will remain, the gates of Hell not prevailing against it.

*****

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Journalists don’t really know how to talk about secession:

For example, look at how The Root is describing the proposed incorporation of St. George in East Baton Rouge Parish:

The rich, white folk who live in Baton Rouge, La., want to secede and form their own town called St. George.

Or at least that’s how their critics are articulating the initiative, the BBC reports. The secession, of sorts, is being sold as a well-intentioned plan that will allow St. George’s hypothetical residents to gain more control over how their tax dollars are being spent to improve public education and other services. But because St. George’s racial makeup would be 70 percent white, skeptics are seeing the initiative as nothing more than a new-age attempt at white flight or a gerrymandering of sorts.

The problem is, St. George isn’t part of Baton Rouge city, it’s part of East Baton Rouge Parish, and they just want to form a new city within it.

Two treaties, between Hawaii and Spain, and Hawaii and Denmark, which Hawaiian independence advocates claim are still in force.

You know why I love Examiner.com? Because their “Honolulu Political Buzz Examiner” is Michael Salla, who also runs an institute on political relations with extra-terrestrials. Anyway, for what it’s worth he and others are claiming that the feds are going ahead with their plan to recognize the native ancestry roll as a federal tribe. Virtually no Hawaiian independence advocates support the effort.

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Don Devine on the secession trend:

American hegemony properly controlled thus assists world peace, and secession could threaten international and domestic liberty. Still, secession in its tamed form of federalism and decentralization presents the secret to domestic liberty, especially in larger states. The ability to devolve power to the lowest levels possible—first to the individual, then to the family, to free associations and businesses, to the community, to local and regional government, and only to the national state when no other institution can perform the function—allows freedom to adjust to community differences and make individuals more satisfied with their national state.

Clark Bianco on the persistence of the English Civil War in our red state-blue state divide:

If you visit a red state you will notice higher than average levels of tobacco use, Evangelical Christianity, Ford F-150s, and so on.

If you visit a blue state you will notice higher than average levels of organic foods,evangelical Brightism, Priuses, and so forth.

To a first approximation, these two bags of cultural signifiers have absolutely nothing to do with King Charles I and Oliver Cromwell and the cultures around them.

In fact, though, if you dig a bit deeper you’ll see that there are very solid strands connecting them. The Parliamentarian Roundheads were made up of Diggers (agrarian socialists – who’d think that farmers would be socially liberal?),Levellers (who were into “popular sovereignty”, which is a fancy political science term for a drum circle, I think) and a bunch of near heretics who’s spiritual descendants believe in Crystal Power and Chakras (or perhaps having their female priests and rabbis perform gay marriages in an inclusive church), and always voting Democrat. In short, you’ve got a pretty similar culture alliance in 1614 as you do in 2014.

WRM on a world in flames:

Obama, Merkel, Cameron and Hollande have made plenty of mistakes on their own; words like “Libya” and “Syria” come to mind. But the rip currents through which they must swim are not entirely of their making. They, and we, are reaping the consequences of bad decisions taken two decades ago, when the skies were still bright and the world was full of hope. For a quarter century now, Western policymakers have assumed that history held no more great challenges on the scale of the colossal crises of the 20th century. They have acted as if we had reached some kind of post-historical utopia, and as if our security and prosperity had become so absolute and so embedded that we no longer needed to concern ourselves with the foundations of the world order.

This was foolishly and tragically wrong. We are not yet back in the worst of the bad old days. We have passed from the late 1920s to the early 1930s. A shadow is stirring in Mirkwood, the orcs are roaming the forests, but the Dark Lord hasn’t returned to his Tower.  The historical clock that seemed to slow in the 1990s is ticking faster now. We can no longer afford to live carelessly and large. The days are getting darker, and if we are to avoid a repeat of the horrors of the last century, there is no time to waste and little to spare.

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Needed a week off after Scotland, but we’re back and more seditious than ever. For starters, if you haven’t read this, do:

Devolution—meaning the decentralization of power—is the geopolitical equivalent of the second law of thermodynamics: inexorable, universal entropy. Today’s nationalism and tribalism across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East represent the continued push for either greater autonomy within states or total independence from what some view as legacy colonial structures. Whether these movements are for devolution, federalism, or secession, they all to varying degrees advocate the same thing: greater self-rule.

In addition to the traditional forces of anti-colonialism and ethnic grievance, the newer realities of weak and over-populated states, struggles to control natural resources, accelerated economic competition, and even the rise of big data and climate change all point to more devolution in the future rather than less. Surprisingly, this could be a good thing, both for America and the world.

Adam Gurri’s on pluralism is a good companion piece to it. Honestly it’s a bit unsettling to see someone as unflappably congenial as Gurri get this pessimistic:

Pluralism is a state of ceasefire across communities which allows the number of communities and conceptions of the good to multiply as their members strive to find answers. The pessimist will see in this nothing but the breakdown in moral order. The optimist will see a broadening of perspectives, of available ground level knowledge, of the stock of stories and ideas available within our common culture. The optimist believes that conceptions of the good which can persist over time are bounded by human nature and by history, but that these bounds are actually quite large, and that exploring them morally enriches us all. …

All caveats aside, I consider myself a partisan on behalf of pluralism. I can see practical value in it. I also believe there is a moral value, and dignity, in conferring the freedom and the responsibility on every citizen to find their own way. But I fear that the historically contingent political ceasefire that makes it possible is necessarily a tense one, and that the boiling over of hostilities into active bloodshed is unavoidable. The only question is how long a timeframe peace and a liberal order can be maintained over, a question I’m not sure there can be an answer for.

*****

Ron Paul: More secession movements please; they’re as american as apple pie.

Dan McCarthy attaches a cautionary note to Ron Paul’s cri de coeur, noting it’s not necessarily a libertarian idea (a point this blog has been making for a long time):

The specifically libertarian case for secessionism is manifold: in fact, it’s several cases for different things that may not add up to a coherent whole. First, there is theradical theory that secessionism in principle leads to free-market anarchism—that is, secessionist reduction of states to ever smaller units ends with reduction of the state to the individual. Second, there is the historical claim that smaller states tend to be freer and more prosperous. Third is the matter of self-determination, which is actually a democratic or nationalistic idea rather than a classically liberal one but historically has been admixed with liberalisms of various kinds. What it means is that “a people” has “a right” to exit a state along with its territory and create a new state.

A fourth consideration is that suppressing secession may require coercion. And finally there is the pragmatic idea that secession is the best way to dismantle the U.S. federal government, the summum malum for some libertarians. (As an addendum, one can mention the claim that the U.S. Constitution in particulartacitly approves secessionism, but that’s a separate argument from cheering for secession more generally.)

It should be obvious that the first and third claims negate one another, and in practice the third overrules the first: real-world secession never leads to individualist anarchism but only to the creation of two or more states where formerly there was one. The abstract claim that every minority within the newly formed states should then be allowed to secede doesn’t translate into anyone’s policy: instead, formerly united states that are now distinct security competitors tend to consider the residual minorities who belong to the other bloc to be internal security threats. These populations left behind by secessionism may or may not be disloyal, but they are readily used as pretexts for aggressive state actions: either for the stronger state to dismember or intimidate the weaker one in the name of protecting minorities or for either state to persecute minorities and build an internal security apparatus to suppress the (possibly imaginary) enemy within. Needless to say, none of this is particularly good for liberty.

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