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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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I am strongly in favor of secession rights in principle, but as usual the real world is messy and complicated. In practice, if territory B secedes from territory A, territory B will then usually contain a subset of people who never wanted to secede from territory A to begin with but were overruled either through voting or through violence. The loyalists during the American Revolution, for example, who were sometimes violently persecuted. Or pro-Spanish-unity people in Catalonia. Etc.

One might also question the morality of, say, a territory that was a net benefactor of federal aid for years then seceding without making up for it by paying for what it had gained through its previous association with the rest of the country.

These are issues in which what is right and what is wrong is very complicated and reasonable people can disagree.

Certainly, though, the anti-secession argument against the US South during the Civil War has never made sense to me. The South was just doing the same thing that the 13 colonies had done 80 years ago. Yet it is pretty common in online arguing to see people say some version of "they were traitors who tried to break up the Union and they got what was coming to them". Which is just silly given how the US got started to begin with, unless the person making the argument is fine with also condemning the American Revolution, which they usually don't seem to do for some reason.

One might also question the morality of, say, a territory that was a net benefactor of federal aid for years then seceding without making up for it by paying for what it had gained through its previous association with the rest of the country.

This is easy to game by manipulating numbers.

There's a classic example where Democrats claim that the government spends a lot on red states when the truth is one or more of general infrastructure used by nonresidents such as interstate highways, military bases that protect the nation rather than the state, blue inner city areas in red states that eat up expenditures, and blues who move to red states to retire so the expenditure and revenue get counted for different states.

It also runs into the problem of "benefits" that are harmful, that can't be rejected, or both. "We paid police to enforce all those drug laws against you. Society benefits when drug use is reduced. You didn't pay us back for those benefits when you seceded!"

Yet it is pretty common in online arguing to see people say some version of "they were traitors who tried to break up the Union and they got what was coming to them".

Well, yes, that's the argument that secession is never justified, which Jefferson rejects. What I'm claiming here is that the question isn't solvable at the meta level--you must engage with the object-level dispute concerning why this group wants to secede from the larger polity.

Jefferson's bill of particulars (the section that I skipped past, but is available in the link to the original) bears a remarkable and not-at-all-accidental similarity to the provisions of the Bill of Rights. When the early Americans were debating whether to ratify the Constitution, which would create a more centralized authority than that created by the Articles of Confederation, a common concern was avoiding the abuses of the previous system under the British Crown. Each of the first eight Amendments instructs the new federal government that it is not allowed to abuse the people in the following ways, which were all things that the Founders had suffered in living memory. The Bill of Rights isn't a random collection of priorities generated by philosophical musing, but a set of very practical, real-world concerns during that period.

At the object level, the American Revolution was about whether comprehensive and systemic violations of what later became the Bill of Rights was sufficient to justify secession.

Also at the object level, the American Civil War was about whether actual or potential violations of Southerners' right to own slaves was sufficient to justify secession.

If the argument above is correct, and justified secession is contingent on the object-level dispute, then I see no inconsistency in describing the secessionary movement that gave rise to the American Revolution as justified, and the secessionary movement that gave rise to the American Civil War as not justified. In my view, this is an easy call, though different people may form their own opinions as they wish.