Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Secession creeping into respectability

The American Conservative, a far right publication of "paleoconservatives" and others who are also published in neo-Confederate publications has this article defending the legality of secession.

They aren't advocating secession, just defending its legality.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/is-secession-legal/

I am not claiming it is a trend, just noting that secession is hasn't quite died out in the conservative media.

I have mixed feelings on all this, it probably is evident from my postings. Looking at the secession petitions it is hard to take it seriously. Looking at it from the perspective of cultural geography theories of nationalism I can't quite dismiss it.

I don't think its potential viability is going be enabled much by Obama's rejection of secession though there will certainly be some people who will be reflexively against anything Obama says and for anything Obama is against.

I think a driving force might be that a lot of people at some level imagined America as a white nation and their patriotism was for that nation and not a multiracial democracy. However, I really don't know if there are enough of these people to enable in any significant way a secession movement.

There is a tendency to think history is on some track or trajectory that has inevitability driven by "historical forces" following an irresistible logic. I do think there are trends and forces driving history, but I also think that there is contingency also in history. There are preconditions that have a potentiality but it will take some chance events to develop these preconditions and result in history taking a particular  trajectory. So I think that secession is not going anywhere without an unforeseen development.

So I am just going to monitor developments.