Why Not Rethink American Unions… Brad Birzer Has

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Audio and Transcript – If the U.S. did actually break up in or after 2012, I would expect some of this to be accurate, but not all of it.  Perhaps the entire eastern / northeastern corridor, starting in D.C. and working its way north / northeast might form one government (probably not a republic).  The southern states, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri might form a republic.  Texas, though, might well go on its own.  The northern states of the Great Plains, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Montana, and Wyoming could form a union or join with parts of Canada.  They might also confederate, ideally, with the previous grouping.  Idaho probably wouldn’t survive, as it would be torn in at least two directions.  The Mormon areas of Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and Idaho would join together in new State of Deseret, centered in Utah.  Hawaii would probably either ally itself with another country, or it might become a part of a Pacific nation of some kind. Check out today’s transcript for more…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  I posted an excerpt from an essay posted by my good friend Brad Birzer at The Imaginative Conservative.  He posted it on Tuesday; I didn’t see it until Friday.  The title of the piece is “What’s a Little Disunion Among Friends?”  Birzer writes this:

[reading]

I think those of us who love the idea of the republic, natural community, liberty, and proper order need to accept one extremely important fact: the American constitutional republic is most likely gone; the constitution has been dead since at least 1945; and there’s little to no chance of it ever reviving–at least not within our current geographical and political structures.  [Mike: Did you hear that?  It’s dead.]  The theological virtue of hope has not completely left me. [If you don’t know who Brad Birzer is, he’s a professor of history at Hillsdale College and author of Charles Carroll of Carrollton: American Cicero.]

As Edmund Burke argued so well, we are never authorized to abandon our country to its fate.  As long as a heart still beats, he stated, the possibility of resuscitation exists.  There are many, many good and moral folks fighting for a revived constitutional order.  And, I want to acknowledge their excellent work.  I think of Winston Elliott at The Imaginative Conservative, RJ Pestritto at Hillsdale College, Patrick Deneen at Notre Dame, Mike Church on talk radio, and a number of others.  [Mike: Then Birzer gets into the discussion about the utility of the union continuing on in its current incarnation.  I’m going to skip almost all the way to the end, because some of this stuff is really thought-provoking.]

But, what strikes me most in 2012 looking back at these documents is how logical disunion is to the very nature, construction, and essence of a republic.  If members have a right to join together voluntarily, they should also have the corresponding right (or “duty,” if Madison is to be taken seriously) to dissent as well.  While there are a number of steps in between decision and final action, this dissent is best expressed ultimately by a complete separation.  Those who have opposed the possibility of disunion throughout American history have also possessed a remarkable (and, unfounded, to my mind) faith in the nationhood of the republic and in a providential mission to reform the world.

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Mike:  I think that really is the glue that holds the current union together.  It is this article of faith that if we just all stick together, if we hold hands and sing the High School Musical 2 song “We’re All in this Together,” that there’s no stone on Earth that we can’t overturn and that we cannot then take and mold and shape into the country that we want them to be because that is our mission here.  I wrote in my introduction to this on Friday that what is holding the union together, what is holding people together, is this jingoistic faith and this fake patriotism that we’ve spoken about here on the program, and that men like Professor Claes Ryn have written about.  Talk about seeing it on display here this week, look at the Olympics.  No one has acknowledged as being from anyplace other than the USA when they win a medal.  If you’re an American and you win a medal, you win it as an American.  You don’t win it, as I pointed out earlier, as a Californian, that would be for the skeet shooting, as a Floridian, that would be for the swimming, and as a New Yorker, and that would also be swimming.  You win it under the banner of the USA.  They’re not going to play the state anthem of New York, Florida or California up there.  If someone else from another country wins it, they certainly will.  It’s interesting to ponder.

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In the nineteenth century, one finds the most obvious appeals to a mystical American nationalism in the speeches and ideas of Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln.

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Mike:  Brad, you may want to include Andrew Jackson in that number.  If you listen to What Lincoln Killed: Episode 1 on Independence Day, you heard part of Jackson’s tirade against the people of South Carolina and their nullification attempt in 1832.  When the final version of the 3-CD set and download is available in a matter of days, I will start playing some excerpts from the Jackson speech, tongue-in-cheek, with all the humor that we added to make it palatable for a larger audience just to illustrate this.  Back to Birzer:

[reading]

Neither appeal is fully logical, and when pushed to the end of their argument, each reaches for a faith in an American that best resembles a Medieval approaching the throne of God.  In the end, the Webster and Lincolnian appeal to a secular faith is nothing more than just this, a claim of faith.

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Mike:  Then he gets into what might the U.S. look like in disunion.  This is what I found most interesting, and I’ll conclude with this.  By the way, this is on the welcome page at MikeChurch.com.

[reading]

If the U.S. did actually break up in or after 2012, I would expect some of this to be accurate, but not all of it.  Perhaps the entire eastern / northeastern corridor, starting in D.C. and working its way north / northeast might form one government (probably not a republic).  The southern states, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri might form a republic.  Texas, though, might well go on its own.  The northern states of the Great Plains, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Montana, and Wyoming could form a union or join with parts of Canada.  They might also confederate, ideally, with the previous grouping.  Idaho probably wouldn’t survive, as it would be torn in at least two directions.  The Mormon areas of Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and Idaho would join together in new State of Deseret, centered in Utah.  Hawaii would probably either ally itself with another country, or it might become a part of a Pacific nation of some kind.

Problem states are Ohio and Michigan.  If lucky, Indiana, Iowa and Illinois might accept them into some kind of political union.  It’s not beyond the realm of possibilities that some of the larger cities might either choose or be forced to become independent city-states.  One can imagine, for example, Illinois voting to rid itself of Chicago.  Anyway, these are all, of course speculations.  Once disunion begins, it’s incredibly difficult to know where it might end.

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Mike:  That’s what I find fascinating about that.  That’s where I also find quite interestingly, amazingly, that anyone that looks at this in 2012 as a reasoned, objectionable or with an objective point of view, comes up with a different answer.  That’s the whole point of the exercise.  The status quo answer or the non-thinking person’s answer is the lazy man’s answer, [mocking] “It’s going to continue the way it is.  We gotta fix Congress and all that, but it’ll work itself out.”  The truly enlightened and truly freethinking point of view is the opposite.  It’s the one that considers the possibilities.  Who is to say that the Republic of Houston doesn’t produce more inherent good for its people than, Houston just as an example, than it does by being part of the current union?

End Mike Church Show Transcript