The Problem with the Union

How viable is the United States as a unified political entity in the long term? Many take a perverse pleasure in the notion that the United States is careening towards an inevitable demise. Much of the type this is simply rooted in juvenile imagination and the propensity therein to ask big "what if?" questions about the political world. If I am personally guilty of the same, I apologize in advance, because I do intend this to be serious analysis.

The type of exercise in which I am about to engage will have the tendency to be received as more right-leaning than perhaps I have been attempting to present myself thus far. Yes, I have said that a state-enforced "family values" agenda is incompatible with libertarian politics. I have advocated significant parts of the notably socially liberal platform of the Democratic Freedom Caucus. Nevertheless, the overall point to take away from these positions is that, however objectionable certain activities may be to socially conservative instincts, the state apparatus of social control that ensures the enforcement of social norms is worse. The description of the modern state as the "welfare-warfare state" is meant to imply that the numerous institutions of government power cannot be easily separated from one another, and that power delegated to the government for one purpose has a tendency shift rather quickly to the assumption of power for another purpose. All delegations of power to the government are deleterious of civil society and should be opposed, even those that nominally seek to bolster the institutions of civil society.

In fact, a current of libertarian-Democratic thinking has its roots in a quite conservative period of the party's history. Cleveland and the so-called "Bourbon Democrats" whole-heartedly supported a laissez-faire economic program. Kelley Ross, a libertarian philosopher, has even gone as far as to credit Cleveland with having governed nearer to libertarian principles than either Reagan or Coolidge.

But Cleveland, it is well-known, presided over a party that had become identified in those days with the Dixiecrats. Looking further back in history, the southern United States had prior to the Civil War been generally opposed to tariffs that would raise the cost of their imports to assist fledgling northern industries, coincidently taking the libertarian position on trade. Many principled libertarians also defend the right of secession. Indeed, several some libertarians have been identified with the "Copperhead Democrat" position on southern secession. There is a case that Lincoln's war to save the Union also centralized power into the hands of the Federal Government to an unprecedented degree and was not worth executing since it ran roughshod over the right of self-determination for which secession stood. I am in agreement with these historical Democratic positions.

It will almost certainly be objected in certain quarters that the real purpose of secession was the right to own slaves. That was in fact the immediate issue of primary concern to the seceding states. But was it in the interests of protecting the institution of slavery to secede? At best, it would have put the Confederacy in the same position as pre-revolutionary Haiti. In the absence of the protections of the institution that the Union had afforded, the South would have likely experienced a prolonged period of slave rebellions, likely culminating in revolution and exile for whatever slave masters survived. The American South would likely have eventually become the continental hub for a broader Afro-Carribean regional culture. Even if this scenario would not have come to pass, we know from the experience of Brazil (which received 5-6 times the number of slaves from the Atlantic slave trade as British North America) that slavery eventually petered out as a system anyhow (in 1888 in Brazil).

I bring this all up to add a twist on the older Copperhead position. Not only should the South have seceded, but significant parts of the North should have parted ways as well. The Union is and always has been a patchwork of regional folkways and engaged in shifting alliances amongst (and against) one another. What the Civil War should have illustrated (and arguably did) is that no greater pretense of unity can exist between these folkways without some measure of tyrannical imperial power imposing it. In the interest of preserving liberty, a consistent libertarian should advocate devolution to independent rule by these various folkways.
What are the folkways of which I speak? David Hackett Fischer identified four of them in his massive tome, Albion's Seed, but I will not go into great detail about that here. As a practical matter, however, devolution of power to the states is probably the simplest way to undertake the project. One might naturally expect splits in states where significant conflicting folkways were present. A good model for this is the state of West Virginia. Virginia had always been divided between the Cavalier plantation owners of the tidewater areas and the Scots-Irish mountain yeoman of the interior. Attempts were even made during the American Revolution to petition the Continental Congress to establish a 14th state in roughly the present-day area of West Virginia. These petitions were thwarted by eastern land speculators with economic interests in the region, but separation for the region was clearly a long time coming.
The United States has long been recognized to contain regional political subcultures, many of which coincide with areas of linguistic diversity (http://www.evolpub.com/Americandialects/AmDialMap.html).

These simply go beyond the older North-South distinction. There is a distinction between the Upcountry South and the Coastal South, for instance. The North is broken into even more regions. The Upper Midwestern dialect, for instance, is associated with the areas in which most 19th century Nordic immigrants settled.

The linguistic diversity peters out in the West. This is noteworthy. The same region possessing a broad linguistic uniformity happens to include the same states that have notoriously high levels of Federal government ownership of land (http://strangemaps.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/map-owns_the_west.jpg). The folk cultures had reached the natural limitations of their expansion, a little west of the Mississippi. The self-initiated movements of the people with their own semi-agrarian lifestyle into new frontiers was gone. In its place we have direct Federal administration of conquered land.

Anglo-Americans thus likely have little long-term interest in most of the Western US. If there is a Euro-American ethnocultural core of the the current US, it is in the Northeastern and Midwestern states and the Upcountry South. But even with in the form there are distinctive regions: Greater New York City, New England, the Great Lakes Basin, the Upper Midwest Germanic States, and the Midland (which itself could probably be divided). Devolving power to the states along with splits and realignments within states along some of the lines implied herein is probably necessary to ensure managable libertarian polity. Murrary Rothbard pointed out that a significant part of the sociology of American party/national politics has been characterized by various ethnoreligious factions sparing to impose their version of a just polity on the others. Perhaps we should try a new notion of sovereignty instead.