If at first you don't secede: Blue State Liberals could take up the mantle of "States' Rights" to have a virtual succession

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Robert J. Berger" <rberger () ibd com>
Date: November 16, 2004 10:54:38 AM EST
To: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>, Dave Farber 
<dave () farber net>
Subject: If at first you don't secede: Blue State Liberals could take 
up the mantle of "States' Rights" to have a virtual succession

If at first you don't secede

Feeling they've lost any say in how the nation is run, liberals
are turning to an unfamiliar philosophy: States' rights.


By Michelle Goldberg
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/11/16/states/index.html

Nov. 16, 2004  |  In the days after the election, fantasies of
blue-state secession ricocheted around the Internet. Liberals
indulged themselves in maps showing Canada gathering the blue
states into its social democratic embrace, leaving the red
states to form their own "Jesusland." They passed around the
scathing rant from the Web site Fuck the South, which lacerated
the chauvinism of the "heartland" and pointed out that the
coasts, far from destroying marriage, actually have lower
divorce rates than the interior.

These sentiments were so pronounced that they migrated into the
mainstream. Speaking on "The McLaughlin Group" the weekend after
George W. Bush's victory, panelist Lawrence O'Donnell, a former
Democratic Senate staffer, noted that blue states subsidize the
red ones with their tax dollars, and said, "The big problem the
country now has, which is going to produce a serious discussion
of secession over the next 20 years, is that the segment of the
country that pays for the federal government is now being
governed by the people who don't pay for the federal
government."

A shocked Tony Blankley asked him, "Are you calling for civil
war?" To which O'Donnell replied, "You can secede without firing
a shot."

For now, of course, secession remains an escapist fantasy. But
its resonance with liberals points to some modest potential for
constructive political action. After all, as the South knows
well, there are interim measures between splitting the nation
and submitting to a culture pushed by a hostile federal
government. Having lost any say in how the nation is run,
liberals may be about to discover states' rights -- for better
or worse.

While Democrats have rarely had less power on a national level,
they will still be major players in cities and states. One of
the resounding victories in the 2004 election was the California
proposition allotting $3 billion in state dollars for embryonic
stem-cell research. The proposition runs counter to Bush
himself, who has limited federal funding to a small group of
preexisting embryonic stem cells. The minimum wage has remained
stagnant at $5.15 an hour since 1997 and the Bush administration
is opposed to an increase. But in November, Florida and Nevada,
both red states, passed initiatives to raise it to $6.15 an
hour. Colorado, another state that voted for Bush, also passed a
measure requiring state utilities to get 10 percent of their
electricity from renewable sources by 2015.

Meanwhile, even as gay rights are preempted or rolled back on
the national level -- and in some states -- Connecticut looks
set to join Vermont in legalizing civil unions for same-sex
couples. As the Danbury News Times reported on Monday,
"Rep. Robert Godfrey, D-Danbury, and other lawmakers say it is
almost inevitable that a gay union measure will become law in
the 2005 session of General Assembly." If that happens,
Connecticut will become the first state where the Legislature
passed such a law without a court order.

Potential abounds for other statewide progressive
measures. Howard Dean famously expanded health insurance in
Vermont to guarantee coverage for all the state's children. His
followers hoped he could do the same thing nationwide. That's
not going to happen, but there's nothing to stop people from
agitating for Dean-style policies in their own
states. Similarly, Margie Waller of the Brookings Institution
points out, Wisconsin has a child-care entitlement for
low-income working families. "If you meet the eligibility
criteria, you're guaranteed to get child care," she
says. Feminists aren't going to get much help with child care
out of the Bush administration, but they could try to replicate
Wisconsin's policy elsewhere.

Liberals have long opposed the growth of state power, and for
good reason. The century's most significant clashes over
federalism have been over civil rights, with the national
government forcing the South to submit to desegregation. Since
then, fights over everything from abortion to school prayer have
pitted Northern liberals, who want to use the federal government
to enforce individual rights, often in the face of hostile
majorities, against Southern conservatives, who believe that
communities should be free to set their own norms.

Now, though, it's liberal enclaves that feel threatened by the
federal government, and who will likely need to muster states'
rights arguments to protect themselves from Bush's domestic
policies.

Most significantly, the states may be the last line of defense
for abortion rights. If Bush is able to appoint Supreme Court
judges who overturn Roe vs. Wade, the abortion question will
likely revert back to the states. If that happens, according to
the Center for Reproductive Rights, 30 states are poised to ban
abortion. Almost undoubtedly, there would then be a push to make
abortion illegal nationwide, which would leave pro-choice states
relying on the doctrine of federalism, or states' rights, to
defend themselves.

"If you are intent on making sure that women can get abortions,
you're going to lobby your state legislature," says Marci
Hamilton, a constitutional law scholar at Benjamin Cardozo
School of Law who argued the landmark 1997 federalism case,
Boerne vs. Flores, before the Supreme Court. (That case
invalidated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a 1993 law
that exempted religious groups from some state and local
ordinances.) "The decision to go to the state rather than the
federal government is federalism."

Such an embrace of federalism would be opportunistic and even
hypocritical. But that's nothing new. "It's all about power,"
says Hamilton. "That's the only criterion."

As Hamilton points out, many conservatives stop advocating for
states' rights as soon as they get their hands on the levers of
federal power. The Bush administration is currently challenging
California's medical marijuana law, which will go before the
Supreme Court next year, and Oregon's assisted suicide law. The
Federal Marriage Amendment, which in its current form would also
ban civil unions, strips states of the power to regulate
marriage, which previously was their exclusive domain.

"Once conservatives got in power they forgot federalism,"
Hamilton says. "They left that principle in the dust and rushed
to control the states that were now engaging in social
experiments."

"What's happening is that the liberals are getting the issue,"
she continues. "The issue is how do you get power in a
circumstance where you don't control the federal government. If
the answer is federalism, which I think is obviously the only
answer, what's going to happen is that all those liberal law
professors who were extremely critical of the Supreme Court
decision in Boerne, those law professors will have to eat their
words."

Of course, given the cynicism with which both sides deploy
states' rights doctrines, it's not clear where right-wing judges
will stand when it comes to battling the left wing. In the
famous case of Bush vs. Gore in 2000, Supreme Court Justice
Antonin Scalia suddenly abandoned his long-standing commitment
to states' rights when he ruled that Florida had violated the
equal protection clause of the Constitution's Fourteenth
Amendment, which holds that no state can "deny to any person
within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Still, Hamilton believes that many justices will remain true to
their previous opinions even if they don't like the outcome. For
example, she says, "The Supreme Court is highly likely to
reverse the decision that marijuana cannot be used," upholding
California's medical marijuana law.

Using state governments to protect rights locally, rather than
nationally, makes many liberals uncomfortable because it means
leaving their red state brethren to the tender mercies of the
right. If those who believe in gay rights spend all their time
shoring up protections in the blue states, they're leaving
vulnerable gays and lesbians in less tolerant locales on their
own. Similarly, to give up on nationwide abortion rights, in
favor of local ones, would be a retreat from the ideas of
sisterhood and solidarity that have been central to the feminist
movement.

At this point, though, liberals may not have a choice. Besides,
on an emotional level, some have already given up their dreams
of reforming the country in order to protect their own
backyards.

The Seattle alternative weekly the Stranger nails this defensive
mood in a recent manifesto titled "The Urban Archipelago: It's
the Cities, Stupid." "It's time to state something that we've
felt for a long time," writes the paper's editors, "but have
been too polite to say out loud: Liberals, progressives, and
Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the
Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a
chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the
United Cities of America."

"In cities all over America, distressed liberals are talking
about fleeing to Canada or, better yet, seceding from the
Union," the piece continues. "We can't literally secede and,
let's admit it, we don't really want to live in Canada. It's too
cold up there and in our heart-of-hearts we hate hockey. We can
secede emotionally, however, by turning our backs on the
heartland. We can focus on our issues, our urban issues, and
promote our shared urban values."

According to the Stranger, this means abandoning a commitment to
things like gun control and abortion rights on a national
scale. "We won't concern ourselves if red states restrict
choice," it says. "We'll just make sure that abortion remains
safe and legal in the cities where we live, and the states we
control, and when your daughter or sister or mother dies in a
botched abortion, we'll try not to feel too awful about it."

Ironically, the Stranger suggests that this means adopting a
right-wing attitude toward taxes and social welfare. "To
red-state voters, to the rural voters, residents of small, dying
towns, and soulless sprawling exburbs, we say this: Fuck
off. Your issues are no longer our issues. We're going to battle
our bleeding-heart instincts and ignore pangs of misplaced
empathy. We will no longer concern ourselves with a health-care
crisis that disproportionately impacts rural areas. Instead we
will work toward winning health care one blue state at a time."

Some liberals warn against giving in to this kind of
thinking. "We're talking about tax dollars going to the very
people who are in need," says Peter Cannavo, an assistant
professor of government at Hamilton College who specializes in
environmental politics. "You're talking about withdrawing tax
dollars from the red states and punishing people, punishing
people who do not deserve to be the target of this wrath. It's
just a way of collectively venting and taking on a gated
community mentality. One has to strive for more than that."

Besides, as the Stranger and others acknowledge, the divide in
this country isn't so much between states as it is between urban
and rural areas. Liberals can't write off Colorado without
writing off the progressive, environmentalist citizens of
Boulder and Denver. If they give up on reproductive rights for
Texans, the pro-choice citizens of Austin will have to live with
the consequences.

Still, Cannavo acknowledges the depth of the alienation that's
driving such thinking. What we're seeing, he says, is the growth
of blue-state nationalism, a new sort of identity politics
forced into life in reaction to the relentless insults of red
America. For years now, conservatives have excoriated liberals
in almost exactly the same way that previous right-wing
movements demonized Jews -- as unwholesomely cosmopolitan,
traitorous, decadent, inclined to both socialism and economic
elitism. Right-wing authors like Michael Savage, Sean Hannity
and Ann Coulter routinely try to write their opponents out of
the nation.

The administration plays on this animosity. In his recent New
York Times Magazine cover story about Bush's faith-based
governing, Ron Suskind quotes Bush's media advisor Mark
McKinnon. After accusing Suskind of thinking Bush is an idiot,
McKinnon goes on to say that "all of you do, up and down the
West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan
called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see,
you're outnumbered two to one by folks in the big, wide middle
of America, busy working people who don't read The New York
Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what
they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the
way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you
attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it's good for
us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They don't
like you!"

Democrats are starting to get this, which is partly why the
results of this election felt so personal. "We are being
attacked and really caricatured," says Cannavo. "There's been an
attack on the blue states as out of touch with the country. You
had 48 percent to 51 percent in the election, but the 48 percent
is considered somehow illegitimate."

Many of the people in that 48 percent are not content to be
ruled by people who, beyond disagreeing with them, seem to
despise them. They'll seek other ways to exercise power. "Over
the history of this country," says Cannavo, "we have had states
taking the lead on certain issues and then even banding together
to sue the federal government. The Northeastern states have
taken action on air pollution. Can this be magnified in terms of
issues like health insurance? Yes. The question, though, is how
far can this go. Would you eventually reach a point of a kind of
loose federation where you have two countries pursuing their own
domestic policies?"

That's essentially the idea. Clearly, it marks an attenuation of
progressive dreams for America. But at least it means there's
something liberals can do to further their own ideals in the
face of Republican domination. For the next four years,
Democrats will be forced to watch as the New Deal is dismantled.

The states can give them a place to rebuild.

About the writer Michelle Goldberg is a senior writer for Salon
based in New York.

--
Robert J. Berger - Internet Bandwidth Development, LLC.
Voice: 408-882-4755 eFax: +1-408-490-2868
http://www.ibd.com


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