2025 and All That

The best way to understand how I and my fellow Trump-haters feel about the current condition of These States is to compare where we are now to where we could have been now.  Not that where we could have been would have necessarily been all that much better.  But it would undoubtedly have been better just the same.

To make that comparison, I can't go back to a year ago this time, because this time last year, Trump was already President-elect.  I have to go back to fourteen months ago this time, which, by pure coincidence, was Halloween.  On October 31, 2024, five days before what will likely be the last American presidential election with more than one candidate, Kamala Harris had at least a 50 percent chance of winning the Presidency.  In the event that Harris won, I expected nothing more from a Harris administration than what President Biden had delivered, which was okay enough.  Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but knowing everything Trump was going to do if he won - because he told us - I was happy to vote for Harris.  I did.  I voted early.  And I knew what her victory would have meant.  It would have meant the election of the first woman - not just the first black woman, the first woman, period - to be elected President of the United States, which have been an even greater and more gigantic leap for America than Barack Obama's election to the Presidency in 2008.  It would have been proof that, despite its shortcomings, America really was for everyone.  While President Biden nudged the United States into a more progressive direction, it was still just a nudge, and I was under no illusion that a Harris administration wouldn't accelerate the move toward a more progressive future, I knew that she was preferable to Trump.  And she would shatter multiple glass ceilings - for women, for women of color, for interracial couples, for interfaith couples.  We were on the cusp of embracing true diversity, equity, and inclusion.

All of that hope for at least such a step forward - and, as far as I'm concerned, the soul of America - died the day Trump won and Harris was forced into early retirement from public life.  Instead of an era of diversity, equity and inclusion, we've entered a period where all three have been eliminated from the body politic.  Instead of nice things like sustainable energy, bullet trains for Amtrak, paid maternity leave, or support for unions - all things the Biden administration was at least taking baby steps toward - we've gotten more tax breaks for the wealthy and programs and amenities slashed to the point where anyone affected is out of luck.   Instead of prosperous, healthy citizens, we've become serfs living on borrowed time and borrowed money who should consider ourselves fortunate if we can afford medical bills or get a vaccine without paying out of pocket - and even vaccines not covered by insurance may be unavailable soon.  

Granted, the four years under President Biden weren't exactly a new Era of Good Feelings (and even the original Era of Good Feelings under President James Monroe two hundred years and change ago had a recession caused by a bank panic).  But even a Harris administration providing minimal improvements would have been preferable to a time in which good things go bad and bad things get worse.

And then there is that new birth of freedom we let slip between our fingers.

This is the cover of the New Yorker that was planned for the November 18, 2024 edition of the magazine in the event of a Harris victory in the presidential election.  Created by Kadir Nelson, it shows Harris dressed in a coat showing images of all of the people throughout history involved in the advancement of civil rights in the U.S. that led step by step to the ultimate culmination of the fruits of their labors - a black woman as the leader of the nation.  Needless to say, a different cover ran - one showing Trump as an ominous storm cloud.  Although the November 18, 2024 edition of the New Yorker came out ahead of the actual date, it was the perfect coincidence that that was the date that Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski revealed on the air their supplicant visit to Mar-a-Lago.  So much for freedom of the press.  

The United States, because of voters who discounted the danger Trump posed to the nation and the world because they either didn't want a black woman running the show or thought that Trump could really bring back prosperity (not that he would have if he could have), has slipped into darkness and despair faster than at any time in its history.  Even Germany took more time in 1933 to move from a democratic republic to a National Socialist state.  One week before the election of 2024, Harris represented a renewal of possibility for the United States.  Seven weeks into this administration, I decided that America was finished as a country.  

And that is when I became a secessionist.  That is when I began my efforts to promote the breakup of the United States into separate countries.  

The surprise was that it took that long.  

The United States has been on the wrong track for forty-five years.  There were times when I saw a modicum of hope for a better and happier future - the first Clinton budget and the push for health care reform after the fall of the Soviet Union, the way Americans came together after 9/11, the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency, the start of the Biden Presidency . . ..  No more.  I no longer have any hope in any positive trend that only turns out to be fleeting.  I've had it with with getting my hopes up only to see America go back to being America.  I no longer live for an era of national renewal.  And on November 5, 2024, the United States didn't go back to its previous incantation as a nation of belligerent ignoramuses.  It flat-out died.  For my home state or any other state where decency and intelligence are still showing pulses to remain in the Union is anathema to me.  I believe one of these states should withdraw from the Union and hopefully start the process of arranging a peaceful separation.

I want out.  I want a divorce.

I'm not going to wish anyone a happy new year.  No one in the fifty states that make up the Union is going to be happy until the United States of America ceases to exist once and for all.  And not only will we former Americans be happy, so will the rest of the world. 

Illegal and Disgusting

The title is a phrase from comments Donald Trump made about how he filed against the federal government as a private citizen during the Biden interregnum for . . . well, I don't know what he sued for, but never mind, "illegal" and "disgusting" are perfect adjectives for what Trump has done in the past 72 hours.

First, Trump's "Justice" Department "released" the Epstein files this past Friday as the law was supposed to require it to do, but it only released two percent of what is on file but redacted 90 percent of what was released.  So most of it looked like this:

But some material incriminating Trump managed to leak out because Pam Blondie somehow overlooked it, and though it was removed from the "Justice" Department's Web site.  But intuitive anti-Trump groups took screenshots of it anyway.

You probably didn't notice any of that, however, because Trump made a big deal out of this:

John F. Kennedy, unlike his wife, may have found Pablo Casals' music boring, and he may have preferred Dr. No to Jules and Jim, but he appreciated the performing arts enough to advocate for their promotion and their celebration.  Unlike John F. Kennedy, Trump places great importance on  entertainment value more than on artistic value, which is why he gave arts honors to some of the least deserving entertainers in the country, and his idea of an enjoyable show is professional wrestling or a UFC fight, which is planned to take place on the White House lawn sometime in the new year.   

Too bad the ballroom won't be ready by then.  That would be the perfect place to put it.

Once again . . . it's time for the United States to break up into separate countries.  I support the dissolution of the Union.  I am a secessionist. 

When (and When Not) To Secede

It was 165 years ago today, Thursday, December 20, 1860, that South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union in response to Abraham Lincoln's election to the Presidency.

". . . that the union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of 'The United States of America,' is hereby dissolved."

Today I am advocating for New Jersey - or California, Massachusetts, New York, or one of the other heavily Democratic states adversely affected by Donald Trump - to take the first step of secession in the hope of triggering a mass withdrawal from the Union that will necessitate the breakup of the United States and a new arrangement for the fifty states that will result in new republics and possibly some of the states becoming provinces of Canada. 

The reasons for secession are quite clear - abuse of Immigration and Customs and Enforcement agents, illegal disruptions and contractions of government services, suppression of individual and civil liberties, crimes against humanity . . . I could go on.  To respond to those who say that secession is unconstitutional, I would argue that Trump's unconstitutional actions and the failure of the other branches of government to check him render that annoying inconvenience moot.  Again: If what Trump does is not unconstitutional, nothing is unconstitutional.  Not even secession. I admit that the chances of any state seceding are slim, but I would argue that states have plenty of reasons to secede today . . . though they have fewer reasons to secede than the slave states of 1860 and 1861 had not to secede.

Empty threats are a leitmotif of American politics (though I would argue that not all of Trump's threats are empty), and the governors of the slave states of the lower South repeatedly threatened to secede throughout the summer and autumn of 1860 if Abraham Lincoln were to be elected President.  Then Lincoln was elected.  And then nothing happened for six weeks.  The slave states suddenly found themselves having to consider whether they should actually make good on their threats to secede, and President James Buchanan urged all fifteen of the slave states to wait and see what Lincoln would do once he took office in March 1861.  In the meantime, the Southern states weighed their options.  There were already plenty of reasons for them to remain in the Union.

First of all, Lincoln, though he won a majority in the Electoral College and won the most popular votes of any of the four - yes, four - major candidates of the 1860 presidential election, was very much a minority President, having won only 39 percent of the popular vote.  As with Barry Goldwater in 1964 or George McGovern in 1972, more than six out of ten voters thought Lincoln was too dangerous and radical to occupy the White House, but thanks to a four-way campaign - the Democrats fielded two nominees,  U.S. Senator Stephen Douglas from the North and Vice President John C. Breckinridge from the South, and there was also John Bell of the Constitutional Union Party - Lincoln was able to squeak through.  Lincoln's position was so precarious that he barely defeated Douglas in New York; had he lost that state, he would have been denied an electoral majority and Congress would have had to select the next President and Vice President.

Second, throughout the 1860 campaign and after the election, Lincoln promised that he would not try to abolish slavery where it already existed; he did not have the constitutional authority or the political support to do that.  He only promised to stop the spread of slavery in the territories that had not yet become states.  Therefore, Southern politicians should have been reassured that slavery could remain legal in their own states.  

Third, the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision, which guaranteed slaves as property under the terms of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, was the law of the land.  The President of the United States could not and cannot change a Supreme Court decision.

Fourth, even though the Democrats were badly divided over slavery - hence two 1860 Democratic presidential candidates, one from the free North and one from the slaveholding South - they had nonetheless elected majorities to both houses of the 37th Congress that would convene in the first half of Lincoln's term as President.  The majorities, based largely in the South, could block any legislation or presidential initiative that the Southern states opposed.

Despite these reasons for not seceding, however, the slave states of the lower South saw Lincoln's election as the first shot across their bow from a purely northern party, the Republican Party, that represented the fastest growing regions in the country - the Northeast and the Midwest - which would soon overwhelm the Southern states in the House with their greater populations and in the Senate with the likely ban on slavery in territories waiting to be admitted into the Union.  The even balance of free and slave states had been upset in 1850 with the admission of California as a free state; the subsequent admissions of Minnesota in 1858, Oregon in 1859, and, in 1861 prior to President Lincoln's inauguration, Kansas as free states meant that, theoretically at least, the slave states would be outvoted in the Senate.  The states of the lower South decided that, if they didn't leave the Union immediately, they would never have the chance to do so again and would forever remain subservient to the North.   Fatuous reasoning, to be sure, but that's how Southerners felt at the time.  So, just before Christmas 1860, South Carolina, which had attempted to nullify a tariff law in 1832 because of its dependence on foreign trade and had caused a disunity crisis for President Andrew Jackson to confront, naturally became the first state to secede from the Union.

The house was divided.

Mississippi was the second state to secede and the first to secede in the new year of 1861.  Ironically, one of its two U.S. Senators, Jefferson Davis, had proposed that the slave states could remain in the Union and form a self-governing dominion within the American commonwealth.  But when his state left the Union, he resigned his Senate seat and returned home from Washington.  Then the rest of the lower South followed, in this order: Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and, at the beginning of February, Texas.  The seven new republics weren't independent for long; they soon formed the Confederate States of America, with Jefferson Davis as its President.  Eight slave states took President Buchanan's advice and waited to see what Lincoln would do as President.  Then, after Fort Sumter was fired upon, President Lincoln called for 75,000 Army volunteers to put down the rebellion.  Angered at the call for military action, Virginia left the Union, followed by Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee.  They too joined the Confederacy, and the Civil War was on. 

I don't advocate a second civil war to break up the United States when I call for my state of New Jersey to secede.  I call for enough states to secede in order to facilitate a conference not unlike the one that was held in Washington in February 1861 to avert civil war, and, this time, agree to a national divorce and not use military action to dissolve the Union.  Because when Fort Sumter in Charleston was attacked by the Confederacy, it led to a bloody conflict, and no one recalled what President Jackson had said during the 1832 Nullification Crisis: "Disunion by armed force is treason.  Are you ready to incur its guilt?"