The great Garry Wills (until recently quite the moderate)
with eye-opener at
NYRB comparing certain aspects of today's revolting GOP to what happened before the Civil War. Basically, a form of secession already taking place.
UPDATE: Below this, watch Bill Moyers on the same theme.
The presiding spirit of this neo-secessionism is a resistance to
majority rule. We see this in the Senate, where a Democratic majority is
resisted at every turn by automatic recourses to the filibuster. We see
it in the attempt to repeal the seventeenth amendment, which allows a
majority of voters to choose a state’s senators. The repealers want that
choice to go back to the state legislatures, where they rule thanks to
anti-majority gerrymandering.
The Old South went from virtual to actual secession only when the
addition of non-slave Western states threatened their disproportionate
hold on the Congress and the Court (which had been Southern in makeup
when ruling on Dred Scott). It is difficult to conjecture what will
happen if the modern virtual seceders do not get their way. Their
anti-government rhetoric is reaching new intensity. Some would clearly
rather ruin than be ruled by a “foreign-born Muslim.” What will the
Republicans who are not fanatics, only cowards, do in that case?
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