Breaking Up America: Liberty and Death

 -- Copyright 2022 by Tom Phillips 

Zaq Landsberg, Reclining Liberty

Give me liberty or give me death! thundered Patrick Henry at the dawn of the American revolution. 

Today, Liberty and Death are partners in a mass murder-suicide pact.  Police with assault weapons blow away mentally ill people with assault weapons, but only after allowing them to slaughter school children, church members, hospital patients and other helpless citizens.     

"Enough!" peeped President Biden, embarrassed into speaking after two weeks of daily massacres.  But the carnage here is dwarfed by the war in Ukraine, the  foreign-policy equivalent of a school shooting.  The Biden administration is pouring 40 Billion dollars worth of deadly American weapons into a fraternal conflict on the other side of the world -- on the pretense of defending democratic ideals we no longer practice at home. 

Maybe we have reached our inflection point at last.  A nation that tolerates child sacrifice to protect its arms industry must perish from the earth -- as must a nation that exports death and ruin and writes off a million civilian casualties as “collateral damage.”  

The USA is a failed state and a danger to humanity.  What is to be done?     

In my 50 years of daily journalism, one day stands out as particularly instructive. It was December 8, 1991, when the Soviet Union passed away -- not with a bang and with barely a whimper.  Bypassing the Soviet state apparatus, Russian President Boris Yeltsin traveled to Minsk in Belarus, and announced the formation of a successor to the USSR -- the Commonwealth of Independent States. This made Russia an independent country surrounded by 14 independent countries, with a framework for co-operation they could work out themselves.  Vladimir Putin would later call this the worst tragedy of the 20th Century, but it was just the opposite -- a diplomatic master stroke that saved the USSR from a violent, Yugoslav-type breakup, with nuclear weapons in the mix. The keys to Yeltsin's success were secret negotiations, perfect timing, and an open-ended vision of a peaceful future.  Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev had no choice but to agree. The state-run economy of the USSR had collapsed, and no one could fix it.  What it needed was a new structure. 

In America 2022 the economy hums along, but our politics are in a death spiral of demonization and random violence.  No Lincoln is at hand to bind up our wounds. We too need a new structure. It’s time to break up the United States, and negotiate a new North America in concert with Mexico and Canada.     

The process is already underway. California has been acting as an independent state for years, e.g. passing its own environmental laws and forcing the marketplace into line.  The California Republic (see its flag) also takes part in a West Coast environmental coalition that includes British Columbia.

Maine’s philosopher-journalist Colin Woodard has found traction for the idea of multiple American Nations. He counts eleven regional cultures in our continent -– among them a Puritan domain he calls “Yankeedom” stretching from Massachusetts to Minnesota; “El Norte,” a Latin culture in northern Mexico and the Southwest US; the “Deep South,” the “Left Coast,” and a resurgent “First Nation” of indigenous people in northern Canada.  

Don’t freak out.  Dividing North America into viable political units – even across existing national borders -- need not disturb our economic common market, which has existed since the 1990s.  It’s called NAFTA.  Trade could continue uninterrupted between regions with different political systems.  Defense would be trickier – but our enemies are far away, and NATO already oversees the West’s imposing military force. It’s always looking for new members.

Breaking up is never easy, and it could spark violence, especially in the aptly named "battleground states."  But the US is wracked with violence now.  In a new North America with nations following their own cultural norms, terrorist weapons could be controlled or confiscated in regions that don't want an armed citizenry.  Conspiracy theories could lose their appeal in a European-style commonwealth.   And our benighted United States could take its place along with the Soviet Union in the trash bin of history.  

I’ll wager that contingency planning is already underway, with an eye on 2024.  As in Minsk, mum's the word.    

-- Copyright 2022 by Tom Phillips