How It Might End, Act I
It seems to be that we have alarm bells going off all around us. The oddity is that so few people seem to hear them.
By Roger Kimball
September 25, 2021
A couple of years ago, I had the honor of publishing American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup by Frank Buckley, a prolific author and law professor at George Mason University. Buckley began by noting the obvious: that we in America are more divided now than at any time since the 1850s. We know how that Disunited States of America worked out, and the horror of the Civil War—what Buckley calls Secession 1.0—has led many of us to conclude that we’d put up with almost anything rather than risk a repeat of that disaster.
“Almost” anything.
Buckley does not predict a second American secession, exactly, but he shows, convincingly, I think, how it might come about. “The bitterness” of our life together, “the contempt for opponents, the growing tolerance of violence, all invite us to think that we’d all be happier were we two different countries.” There is something to that. And something to Buckley’s admonitory conclusion: “In all the ways that matter, save for the naked force of the law, we are already divided into two nations, just as much as in 1861.”
I hesitate to spoil the ending, but it is probably worth noting that in the end, despite his warnings and various scenarios of how the divorce might happen, Buckley turns out, again like most (but not all of us) to be a unionist. The United States may be too big and too powerful for its own or anyone else’s good, but might, while it doesn’t make right, does or at least conduce to stability.
And consider the alternative world orders on offer: Communist China? Islamic fundamentalism? European socialism?
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