For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And our first guest on the show today is Kirkpatrick Sale.
He's a former independent journalist, wrote for The Nation, Mother Jones, Counterpunch.
And he is the director of the Middlebury Institute, which is middleburyinstitute.org on the web.
And author of the Burlington Declaration, I believe it is.
Welcome to the show, sir.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
I'm not the author of any declaration, but...
Oh, no?
No, I am the transmitter of several declarations that the secession movement has produced over the last five years.
All of which are found on the website, and all of which declare the purpose of secession and the live possibility of secession.
All right.
Well, forgive me, but I guess there's no point in starting anywhere but here, because I know how people's knees jerk.
You must be some kind of right-wing racist redneck who just wants to reinstitute Jim Crow or even worse, right?
You got me wrong, on all accounts.
But it is true that there's a lot of knee jerk that goes in that direction.
Which is pretty silly when you consider that one of the strongest secession movements in America today is in Vermont, when they do not wish to bring back slavery.
And why is it that Vermont is such a hotbed of secessionist movement activity right now, do you think?
Well, I think that there are two things.
One is that there are a significant number of people there who were fed up with George Bush and all that he did.
And even started an impeachment movement in the town meetings up there, and the wars that their National Guard had to go and fight.
Significant number of people who hated Bush from the beginning and thought that the best thing that they could do was to get out of the empire.
But then there's also a great many people who understand Vermont to be a kind of distinct geographic place and a distinct culture.
You say Vermont to people, you get a sense that there's a different place there.
You think of dairy, you think of maple, you think of liberal.
They see themselves as a distinct place.
So that also makes the idea of going off on your own more palatable and more interesting.
There is the additional fact that Vermont indeed was a separate republic of its own after 1777 before it ultimately joined the Union.
It was the only country, not a colony, to join the Union.
So there's that strong feeling there that secession is possible and secession is good.
I'm from Texas, and it's a bit like that there, where Texas was a republic.
So wait a minute, help me out with that history here, because I remember that Vermont was one state that was split into two and became Vermont and New Hampshire, right?
Not exactly, no.
All right, well help me out, because it's been a couple hundred years.
I don't remember very clearly.
Vermont had some difficulty on both the east and west sides of defining its borders.
But the logical borders were made up of water, Lake Champlain on the west and the Connecticut River on the east.
And the east border wasn't that difficult to establish.
So now after the American Revolution, you're saying before the American Revolution, Vermont was already an independent republic in a sense and not a colony?
That's correct.
I didn't realize that.
So then after the Revolution, they were already a sovereign state in a way that the other states, they were just becoming.
That's correct.
I can see why then that would kind of leave a legacy that's a bit different than the way people think of, I don't know, West Virginia.
That was carved out of Virginia during the Civil War or something like that, the creation of the federal government.
Yes, right.
But you're right that Texas was a republic, and there is that same leftover sense that we could be a republic again.
Well, so let me ask you this, because here's the thing.
It seems to me like if we just reinstated the Constitution, or even the Articles of Confederation, but I mean, hell, even if we just settled for the Constitution, wouldn't we be about 90% toward anarcho-capitalism or anarcho-something from where we are now?
I mean, we have the biggest government in the whole history of everything combined.
So if we just went by the Constitution, wouldn't that be federalism enough for you?
Well, in the first place, you can't go by the Constitution because the Constitution has become so degraded and twisted in 250 years that it is an agent of centralism and bigness and corporate control.
You'd better do better to scrap the Constitution unless you want to go back to the Constitution when it was adopted by the 13 original states, before the Hamiltonians and the centralizers came in and messed it up.
That would be kind of funny, right?
Keep the Constitution, but repeal every law passed since the first Washington administration.
Yeah, that works.
Kind of pointless.
I see what you mean.
So it's a failed experiment, the American Constitution, you think.
It's over with.
Throw it out.
Well, it's failed if you were interested in liberty and freedom and individuality.
Yeah, it's a failure.
If you are happy with centralized, quasi-fascist government, corporate government hand-in-hand working together in their own interests and not in ours, then this is what we've got.
And if you happen to be a rich person, you'd say that this is a great success.
The rest of us don't happen to think so.
Well, from reading some of your articles here on the Internet, it seems like part of the case that you make for this day and age is that, hey, listen, the Empire's falling apart anyway.
America's falling apart anyway, so now the question is what to do.
Get off the Titanic before it sinks, I'd say.
All right, well, but then wouldn't Vermont just be helpless in the face of the Canadian juggernaut?
What Canadian juggernaut?
You think Quebec is going to want to go down and take over Vermont?
No, probably not.
As the rest of Canada, they wouldn't want it.
And Vermont, you could envision as the kind of Switzerland of North America, a place which had its own ways of doing things but didn't bother anybody else and with no reason for anybody else to bother it.
And that may be one of the reasons that the movement has grown so interestingly strong in Vermont.
Well, now, it's interesting the kind of tradition of pro-secessionist movements in America.
I guess most people would just think of the Southern attempted secession leading up to the Civil War there, it's been pointed out by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel and others on this show and in different places, that William Lloyd Garrison and a lot of the abolitionists were for the North seceding from the Union.
In fact, I guess even before that, there were a lot of Yankees in New England who wanted to secede during Mr. Madison's war of 1812 through 14, right?
That is true.
But go back a little bit more.
The original war against Britain was a war of secession.
It wasn't an attempt to take over the British government or anything like that.
It was a war of secession.
And then after that was won, they created the Articles of Confederation.
And the 13 states seceded from that peacefully in order to adopt the new constitution, 1793.
So the secession is very deep in the roots of who we are as Americans.
And I think this is probably why this Burlington Declaration reads just like the Declaration of Independence.
We start with the premise that people are individuals and if they're going to create a government, it's up to them to create.
That's why we have a temporary, limited constitutional republic, not some king born with a divine right.
That's what we had thought that we were creating.
As it turns out, you can't.
And in fact, you can't govern anything that's 305 million people coast to coast.
It just cannot be governed.
And the last two years, if nothing else, has proved that convincingly.
But the previous 25 years would provide equal evidence that it cannot be governed well at that scale and that complexity.
Well, you know, something really interesting, I guess, it's developed over the last, well, maybe even since the Civil War, but especially over the last maybe 60 or 70 years is a kind of liberal nationalism that that argues.
And I think pretty convincingly that it took the national government in the 1860s and then again in the 1960s to force the southern states to, you know, de-legalize the oppression of American blacks.
And so liberalism has become a very nationalistic kind of philosophy now.
I think the living constitution where the national government sometimes it just has to break the old system in order to do the right thing.
So you could believe that that is that is a fundamental liberal belief.
The fact is that the events around 1860 did not succeed in bettering the lot of blacks.
The events around 1960 certainly went a good ways toward empowering blacks in a significant way that they had not had power before.
And yet it has not by any means created the kind of equality and economic success that the liberals would like to take credit for.
In fact, as you probably know, there is more segregation in the school systems of America today than there ever has been.
And it's more so, in fact, in the north than it is in the south, north and the west than in the south.
So the great liberal idea of engineering social change from on top, though it had every reasonable idea behind it and was perfectly moral in its conception, has proved to be pretty much of a failure.
And black advancement, with the exception of the Voting Rights Act, has come because the blacks created it, not because the federals opened up everything for them.
Well, certainly there's a lot of truth in that.
In fact, it reminds me, I just read this thing the other day denouncing Ron Paul by comparing him to William Lloyd Garrison and to Malcolm X and saying that instead of being like William Lloyd Garrison, Ron Paul should be more like Abraham Lincoln.
Well, that's folly.
Lincoln was the most disastrous centralizer that we have ever had in this country and won a war and created about 70 years of sheer misery, black and white, throughout the south.
Just a despicable destruction of what was in the south, leaving neither black nor white in a particularly good position afterwards.
The condition of blacks in the south in the 19th century through the 20s into the 30s, not pretty at all, which is why so many blacks left the south and went up north.
You know, I learned from my friend David Beto, a professor of history at the University of Alabama, that the first year that there was not a lynching in the south was 1952.
And then, of course, there were plenty after that as well, but that was the first year, that was the first lynching-free year in the south was 1952.
Well, that's just a terrible statement, but what I'm trying to suggest to you is that this Lincoln effort to force union upon the nation on the southern states left a legacy of such destruction and rot that things like the Ku Klux Klan and lynching grew up in that terrible pot that he had created.
Well, now, so I wonder about this, too.
It's kind of a contradiction.
I get caught up and I'm not sure exactly what to do with it.
So if you have, I don't know, say 70% of the people of Texas or of South Carolina want to secede from Washington, D.C. and the U.S. Constitution and deny its authority, what about the minority that doesn't want to secede?
I mean, look at the situation of the American states.
Nobody even asked the blacks at all.
But even if you discount that, what about the free men who did not want to secede from the Union?
Weren't they being tyrannized just as much as the people who were determined to secede?
It would be so if it was something like a small minority pushing this down the throats of the others.
But nowhere in the South was that true.
And in fact, in many of the states of the northern South, they did not secede when South Carolina did.
And they didn't secede until Lincoln started a war over it.
And at that point, the settlement was overwhelmingly in favor.
Now, it is true that if you want to secede by a vote of the populace of a state, you had better be sure that that's a very strong vote.
What the people in Vermont are calling for is a statewide convention at which there would have to be a three-quarters vote in favor of secession in order for them to feel morally that they could go ahead.
And in that case, if that was the case, then there would be that 25% that might not like it and might move out.
And of course, they would be free to do so.
Or might say, well, let's see how it works before I move out.
But the problem of democracy is that there's always a minority.
And what the Constitution and the Founding Fathers worked on was how do you protect the rights of minorities when there is a strong majority.
One of the ways that you do is by secession.
And they deliberately said that, that a minority that was not happy with what the majority was pushing down on them had the right to secede.
And I think that that would be true even if a state did secede and there was some small part of it that didn't want to remain.
And if it was geographically coherent, it might be allowed to secede from the seceding state.
It should be, in fact.
Well, now, those over the generations, I guess, especially since World War II, who have kind of been the dreamers of a one-world federalism, they kind of tend to point to just looking back in history and say, well, you know, there used to be these real small city-states.
And then they were all joined together into bigger and bigger kingdoms and so forth.
Even if you look at the world spinning away from America's unipolar imperial moment here, you still see kind of the consolidation of sovereignty.
Say, for example, in South America, they're working, I guess, pretty slowly, but they're working on sort of a United States of South America in a way.
Not really.
No?
The OAS?
No, not really.
Well, yeah, I think it was a new proposal that they're just kind of getting started.
But so I guess I'm just setting you up for the argument that they say, anyway, that the current system of competing nation-states is a failure.
Eventually it's going to get us all killed.
You've probably seen the pamphlets that say there's one alternative to the atom bomb blowing up in your town.
That's the United Nations.
Things like that, where, you know, they're kind of throwing up their hands at the current system, but they can't seem to imagine anything but a larger version of what we've already got.
Yes.
Isn't that foolish?
Isn't that crazy?
It sure seems like it to me.
What are you going to say to somebody like that?
How could anybody in this day and age believe that?
It's true that people who love empires and love kingdoms may say that that is the inevitable fate of humans.
Of course it isn't.
It hasn't been.
History isn't the history of empires, except when it's written by imperialists.
In fact, throughout history, most people have not been living in large states and empires.
And then in the 19th century, those empires became large enough so that they began to gobble up the whole world.
Does anybody think that was a good idea?
No.
No.
And the empire that we have today, does anybody think that is working well?
And suppose you joined them all together.
What would make that work well?
You cannot possibly.
You can't govern 300 million people.
You can't, for sure, govern 7 billion people.
That's ridiculous.
You can't govern a billion people unless, like China, you want to impose a one-party dictatorship upon them.
And I don't think any people think that that's what a united nation holds for them.
But the fact is, if you look at recent history, since World War II, all of the political action has been decentralization, has been secession, and the liberation of smaller and smaller states.
Until 1945, there were 50 nations in the United Nations.
Today there are 192 in the United Nations.
And there are 30 other political entities not in the United Nations.
That is the characteristic of our time.
Not a growing alliance to a one-world government.
That's not what's happening.
And the Soviet Union breakup and Yugoslavia breakup are only parts of it.
What's happening is that there are smaller states that are working to get out from under larger states.
Everywhere across the world.
It has happened and it is still happening.
My friend Anthony Gregory, who, by the way, figures that in the next generation, it will be the almost unanimous opinion of the entire libertarian community to dissolve the United States as a benefit.
Why wait so long?
Why not do it now?
Well, yeah, well, I don't know.
I'm trying to encourage him at this very moment.
He points out that I think it's from, I forget if it's from the rights of man or common sense.
I think it's from common sense where Thomas Paine points out.
What a joke.
The idea that the king and the parliament serve as a check and a balance on each other.
You know, basically, these are just two halves of one monopoly of force.
And all they do is enable each other rather than check each other.
And it sort of seems like kind of regardless of your view, unless you're the most rosy utopian in the world, pretty much everybody agrees for religious reasons or otherwise, that human beings are pretty fallible and on our best day, we're all right.
But then again, you can't really trust us with power or anything that that's kind of the American belief system.
We even learned that in government school, right, that the founders deliberately created checks and balances so that nobody could be a tyrant.
All you're doing is you're saying we need more checks, more balances, because this just isn't enough to get the job done.
No, I'm not.
I'm not interested in getting the job done of the United States.
Well, I'm just saying the job done of limiting the power being exercised over your life in the most general sense, really.
No, I'm interested in having some control over it, which is more possible if South Carolina, where I live, with four and a half million people, secedes and becomes a state on its own.
I would have some chance of having some influence on that government, which I have no chance at the scale of the national government.
That's the only argument.
The idea is not to make the United States federal system work better.
It's not fixable.
It can't be fixable, after all, if there are no significant checks and balances between administrative and legislative.
And, in fact, they have become each the same thing.
And the arbiter at the top of it all is the Supreme Court, and obviously the Supreme Court decides in favor of the Supreme Court every time, and has for 250 years.
I mean, it's not an impartial agent.
It will decide in favor of that which benefits the centralization and power of the national government.
So that's not fixable.
There's no checks and balances of any kind that's going to help you out there.
The best you could do is get off.
And I'm not proposing here to do away with all government, because although one could imagine down the line a good deal of decentralization would operate within a healthy seceding state, let's not be so utopian as to start out with that as the goal.
The goal would be to take the government as it exists in the seceding state and try to make that as benign and democratic and efficient as possible, all of which can be done at a smaller scale.
It's not a guarantee that it will be done, but it cannot be done at a large scale, and it can be done at a smaller scale.
And I have just finished writing an essay on the optimum size of nation-states.
As you look around the world, what seems to be those states that are most efficient, most democratic, they fall in the range of 3 to 5 million people.
You can up it to, say, 7 million people, and then you would have all of them.
But by any measure, the freest, most democratic, most financially successful, on any happiest measurement you can make, they fall between 3, 5, 7 million people in that range, because things can be done at that scale.
I actually know a lady from Switzerland who just cannot abide my libertarianism, which has no use for state power whatsoever, because she grew up in, I guess, probably the single best example of a government that works, that's kept its people out of war for centuries in a row, where if people are mad, they go down and they take care of business at the local level, and they set things right.
She believes in little d democracy and always will, because she's seen it work, at least close enough that it's certainly barely even evil to be a necessary evil to her, because that's where she's from, Switzerland.
Yes, and it's not only a small state at 7 million people, but within it there is great power in the cantons and in the little city-states.
And that's what keeps democracy at work in Switzerland.
It's a good system and easy to emulate.
Now you, as a libertarian, might believe that we can do without government, but this would seem to be impractical at any level beyond oneself, the individual.
I think you want to live in a community where we decide that red is the color we stop at at the traffic lights, green is the one you go at, yellow is the one where you speed up.
You want to decide these things in a community, and you can extend that decision-making power and that sense of community up to quite a number of people and still retain democratic say in what color you're going to go on and what color you're going to stop at.
Well, I am an anarchist, but I'll tell you, I would settle for South Austin seceding from North Austin and seceding from Texas and creating our little South Austin republic.
I'd come home from California in a day and a half if I could get that.
Why don't you work for that?
I'm working for it right now.
I don't think it's practical to work for...
I am not an anarchist.
I'm an anarcho-communalist, and I believe in community as the proper institution among humans for happiness in government.
The question is how big you wish to make this community, and that's something that ought to be open for individuals to decide.
Sure.
Well, and that's also a debate that we'd be having long after our wonderful, successful secession.
Yes.
Yes, and that's a fair debate to have, I think.
Sure.
And as I say, I think what happens if you have a reasonable democratic state of, let us say, 5 million people, that it would work toward decentralization simply because that's more efficient than centralization, ultimately, in the long run.
But I think the virtue of secession right now, thinking of it as a state creation, is that you don't have to invent things like South Austin, and you don't have to...
The change is not as wild and revolutionary as most political changes have been in the past.
It's not a matter of doing away with capitalism.
We're not talking about that.
It's not a matter of doing away with Washington, D.C.
It's a matter of empowering the state legislature that already exists and the arms of government that already exist at a state level.
So it seems to me that state secession is a doable project in a way that nothing else on the political horizon is.
You can't think about conventional two-party politics.
That's a joke.
You can't think about running a third party, as libertarians in particular must realize by now.
And even if you have a successful third party, it is still amenable to all the corruption of the other two parties because it gets power insofar as it gets money from the people who want to control it.
So you can't have a third party.
It would seem that a revolution on the face of it is absurd.
So what alternatives are there for serious political change?
That seems to me to come down to secession.
Sounds right to me.
Listen, I really appreciate your time on the show today.
I wish I had more, but it's time to move on to the next guest.
But this has been very good.
I highly recommend everyone go and check out the Burlington Declaration.
No, no.
It's the Middlebury Declaration, Middlebury Institute.
Oh.
Anyway, middleburyinstitute.org, everybody.
Check it out.
Kirkpatrick Sale.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today.
I really do appreciate it.
Okay.
Good.
Thanks.
