The union that the 50 sister States of North America have known since Lincoln smashed them all together by naked military force into a single entity has reached its end.  That may sound like an exaggeration, but the radical divergence of many of the States from one another over fundamental cultural/philosophical issues illustrates the stark truth of it.  A couple of examples will help make this point.

COVID Response

On one side of the divide are States like Rhode Island, that want to force people to put untested medical products into their bodies, while banning the use of safe, cheap, effective remedies:

The legislation reads like a plank of Communism, stating:

This act would mandate all residents sixteen (16) years or older to be vaccinated against COVID-19. If a resident is under sixteen (16) years of age the resident would be required to be immunized against COVID-19, with the responsibility for ensuring compliance falling on all parents or guardians with medical consent powers. Additionally any person who violates this chapter would be required to pay a monthly civil penalty of fifty dollars ($50.00) and would owe twice the amount of personal income taxes.

Three different Doctors will have to state on record that the child is “not fit for immunization” In order for parents to receive an exemption for a minor. And the child themselves will have to sign the form. The state’s health department will have the power to investigate any petition for exemption. Bell stands by his totalitarianism claiming a survey conducted by Harvard, Northeastern, Northwestern and Rutgers Universities proves that 65% of residents support the statewide vaccine mandate.

On the other side are States like Tennessee that have outlawed vaxx and mask mandates and have granted explicit protections for drugs like ivermectin to be prescribed for covid, as well as granting other protections like these (via the first link):

• Removes any authority of a local health entity or official, mayor, governmental entity, or school to quarantine a person or private business due to COVID-19 for simple exposure to the virus.
• Prohibits any health care provider from vaccinating a child without parental consent.
• Prohibits all use of state funding to go toward implementation of any federal COVID countermeasure.
• Allows any doctor to prescribe the monoclonal antibodies for any patient they believe needs it.
• State medical boards are prohibited from taking any punitive action against a physician for the recommendations they make about coronavirus treatment, mitigation, or prevention — including vaccination.

Abortion Policy

Some States like Illinois, Colorado, and California are attempting to make child murder as easy to commit as possible.  California in particular is ready to revert back to the brutal pre-Christian Roman practice of killing new-born children:

California policymakers who make up the “Future of Abortion Council” just dropped a bombshell. They intend to not only codify the killing of unborn children throughout all nine months of pregnancy but to decriminalize killing newborns days or even weeks after birth.

New language added to AB 2223 last week revealed the disturbing intent. The proposed legislation would shield a mother from civil and criminal charges for any “actions or omissions” related to her pregnancy, “including miscarriage, stillbirth, or abortion, or perinatal death.” Although definitions of “perinatal death” vary, all of them include the demise of newborns seven days or more after birth.

The bill from Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks additionally protects anyone who “aids or assists a pregnant person in exercising” these rights. It also allows a woman to sue any police department or legal authority which arrests or charges her for hurting or killing her child under provisions of the bill.

And once again, there is a clear push in the opposite direction from States like Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and others:

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a bill into law on Tuesday that makes it a felony to perform an abortion, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, as part of an aggressive push in Republican-led states across the country to scale back abortion rights.

The bill, which takes effect 90 days after the Legislature adjourns next month, makes an exception only for an abortion performed to save the life of the mother. Abortion rights advocates say the bill signed by the GOP governor is certain to face a legal challenge.

Its passage comes as the conservative U.S. Supreme Court considers ratcheting back abortion rights that have been in place for nearly 50 years.

“We want to outlaw abortion in the state of Oklahoma,” Stitt said during a signing ceremony for the bill, flanked by anti-abortion lawmakers, clergy and students. “I promised Oklahomans that I would sign every pro-life bill that hits my desk, and that’s what we’re doing here today.”

Under the bill, anyone convicted of performing an abortion would face up to 10 years in prison and a $100,000 fine. It does not authorize criminal charges against a woman for receiving an abortion.

Sen. Nathan Dahm, a Broken Arrow Republican now running for Congress who wrote the bill, called it the “strongest pro-life legislation in the country right now, which effectively eliminates abortion in Oklahoma.”

Dahm said the bill would apply to any physicians in Oklahoma who dispense abortion medication to women, which accounted for about 64% of all abortions performed in Oklahoma in 2020, the most recent year for which statistics were available. There is no enforcement mechanism in the bill for women who order abortion medication online from out-of-state suppliers. Oklahoma lawmakers passed a bill last year to prevent women from ordering abortion medication online, but that measure was blocked by the Oklahoma Supreme Court.

The Future

A union of such heterogeneous parts can be held together mainly through two means:

1 An all-powerful national government that brooks no dissent amongst the parts; or

2 A decentralized plan of government, with a weak coordinating center and a great deal of variety amongst the constituent parts.

The latter is the condition the States lived under from 1776 to 1861 (and prior to independence, the colonies, under a distant king, knew this sort of political life as well, until Parliament got a bit too bossy).  But since Lincoln’s revolution, the federal government has reigned supreme, backed up by the implicit threat of military invasion if a State steps out of line.  This is not the tradition of our honorable forebears.  A Southern patriot from Alabama once said,

Sir, the Convention which framed our Constitution expressly refused to grant to the General Government the power to employ force against a State. The States came into the Union “free, sovereign and independent.” They have never parted with their freedom or sovereignty. They established a Government to act as their agent; and now, to permit that agent to employ force against the States would be to sanction the grossest usurpation. It would be converting the Government into a despotism.

Sir, the Union was never intended to be preserved by force. The fact that the power to employ force against a State was refused in the Convention which framed the Constitution, proves that those who constructed our Government knew that it could not be maintained by force. Of what value would the Union be, if the States composing it had to be reduced to obedience by the strong arm of military power? The permanence and security of our Government depend alone upon the principle of common affection and common interest.

Similar sentiments were expressed even by such dyed-in-the-wool Yankees as Lysander Spooner and John Quincy Adams.  The latter said in 1839,

If the day should ever come, (may Heaven avert it,) when the affections of the people of these states shall be alienated from each other; when the fraternal spirit shall give away to cold indifference, or collisions of interest shall fester into hatred, the bands of political association will not long hold together parties no longer attracted by the magnetism of conciliated interests and kindly sympathies; and far better will it be for the people of the disunited states, to part in friendship from each other, than to be held together by constraint.

Thanks to the wild-eyed, pseudo-Christian millennialism of his fellow Puritans/Yankees, the States have reached the level of ill-will that Mr. Adams dreaded.

Thus has Lincoln’s ideology of nationalism showed itself a failure.  It is time to go back to what has worked in the past, here and elsewhere; time to allow the original and very real cultural regions to reassert themselves (blossoming with venerable things like ancestries, saints, histories, poems, and other literature, aspects of which the brilliant English writer Paul Kingsnorth discusses here), and to let those regions govern themselves for the most part – those regions being described well by Joel Garreau in his book The Nine Nations of North America and in similar works by other authors like David H. Fischer (Albion’s Seed).

It is time to reject organization along ideological lines that have little basis in actual history, and which have done so much harm here in the States and in other countries.  Time to ‘rethink the American Union for the 21^st century’, as one book title puts it.

Continuing to engage in the low-level cultural war that is growing hotter between the States of the South, Rustbelt, and Great Plains and the States of the Northeast and West Coast is self-destructive.  It is better to separate/renegotiate peacefully while people and infrastructure are still mostly intact.

If the blue State elite won’t allow someone like Ron DeSantis to be elected president of the Washington swamp city, we would be glad, speaking for ourselves, to have him as head man of a southeastern red State confederation.  Just one of the possibilities that could come to pass with a little courage and imagination on the part of the country class.