VIVA LA HAMILTON: OUR POP FOUNDER HAD THE ANSWER

SEPARATION, NOT SECESSION: GREATER FEDERALISM AND LESS FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IS THE ANSWER TO OUR DIFFERENCES AS A PEOPLE

 

With Trump’s election leaving unhappy Californians as nervous as a Christian Scientist with appendicitis (if you don’t get that joke, you don’t understand the oxymoron that is “Christian Science“), some here in the Golden State are calling for secession. That is, for California to leave our Union and go its own liberal way. Trump is’t their kind of President, and his vision of America not one they want to stick around for.

 

Legally speaking, I think the issue of states seceding from the Union was closed at Appomattox Court House in 1865. But I understand how my progressive neighbors feel, with the looming juggernaut that is SS Trump steaming into port. For the last eight years, I have felt like my country had disappeared right before my eyes. I didn’t recognize the vision of America being articulated by President Obama and his party; a sort of watered-down American version of Sweden. I even contemplated moving somewhere else.

 

But the answer to this swinging political pendulum that leaves the left and the right delighted or dismayed, in turns, every four to eight years is not to dissolve this difficult marriage of opposites that our Union has become. Instead, as Pat Buchanan articulates here, the problem is that we have too much power invested in a federal “nanny” government, which in trying to apply a one-size-fits-all answer to every local problem guarantees to please the few special interests and to sow dissatisfaction among the rest of us.

 

The Founders, brilliant men that they were (despite being a bunch of “dead white guys”) laid out the perfect solution. Don’t go see “Hamilton“: read him, in the “Federalist Papers“. Each state should be its own mini-nation, acting as safe-harbor for all of us to experiment on the kind of America we want to live in. One nation doesn’t mean one solution to every problem. Californians shouldn’t be forced to live like Texans; and Texans would rather die (or fight) than be forced to live in a state run like California.

 

But that’s groovy. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Let each state find its own bliss. If you don’t like what California is becoming, move. Go to the state that is doing it your way.

 

What isn’t working and will only lead to more discontent and social upheaval is for each party to try and turn the country as a whole on its axis every few years, when they gain power in Washington. If we don’t want our current  cultural war to turn into a real war, we need a certain degree of separation. Fighters, go to your corners. Separation, not secession, is the answer. 

 

Washington isn’t where our salvation as a nation lies. It is in Sacramento, and Austin, and Albany, and Tallahassee. More Federalism, less federal government. 

 

Viva la Hamilton. He was a pretty smart guy.