The new film Civil War is a historic cinematic achievement. British director Alex Garland has made a movie that might be worse than a real American civil war.

Perhaps that was Garland’s intention. His film is a series of horrifying set pieces—Abu Ghraib-style torture by gas station attendants, government aerial bombings of civilians, summary execution of journalists, a massive California and Texas invasion of Washington, D.C.—that seem to add up to a warning. If we don’t steer away from our current path of polarization and political conflict, Garland suggests, this could be the end of the United States.

There’s established logic in this message. Early in the film, I kept thinking of the late, great Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran, who wrote in his anti-existentialist 1973 masterpiece The Trouble With Being Born: “When we perceive the end in the beginning, we move faster than time. Illumination, that lightning disappointment, affords certitude which transforms disillusion into deliverance.”

But Civil War never provides the illumination or certitude that inspires action. It’s too Hollywood, which is to say that it’s too unoriginal and too violent, with too many guns.

Indeed, the film is so over-the-top that it feels uncomfortably, well, Putinist. These days, the Russian and Chinese governments, and their media organs, routinely promote the idea that the U.S. is headed for, in the words of former Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, a “bloody civil war which [will] cost thousands upon thousands of lives.” Civil War brings that propagandist vision to cinematic life.

If the U.S. does see another civil war, it will almost certainly not involve the new film’s vision of warring armies advancing to a final shootout at the White House. Nor is it likely to involve fights between groups of states, like the California–Texas alliance the film depicts. Those visions—like much of this film, where the internet rarely enters the story and the main characters are traditional still photographers—are anachronisms, owing more to the 1860s Civil War than to 21st-century realities.

Indeed, the real challenge of the next American civil war will be perceiving whether it is a war at all. Such a conflict won’t separate soldiers from civilians. It will be fought with cyberattacks, misinformation and disinformation, and psychological warfare. The battlegrounds will be political and legal, with warring factions seeking to cancel each other’s rights and prerogatives. It will also be diplomatic, because an American civil war would be, by definition, a world war. Our enemies will fund and fuel our conflict, while our allies will send emissaries to intervene and negotiate peace.

The fighting will not be between states, because the conflicts in our society are not primarily geographic. Our most bitter fault lines are around ideology, race, gender, age, class, education, and immigrant status. A civil war will map those divides within our metro regions, within our cities, even within our neighborhoods.

For these reasons, it’s time to retire the idea of California “secession,” even for those of us who are sympathetic to making California independent by peaceful means. Let’s face facts: The Golden State is never going to break away and fire on Camp Pendleton, like South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter in 1861. And we certainly aren’t going to send troops to march on Washington. We have no military, and no offensive warfare beyond Gov. Newsom’s Fox News appearances.

No—if California ever becomes an independent nation, the more likely path will be through a U.S. government meltdown.

Unfortunately, that scenario now seems possible. It is easy to imagine a fascist president, with a compliant Supreme Court and a cowed Congress, using his military to punish cities and communities whose actions he doesn’t like. It’s also possible to imagine such a president invoking executive powers to shut down Congress (as Donald Trump attempted on January 6) or government agencies that won’t bend to his command.

In such a circumstance, California, without representation in Congress, will have little choice but to take on national duties. Behaving more like countries, California and other unrepresented states might drift naturally to formal breakup, the current republic ending not with war but with written agreements between states and a disintegrated federal government.

To make a believable movie about such a real American civil war would require a filmmaker with the virtuosity of the late Akira Kurosawa, whose 1950 film Rashomon famously tells one story from multiple, contradictory perspectives. Perhaps the San Fernando Valley auteur Paul Thomas Anderson could pull off such a film (he used a similar technique in Magnolia). Maybe Drew Goddard, writer-director of the Lake Tahoe noir Bad Times at the El Royale, could manage it.

Garland’s film never comes close. We never get to know the civil war’s combatants, some of whom seem like cartoon villains. Instead, the director tells his story through the narrow perspectives of four journalists driving from New York to Washington. All but the main character, played by Kirsten Dunst, come off as callous, selfish, or vaguely ridiculous.

As the president is about to be executed, one journalist asks the soldiers to wait a second because “I need a quote.”

The film feels unimaginative because the idea of another American civil war is actually an old one. For example, Marvel made a much smarter film in 2016 about what drives us to war when feuding superheroes devoted to Captain America and Iron Man turned on each other in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War.

But watching this Civil War, I found myself thinking of the 1997 satire The Second American Civil War. That cable TV movie, with scenes filmed at Los Angeles City Hall and the State Capitol in Sacramento, envisioned a future that looks too much like our present, with Idaho sparking a civil war in a country badly divided by race, immigration, politics, and media nonsense.

Like Garland’s film, it hid from the harder questions by putting journalists at center stage. But for all its goofiness, that 27-year-old film was the wiser, more relevant, and more responsible movie.

“The country is falling apart,” says a TV producer in the satire. “We don’t need exclamation marks.”

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The further I drove into Oroville, the more disappointment I felt.

I had my passport with me, but no one asked me to show it. American flags still hung from stores along Montgomery Street. Homes near the Feather River were flying our state’s banner. City Hall had not been replaced by a new national capitol. And as hard as I looked, I could find no new standing army, or presidential palace, or the Oroville Food and Drug Administration.

It was as if the city council of Oroville, 70 miles north of Sacramento in Butte County, had never made national news in 2021 by declaring itself a “constitutional republic.” And no one in this town home to close to 20,000 residents much wanted to talk about this bold move, even those who once championed the idea.

That’s too bad. Because there is no more productive spirit, and no greater creative force, than the commitment to break away, to declare independence and build something new.

That’s the spirit, that’s the force, we should celebrate on Independence Day—especially in California, which is known for going its own way. But it’s been a long time since Independence Day was about independence.

These days, we try to put on displays of national unity—a fundamental mistake at the heart of our national malaise.

Americans, amidst our divisions, foolishly long for unity, even though unity, and the national compromises it requires, have produced so many awful things in our country. We the people—or more correctly, the wealthy male and European slice of we—came together to adopt a constitution that enshrined slavery and shunned democracy. In the name of unity, we ended Reconstruction and launched Jim Crow. In our moments of greatest national unity, we ceded terrible power to presidents, and pursued endless wars.

The United States only truly advances through division and disunion. We needed a civil war to end slavery. Every expansion of rights required social movements that divided us. The nation’s signature technological achievements were the products of people who went off on their own, in defiance of business convention and existing laws, from Kitty Hawk to Cupertino. Environmental progress, including climate change laws, has come when cities and states, including California, have broken ranks.

So, on this Independence Day, the problem is not our absence of unity, but the weakness of our efforts at disunion.

California, and especially its discontents, have displayed a decided lack of nerve. This country needs a revolution, but we aren’t supplying one. A state famous for producing internal secession movements—there have been more than 200 attempted break-ups since 1850—lately has seen nothing but half-hearted efforts.

In this, Oroville is hardly the only disappointment.

Who, for example, switched all the coffee in San Bernardino County to decaf this year?

Last fall, the people of that county, the largest by area in the United States, voted to direct officials to study greater autonomy “up to and including secession from the State of California.”

That verdict portended a wholesale rethinking of the meaning of county government in California and the U.S. Some of us hoped that San Bernardino, one of the few parts of California seeing population gains, would dream bigger than just statehood, and go all the way, for nationhood. (I would have applied for citizenship.)

But eight months after the vote, there have been few public signs of progress, other than a few more pointed requests for funding San Bernardino priorities in the state budget. There is no public indication of serious work on statehood, and the study that voters demanded has not been published.

In the rural precincts of the North State, the longstanding push for a state of Jefferson, which drew heavy publicity and broad local government support in the early years of this century, seems at low ebb. It’s been eclipsed by the effort by rural counties in Oregon, some of which border California and would have been part of Jefferson, to split off from the Beaver State and become part of an expanded “Greater Idaho.”

Northern California does have some disunity, but it’s not of the constructive kind. In Shasta County, right-wing political figures have taken over, and their desire to destroy institutions and threaten people eclipses any interest in building more democratic government.

Just this May, El Dorado County, which includes Lake Tahoe, saw the launch of a new secession effort, called the Republic of El Dorado, inspired in part by the fact that the county isn’t home to a single elected representative in the state or federal government. But again, the effort doesn’t have a clear agenda. It’s also built on the dubious claim, running contrary to law and the constitution, that the county can leave and make itself a state without any agreement or sign-off from Congress or the state legislature.

There are other local acts of defiance that could evolve into a bigger split and more change, but haven’t yet. Our state is full of sanctuary cities that have developed new ways to protect and serve unauthorized immigrants and their families. Some school boards, notably in Temecula, have limited access to books or taken conservative stands in the culture wars, thus challenging the state. The city of Huntington Beach and the state are suing each other over housing laws, though it seems unlikely that the outcome will boost housing production, much less change the nature of local government in California.

Meanwhile, other, more established ideas for independence in California remain dormant. Bay Area investor Tim Draper, who once circulated ballot measures to split California into multiple states, is devoted to cryptocurrency instead. The city of Los Angeles is in a political crisis and might benefit from the relaunch required by a breakup, but the movement for San Fernando Valley secession, which triggered a citywide vote a generation ago, is all but dead.

That’s too bad. As the historian and journalist Richard Kreitner observed in his 2020 book Break It Up, “secession is the only kind of revolution we Americans have ever known and the only kind we’re ever likely to see,”

So, on this Independence Day, the best way for Californians to celebrate their country is by plotting to break away and build something new.

We’re disunited, and that’s what makes us great.

The post In Praise of a Disunited States of America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

California may now need its own Independence Clock, showing how close we are to that seemingly unthinkable moment when our state departs the U.S., to become an independent nation.

In recent weeks, that prospect drew unmistakably closer, courtesy of the U.S. Supreme Court.

First, justices overturned more than a century of legal precedent that had allowed communities in California to limit public gun possession—endangering laws that have spared us from some of the American epidemic of gun deaths by murder, suicide, and accident.

Then, the court reversed Roe v. Wade and eliminated the federal constitutional right to abortion—a right enshrined in our state constitution and supported by majorities of Californians of every political party, region, and demographic group.

These decisions were like earthquakes—unsettling but unsurprising, given the justices’ frequent expressions of contempt for California in oral arguments (a bias I wrote about last year). They were enacted by a far-right court majority that exists because America’s anti-democratic constitution gives less representation and less voting power to Californians, both in choosing a president (who nominates justices) and in electing a Senate (which confirms them).

The two decisions follow a fusillade of recent federal failings that have damaged California and harmed our people. These include a pandemic response that cost nearly 100,000 Californian lives; a generation-long “war on terror” that killed more soldiers from California than from any other state;  attacks on our efforts to end the drug war and police abuses; attempts to cancel our environmental laws; denial and delay of disaster aid; accusations that our elections are fraudulent; and the violation of the rights of our immigrants and their families.

To cope, California has had to behave more like a separate nation than a state. We have adopted our own immigration policy. We have signed our own environmental treaties with other countries (agreements that are even more important now that the Supreme Court has limited the federal government’s ability to regulate climate change). We have funded our own research on subjects from guns to stem cells (in response to federal restrictions on such research). And we have successfully pressured car makers and other corporations to privilege our state regulations over national ones, just to name a few.

But creating a quasi-nation creates costs that are hard on Californians. We weren’t designed to operate as an island. How much more can a state handle, governmentally, economically, emotionally?

The Supreme Court made clear last week that we can expect no respite in the future.

I say this not just because the court, for the first time, cancelled a constitutional right in the abortion case, or because Clarence Thomas, in his concurrence, declared that the courts should cancel the rights to contraception and same-sex marriage. I say this because the court’s method of decision-making does not account for Californians’ lives or preferences.

Both the guns and abortion decisions rely on peculiar readings of history—focused on American and English practices of the 18^th, 17^th, and earlier centuries, generations before women’s suffrage, before the end of slavery, before California was even a state. The decisions employ a mode of historical analogy that lacks the rigor of palm reading, much less serious legal analysis.

The troubles will persist beyond this court, which, with the retirement of Stephen Breyer, no longer has a single Californian among its justices. Given our disenfranchisement, what is to stop a future Congress and president from cancelling our abortion laws, our protections for women or gay people or minorities or immigrants, our climate and environmental laws, or even our commitment to making it easier for our people to vote?

As an optimist, I’ve previously argued that democratic reforms in California and elsewhere could solve this American crisis. With more and better participatory tools—from citizens assemblies to proportional representation to national referenda—the U.S. could re-found itself as a modern democracy. But the open hostility to democracy of this court, and among much of the American political elite, suggests that any such reforms do not stand a chance.

Departing the union seems beyond the pale. But so is the behavior of the American government. That’s why, as fanciful as a break-up of the country might still sound, the Independence Clock is ticking closer to midnight.

Polling from last year showed growing support, among Americans of all political persuasions, for removing their own state from the U.S. A University of Virginia poll found 41 percent support among Biden voters and 52 percent support among Trump voters for blue or red states seceding to form their own separate nations. A Bright Line Watch poll found that 47 percent of Democrats in West Coast states favor forming their own nation.

Is it time for California to go? Probably not. But it’s not too early to pack a bag and make a departure plan. We badly need an open and ongoing statewide conversation, including major media and our elected leaders, about independence.

The day after Roe v. Wade fell, I found myself coaching in a youth sports tournament, which starts every game with the Pledge of Allegiance. I stood and put my hand over my heart, but found that I could no longer bring myself to recite the words.

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This scenario seems to be playing out in Atlanta, where acolytes of former president Donald Trump are calling for the affluent, predominantly white enclave of Buckhead to secede from the city.

Proponents of secession say the timing of their effort simply reflects concern about a recent spike in crime in the area, but it also serves a broader strategic purpose, as part of the national Republican Party’s efforts to regain its footing in Georgia after its surprising stumble in the state’s 2020 presidential and senatorial elections. GOP leaders have already pushed through legislation calculated to suppress minority voting in this year’s gubernatorial and congressional midterm contests in Georgia. Yet they also face a need to rekindle the partisan loyalties of traditionally Republican metropolitan whites, which appeared to lapse nationwide in 2020—especially in places like Buckhead, where Donald Trump claimed only four precincts in 2020, compared to nine in 2016.

The stated case for Buckhead’s breakaway is not wholly lacking in substance. For some time, residents of the area have expressed concern about how much safety their substantial tax payments really buy them. The outcry has intensified in recent months. Buckhead secessionists point to a 44 percent jump in homicides in 2021, with all shooting incidents up by 31 percent and aggravated assaults up by 20 percent. Meanwhile, the city of Atlanta’s efforts to combat a citywide surge in violent crime have suffered from the departure of roughly 1 in 5 of its police officers over the last year in the face of former mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms’ hard-nosed response to incidents in which police appeared to use excessive force. Predictably, the key plank in the Buckhead Cityhood Committee’s (BCC) secessionist platform is the promise of the highest-paid and most carefully screened police force in Georgia—including 175 active patrolmen, which would purportedly quadruple the number of officers on duty per shift.

Although the percentage increases in Buckhead’s crime rate seem striking, the 44 percent rise in homicides reflects an absolute increase from 8 in 2020 to 13 in 2021, while the area’s police zone recorded substantially fewer violent offenses than the average in Atlanta’s other zones last year. Even so, secession proponents have declared Buckhead a “war zone,” where “the killing never stops.” Such calculated hyperbole is a favorite device of career political subversives like longtime Trump advisor Steve Bannon, who rely on it to shock their followers into actions whose consequences they may not fully comprehend. In this sense, the Buckhead secession movement seems like something straight out of Bannon’s playbook, which envisions hard-right voters seizing control of the Republican Party “village by village, precinct by precinct.”

A great many Buckhead residents are against secession, including the two Democrats who represent the area in the state legislature. In both houses of that body, the sponsors of bills to enable the withdrawal vote are Republicans whose districts lie in other counties, one 50 miles away, and another 100. Not all of the state’s prominent Republicans have openly endorsed the measure, but one who has is former U.S. Senator David Perdue—another non-Buckheader who, with Trump’s endorsement, is now challenging incumbent Brian Kemp in their party’s upcoming gubernatorial primary. Far-right Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a frequent guest on Bannon’s podcast, has also praised the efforts of the Buckhead Cityhood Committee (BCC) and its CEO, Bill White. Greene doesn’t represent Buckhead either. But she has found a kindred spirit in White, a fellow conspiracy theorist who has raised copious sums for Donald Trump, rallied support for the “Stop the Steal” movement, and lauded the “patriots’” who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Further evidence of the partisan allegiances at work in the secession campaign emerged from a BCC poll showing 86 percent of Buckhead’s Republicans favoring the pullout, compared to only 38 percent of its Democrats. The presumptive Democratic nominee for governor, Stacey Abrams, has declared her opposition, as has the newly elected Democratic mayor of Atlanta, Andre Dickens. Proponents of the secession initiative insist that their campaign is colorblind. Still, the number of Black leaders who have lined up with Abrams and Dickens to denounce the effort, combined with BCC-er Bill White’s re-tweet of disparaging comments about Black-majority cities from a white nationalist website, attest to the pronounced racial overtones of the secession campaign. Some 74 percent of the proposed new city’s population, estimated to be in the neighborhood of 100,000, would be white. Without Buckhead, the black share of Atlanta’s population would rise from just over 50 percent to just under 60 percent.

This aspect of Buckhead’s departure is particularly ironic in view of the circumstances that led to it becoming part of Atlanta in the first place. Historian Matthew Lassiter has explained how Buckhead became a strategic pawn in Atlanta Mayor William B. Hartsfield’s plan to sustain both his city’s post-World War II economic boom and its reputation for racial stability.

A pragmatist of the first order, Hartsfield prided himself on maintaining a close working relationship with the conservative leaders of the city’s well-established Black middle class. Yet population trends in the mid-20th century suggested Black people would soon outnumber whites in Atlanta, and Hartsfield believed that the prospect of dealing with a Black governing majority would discourage corporate managers from making major investments in his town. Warning that Atlanta was “finished” as a city if it could not expand, he managed in 1952 to push through a legislative annexation plan that tripled its geographic area while adding some 100,000 whites from the Buckhead community lying just to its northeast. The infusion immediately reduced the Black share of the city’s population from 41 to 31 percent.

Hartsfield meant to maintain Black-white relations through moderation, rather than sheer strength of numbers, however, lest he put the lie to his own claim that Atlanta was “Too Busy to Hate.” The prosperous, self-assured, racially tolerant, pro-business white denizens of Buckhead proved critical to this mission. They backed him in 1960, when, with Atlanta schools facing court-ordered desegregation, Hartsfield and allies like prominent attorney and Buckhead resident Griffin Bell thwarted demands to cut state funding for any public school system complying with integration efforts.

In return, Hartsfield’s strategy for school integration in Atlanta minimized its impact on his well-heeled white supporters in Buckhead. The small, carefully selected cadre of Black students assigned to transfer into schools in their neighborhoods in 1963 boasted higher average test scores than their new white classmates, while the numerical brunt of integration fell on the white working-class neighborhoods south and west of downtown.

And much as the mayor had promised, after annexation Buckhead became an economic dynamo, awash in high-income consumers and free-flowing investment capital. When Buckhead’s gleaming, futuristic Lenox Square opened in 1959, it was billed as the South’s largest shopping mall. There would soon be other, smaller, but no less fashionable shopping plazas, as well as a proliferation of steadily higher-rising office towers and a bustling restaurant and bar scene. A Buckhead address, residential or commercial, became synonymous with wealth and power. Not by chance did Tom Wolfe make Charlie Croker, the hard-charging, relentlessly entrepreneurial protagonist of his 1998 novel, A Man in Full, a resident of Buckhead.

Today’s Buckheaders who trumpet secession the loudest don’t seem to have spent much time pondering the practicalities of getting what they say they want. Funding an expanded police presence in an independent Buckhead today shouldn’t be a problem, the BCC insists, citing a feasibility study that foresees the new city’s massive tax base generating a budget surplus in the neighborhood of $114 million annually. But this figure fails to account either for standard municipal expenditures like waste removal and street maintenance or for Buckhead’s substantial portion of Atlanta’s billions in bond and employee pension obligations. A December city council move means nearly $200 million in bond repayment would come due in full 12 months after Buckhead’s official departure.

Another loose end the secession proponents don’t seem keen to discuss is the fate of some 5,500 Buckhead pupils currently enrolled in the Atlanta Public Schools system. While Georgia law is friendly to the creation of new cities, the state’s constitution forbids the creation of new independent public school systems. Who would educate the Buckhead students whose parents can’t afford or don’t choose to send them to one of its ritzy private schools?

Broader fiscal consequences of Buckhead’s withdrawal would be unavoidable. The proposed boundaries of the new city contain all or part of three of the four richest zip codes in Georgia. The richest, 30327, boasts an average household income of $285,000, with 40 percent of its homes valued above $1 million. With its high-dollar commercial properties thrown in, Buckhead’s departure would strip Atlanta of some 40 percent of the total assessed value of its taxable property, and more than half of the budgeted revenue for its public schools. So much for the city’s credit rating—and ultimately, perhaps, that of other Georgia cities that might see their tax bases decimated by similar desertions should Buckhead’s come to pass. (There are already copycat movements in places like Athens, where there is talk of the upscale Five Points neighborhood withdrawing from the city.)

For some supporters, the secession drive seems to be more about wounding Atlanta than benefiting Buckhead.  Fox News host Tucker Carlson was so taken with the prospect of punishing “woke” leaders of a Black majority city that when the BCC’s Bill White appeared on his show, he grew animated in urging White and his cohort to “leave immediately. That’ll be a lesson to the rest of the country.”

The substance of that lesson may prove less to their liking than Carlson and other Buckhead Cityhood proponents envision. Efforts by white conservatives to hold Atlanta’s political influence in check have been a fixture in Georgia politics for more than 150 years. But pushing the city that accounts for roughly two-thirds of the state’s GDP to the brink of receivership hardly promises to sit well with executives of the 29 Fortune 1,000 companies who currently call it home, or other mega-investors who might now think twice about joining them.

There are indications that enthusiasm for what some Atlantans call “Buckxit” is on the wane, but even if the deeply partisan venture ultimately fizzles, it has already shown that the same political mentality that stirs vindictiveness and division in national affairs stands to be no less toxic when it surfaces in matters of more local concern.

The post Who Benefits From ‘Buckxit’? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Many politicians of the period avoided serious talk of sectionalism and slavery at such “mixed” gatherings, in the interest of keeping things civil. But the holiday atmosphere lent itself to informality, and the men haphazardly started proposing ideas. Some favored letting individual states and territories decide whether or not they should have slavery within their borders, while others wanted to simply draw a geographic line from the Mississippi River to the Pacific, prohibiting slavery above the line and allowing it below. The conversation grew heated—and within minutes, two of the politicians came to physical blows, their colleagues pulling them apart as they rolled around on the floor like a pair of angry schoolboys. But despite the topic of discussion, sectionalism and slavery had little to do with this fistfight. It was the physical manifestation of an already strained relationship between two politicians who should have had a lot in common: Mississippi’s U.S. senators, Henry Stuart Foote and Jefferson Davis.

In the history of American politics there have been many ugly rivalries—Andrew Jackson versus John C. Calhoun, Lyndon Johnson versus Robert Kennedy—but none was more bitter than the animus between Foote and Davis, which lasted from the 1840s until Foote’s death in 1880. The two men despised one another, and the higher they rose in political circles, the greater their hatred became. Both were ambitious political climbers, but in different ways. Foote was a street fighter, while Davis, who would later become president of the Confederacy, was calculating and somber. Foote was more publicly aggressive, never missing an opportunity to prod Davis. Davis, who was more famous, met Foote’s jabs with intimidating, withering glares and steely silence. Foote resented Davis for his natural aloofness; Davis bristled at the venomous personal barbs that punctuated Foote’s rhetoric. For Davis, the violent encounter at the Washington boarding house was an uncommon loss of self-control, a rare emotional display of barbarism from a man who was accustomed to public formality. For Foote, the fight was business as usual.

Davis was born in Kentucky in 1808 and moved with his family to Mississippi when he was a small boy. He attended the United States Military Academy and later became a successful planter. Born in 1804, Foote was a native Virginian who came to Mississippi while in his twenties. He practiced law and owned a newspaper. Both men became involved in politics during the Jacksonian period, and both were very ambitious. The genesis of their feud lay in the 1844 trial of local district court clerk John T. Mason, near Vicksburg, Mississippi. Mason was accused of killing Davis’s brother-in-law in a duel, and Foote, then a successful attorney, led his defense. His closing argument dazzled the jury, who voted to acquit, ruling that the killing was an “excusable homicide.” As was his way, Foote trumpeted his success to anyone who would listen, angering Davis and his family, who naturally felt that the killer should be punished.

Davis and Foote both entered the U.S. Senate during the late 1840s, at a time when slavery was becoming the dominant national issue. Mississippi was one of the leading cotton-producing states, and its politicians joined the rest of the South in pushing back on perceived threats to slavery posed by Northerners, creating a siege mentality that dominated daily life. During these volatile times, both Foote and Davis wanted to be the leading political voice of their state on the Senate floor, which set them on a collision course.

Both men were pro-slavery ideologues, but aside from that, they agreed on almost nothing. During the months-long, tumultuous debates that culminated in the Compromise of 1850, the last political deal over slavery between the North and the South prior to the Civil War, Foote and Davis were consistently hostile toward one another on the Senate floor. At a time when some Southerners were already talking about secession, Foote was a unionist: He took a moderate position that secession was dangerous and claimed that slavery could be protected without alienating the North, and that compromise was possible. Davis was less willing to make any sort of compromise, taking a harder line. One witness who heard them both speak later compared Davis’s “dignified and commanding, soft and persuasive” oratory to Foote’s “[f]iery torrent of fierce invective and brilliant declamation.” In heated moments, Davis labeled Foote “a Constitutional liar,” while Foote claimed that Davis “speaks only for himself, and under the promptings of his own ambition.”

During all the turmoil, most Southern politicians, in Mississippi and beyond, rallied around Davis, whose honeyed pro-slavery oration on the Senate floor helped him emerge as one of the primary spokesmen for the South—a rational, stable presence during an angry, uncertain period. Davis’s increased national profile irritated Foote, who was also well known, but not as well respected. Foote exacted his revenge in 1851, when the two men faced each other in a contest to become Mississippi’s governor. Foote won the election, but his tenure as governor was a disaster, in part because Davis and his allies in the state worked tirelessly to undermine him. They held up legislation and funding for almost every initiative Foote advanced, and blocked his appointments to government posts.

After Foote’s term ended in 1854, he relocated to California, hoping to get a new political start. Davis likely thought that he would never have to worry about his rival again—but if so, he was sadly mistaken. Still hoping to capitalize on his name recognition in the South, Foote moved back east to Nashville, Tennessee in 1859. He arrived just in time to watch the nation come apart on the eve of the Civil War. The seceding Southern states formed the Confederacy, electing Davis as president, and Foote decided to run to represent Tennessee’s 5th District in the new Confederate Congress.

Foote’s hostility toward Davis was well known, and some political observers believed that his run for Congress was little more than a ploy to put him in position to continue his feud with the Confederate president. Foote won the race—and indeed, his tenure as a Confederate lawmaker seemed driven by his hatred for Davis. He was an instant critic, delivering verbal broadsides against the Davis administration that became more frequent and bitter as time wore on. He blamed Davis for Confederate military failures and for weaknesses in the Confederate economy, and frequently questioned his personal integrity. He called the president a despot and tyrant, and during one notable tirade, a “fiendish character responsible for more barefaced acts of corruption than any single individual has ever been known to commit in the same space and time in any part of Christendom.” (Foote admitted after the war that “not a day passed while I occupied a seat in the Confederate Congress that was not more or less signalized by my vehement opposition to Mr. Davis.”) Davis did his best to ignore the inflammatory rhetoric, but his allies did not—and tangled often with Foote on the floor of Congress, in verbal confrontations and at least two fistfights.

As the Confederacy began to crumble during the war’s latter stages, Davis became an easier target for abuse. Foote continued his rhetorical assaults on the president, and also demanded investigation after investigation of the administration’s conduct of the war. He attacked Davis’s political allies, his appointees, and anyone with whom the Confederate president was friendly. Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin, who was Jewish, was a favorite target, inspiring a number of Antisemitic rants. Foote questioned the competence of Davis’s preferred generals in the field, going so far as to call Major General Thomas C. Hindman, Jr. a “fiend in human form.”

While other Confederate congressman disparaged Davis and complained about some of his decisions, few were as long-winded as Foote. Eventually, open sighs greeted Foote every time he stood up in the House chamber to speak. Newspaper reports of his tirades against Davis filtered into the North, where they were employed as propaganda, proving that the Confederate government was in disarray.

The end of the Confederacy, in 1865, did little to temper the ill will between Foote and Davis, who continued their sniping until Foote’s death in 1880. Davis lived until 1889, long enough to enjoy his own elevation to hero status throughout the South—an outcome that would have appalled Foote.

In the years immediately after the war, Davis slowly tried to rebuild his reputation, and Foote remained in Nashville practicing law. Both men also joined a battle of the books that took place in the years following the Civil War, as principal players in the conflict rushed to tell their sides of the story. Foote wrote a history of the Civil War and an ominously titled memoir, Casket of Reminiscences. Both of Foote’s books devoted a good deal of space to sharp criticism of Davis, calling him “a shameful, hypocritical and tyrannical chief executive,” and condemning “that compound of weakness, and corruption, and servility in the form of a cabinet which Mr. Davis so stupidly called around him.”

For his part, Davis privately criticized Foote for being “faithless to his trust as a representative in the Congress of the Confederate States”—but continued ignoring his rival in public. The former Confederate president also produced a massive, post-war tome, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. It did not mention Foote at all.

The post Jefferson Davis’s Lesser-Known Nemesis appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Democratically, of course. But saying that is only a start to answering a complicated and difficult question.

And it’s an urgent question, because recently there has been an increase in the number of movements for national self-determination and secession. Worldwide, between 1994-2017, I found 55 referendums registered, from Catalonia to Scotland, New Zealand to the Falklands, from Quebec to Iraqi Kurdistan. Most involved not full independence but rather a change in the political status of a state, or a separation or an integration of territory within an existing state. Whether such votes make sure that every voice is heard and ease difficult changes, or whether the votes tip countries towards more conflict and even violence, depends a great deal on the process around separation, and how democratic it truly is.

There are long-standing rules and processes for splitting up. The right to self-determination, as a collective right of peoples, is enshrined in all kinds of international covenants. But such secessions, or decisions to combine with another state or seek a different status internationally, cannot be unilateral under current international law. There must be a process.

There are, surprisingly, three possible methods to reconfigure one’s state—of which a referendum, or popular vote, is one, but is not required. The other two methods for applying the right of self-determination, as outlined by the International Court of Justice, include the election of an assembly of representatives entitled to such a decision, or a decision by the General Assembly of the United Nations.

As a scholar living in South Tyrol, a part of Northern Italy with a strong independence movement, I’ve made a study of self-determination efforts around the world. And I’ve become convinced that popular referendums should be a requirement when it comes to enshrining the constitution of a new sovereign state, or beginning secession or integration within a state. Referendums should also be required for changes in the political status of part of a state’s territory (such as autonomy or other forms of power sharing).

Popular votes offer a chance for participation to each legal inhabitant of a concerned area, making the plan that arises democratic, representative, and legitimate enough to have force.

But a referendum in and of itself is no guarantee of legitimacy. The world has seen many informal referendums organized in a unilateral way, outside of democratic negotiation and unregulated by constitutional processes. Territorial entities that seek to secede this way almost never gain international recognition, and they can sow international conflict as well.

For the nations of the world, the question is how to hold such votes in ways that produce accurate results that have legitimacy and don’t provoke deeper conflict or war. This is a tricky business, since most independent countries in their constitutions do not allow the right for secession of a part of their territory and thus do not provide for the right to hold referendums on such issues.

International law also doesn’t offer much in the way of specific guidance about how to hold such referendums. And the details can be complicated, in part because international law has been designed to recognize conflicting interests. The most important United Nations covenants, such as the Friendly Relations Act of 1970, recognize both the right of states to defend the integrity of their territory and the right to self-determination of peoples within an existing state.

Since 1994, many of the calls for self-determination have come from inside Europe, and their outcomes demonstrate the potential and perils of these movements. Currently, there are movements afoot in South Tyrol, in Flanders (now part of Belgium), in Greenland (Denmark), in the Basque Country, in the Republika Srpska of Bosnia-Herzegovina, in the eastern part of Ukraine (Donbass), and in Catalonia.

Troublingly, in three European regions, secession has de facto already happened, but not by constitutional methods, but rather with violent means with military support from neighboring countries or “kin states”: Northern Cyprus in 1974, now the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, in Transnistria in 1994, formerly a part of Moldova, and in 2014 in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, part of the Ukraine, later annexed by Russia after the March 2014 referendum on self-determination, an illegal act in terms of constitutional and international law.

De facto it also happened in the so-called People’s Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk in Eastern Ukraine, a still-open conflict. In the 1990s, two formerly autonomous regions of Georgia split away (South Ossetia and Abkhazia), and also the area now known as Artsakh split from Azerbaijan. Of course, all those entities held referendums—many of dubious democratic quality—recording huge majorities in favor of secession. But all of those self-declared republics failed to gain international recognition.

All these bad examples should not sour us on the power of a democratic referendum. Such votes can be done well. Take Scotland and its vote on independence from the United Kingdom in 2014. The process there demonstrated democratic maturity and gave the verdict legitimacy. One lesson is that democratic negotiation may be more important than law or precedent when it comes to constructing such a popular vote.

The British government, after negotiations and consultations with the Scottish government and Parliament, agreed to hold a popular referendum on the sovereignty of Scotland, although no U.K. constitutional law provides for such a right of a member country of the U.K.

In September 2014, 55.3 percent of Scottish voters rejected the option of secession. That verdict didn’t end the controversy entirely—after the Brexit vote in June 2016, the Scottish National Party announced it would push for a new referendum on independence—but the healthy debate settled the question for a time, and left participants on both sides satisfied with the vote. (You may wonder about Brexit, but I don’t consider it here because it belongs in a different category, since it is about an entire country leaving a union based on politics and trade.)

The first step to a democratic vote is establishing a procedure for it. Creating processes that have time to be established, and providing time for consideration, can reduce the risks of such votes. Take the recent November 4, 2018 vote in New Caledonia on self-determination. New Caledonia, in Oceania, is one of the autonomous overseas territories of France. The vote was conducted under a 1998 accord, called Nouméa, that gave New Caledonia the right to decide freely whether to keep being a part of France as an autonomous entity or become an independent country. So, when the vote was conducted 20 years later, there were no questions about its legitimacy. Other French overseas territories also had used the means of referendums to determine their political status. This fall, New Caledonians voted against independence in a peaceful, legitimate vote.

But without procedure, you may have conflict, even in a democratic society.

Some countries bar such votes, causing themselves considerable trouble. The Spanish Constitution, for example, does not allow its autonomous communities to hold referendums on secession; unlike in the U.K., the constitution stresses the indivisibility of the state and considers democratic efforts for self-determination of smaller nations inside Spain as attacks on the legal constitutional order or even as acts of rebellion. For this reason, the nation’s Supreme Court banned the Basque Country in 2008 from holding a referendum on declaring a different political status; and, as a result, conflict on that subject remains.

And in 2017, after the referendum on independence of Catalonia, the president and the government of Catalonia were persecuted under penal law for having organized such a referendum. While a slight majority of Catalan voters voted yes to independence, and the independence movement was peaceful and democratic, there was no mutually agreed process. And so the result was declared illegal and invalid by Madrid. Protests followed, and the conflict became more serious. Sooner or later a new referendum will need to be held that is fair and correct under constitutional and international law—as the Catalans have this fundamental right and deserve this democratic opportunity. The 2014 referendum in Scotland may serve as a shining example.

Ultimately, studying how states acquire self-determination has led me to a simple, but slightly paradoxical conclusion: The best path to splitting up your country begins with coming together to agree on the rules of a referendum.

That’s because the kind of procedure established for self-determination sets the course for future relationships—both between the independence-seeking territory and the state it seeks to leave, and between those two entities and the rest of the world.

The post Do Successful Secession Movements Have to Be Democratic? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

California may have the size and economy and independent spirit of a good-sized country. But California is not a nation. Which is precisely why it would be so self-destructive to seek to become one.

Yes, it’s understandable why, with the election of an evil white supremacist swindler as president of the United States, the idea of California going off on its own suddenly has such great currency. The movement for an independent California has taken off on social media; its supporters are appearing on TV, putting up billboards, and planning a referendum. Our state’s elected leaders are speaking of how Trump’s victory makes them feel like strangers in their own country. And many Californians are rightfully renewing strong objections to how America’s outdated 18th century governing system, from the Electoral College to the U.S. Senate (with just two senators per state, no matter the size) works against California’s interests.

Last week, I was constantly asked about the possibility of California’s independence while running a global forum on direct and participatory democracy. The conference was held, fortuitously, in Spanish Basque Country, whose people are experts in the difficulties of seeking independence, having sought their own nation within the Iberian Peninsula for centuries.

So, after failing to joke away such inquiries, I answered California independence questions with my own query: Do you think we would be better off trying to go our own way?

The responses—from political scientists around the world, and especially the Basques who hosted—were sobering. It’s impossible to know how any secession will turn out, and the process of winning independence is always costlier and harder than would-be secessionists think.

Such efforts are bitter, divisive struggles even for a cohesive nation like the Basque Country, whose people have assiduously protected their distinctive language and culture. When I asked the president of the Basque Parliament, Bakartxo Tejeria, what distinguished Basque democratic culture, she mentioned three things: stubbornness, a very long collective memory, and a determination to never run from a fight.

Such feistiness is inspiring, especially when experienced up close.

But it is not very Californian.

We are open-minded, not stubborn; we celebrate and seek out new incursions of language and culture and migrants, instead of defending against them. And Californians don’t just have short memories of our shared history; most of us never bothered to learn the history in the first place.

And we largely see these aspects of our character not as failures, but as virtues.

We are not a nation. To the contrary, we are best understood as one of the world’s leading un-nations. The word nation, after all, comes from Latin and from old English and French words for “birth” (naissance). But more than a quarter of Californians were born in some other country and millions entered the world in some other state. Nations are defined by common descent, history, language or culture, but Californians pride ourselves on our lack of shared history, which is what makes us so cool, so diverse, so darn good-looking.

If our un-nation can be said to be any one thing—and we are hard to generalize about—it is that we are a sanctuary, for Americans and the rest of the world, who must flee from stubbornness and fighting. When the United States gets into wars—from the Civil War to World War II—its citizens head here to heal and start over. “Things better work here,” Joan Didion famously wrote of her native state, “because here, beneath the immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”

It is our inclusive un-nationhood, and not just our recent political preference for Democrats, that makes California the natural opposition to the prospect of a federal government peddling racist and xenophobic nationalism. Which is precisely why the idea of an independent California country—so long discussed and joked about—is now newly serious. And newly dangerous.

To be blunt: Do we really want to answer Trumpian nationalism with our own? For our un-nation to pursue its own nationalist project would be a capitulation to the forces of separatism. And it would be nothing less than a betrayal of ourselves, a suicide of the universalist California idea.

It also would be, as a practical matter, a very nasty business. The conflict could last decades, and the costs would be felt not just in politics but in treasure—and quite possibly blood.

We’d have to battle Congress and other states to get their support if we wanted to leave peacefully, and we’d certainly have to take more than our share of America’s debts with us. And if things got so bad that we chose to leave without permission? Do you really think a country as armed and violent and war-prone as the United States would let its greatest province exit without a fight? In the Basque Country, scholars of nationalism from Asia to South America reminded me of what happened in other independence struggles: Koreans killing Koreans, Chinese killing Chinese, Irish killing Irish, and, less than two centuries ago, Americans killing Americans.

Inevitably, the fighting would pit Californian against Californian. Many of us would not want to leave the U.S. And most of us identify more closely with our distinct regions than with the state as a whole, a tendency that could divide us. And don’t forget: While Hillary Clinton won California by 29 points and more than 3.5 million votes, one third of California voters cast ballots for Trump—representing an uncomfortably large Fifth Column with which to coexist.

What sense would it make to take on an independence war of choice when we already face so many other consequential fights? Climate change threatens like the big waves that I watched crest and splash over the top of Basque sea walls. The whole world confronts regional wars and a migration crisis, and Western countries face a calamity of stagnant incomes and retreating democracies.

Let’s also remember that, if we managed to leave, we’d win only the ice-cold comfort of trying to sleep every night next door to an unstable, nuclear-armed country bitter at our departure.

Given the world and the America we now face, Californians shouldn’t waste another second contemplating independence or secession. We must instead focus on defending our nation and protecting its people, regardless of race, religion or legal status, against whatever horrors the haters in Washington D.C might send our way.

But in doing so, we must be careful to avoid escalating the conflict. Ours will have to be a strategy right out of the Cold War. Contest every incursion of the Orange-Haired Empire, while carefully avoiding rhetoric or actions that lead to greater conflict or violence. Build our own alliances and collaborations with states and countries that share our values.

We will have to be especially disciplined about impugning the motives of those who support the new American regime. Instead, we must relentlessly urge them to change their minds, and assure them that when they realize their mistake, we will welcome them like the sanctuary we’ve always been. We’ll have to challenge the nativists and racialists within our own borders with the same spirit.

In other words, we have to stay strong—and stay chill.

We’ll also have to work on improving the power of our own example—we’ll need to get better at governing, and more effective at meeting our state’s economic, educational, and environmental goals. We’ll need to give new meaning to the old adage: Living well is the best revenge.

So, on this Thanksgiving weekend, let’s begin by avoiding rancor or worry at the family table. Instead let’s give thanks for the United States, and for the fact that we’re its biggest, most powerful state, with plenty of weight to throw against Washington.

And let’s remind ourselves that America, for better and for worse, is California’s nation. Why would we ever surrender it?

The post California’s Not Built to Become Its Own Nation appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.