Why Breaking Up is Best

Instead of the politics of domination, just let more socio-cultural enclaves get exactly what they vote for, "good and hard." Then, everyone can learn from their mistakes in tighter feedback loops.

Politics makes people stupid and bad. —Jason Brennan

America is fracturing, and fast. The fault lines are crudely ideological. The only thing that continues to unite the country is a taboo: that we should never break up the Union.

Lincoln’s victory over the South in the Civil War cemented the idea that the Union’s dissolution would always be a terrible thing.

But I want to persuade you otherwise.

Let’s start with the fact that support for the Union, come what may, really means support for a strong, central government. That’s not what Jefferson wanted. It’s what Hamilton wanted. Madison tried to split the difference, but failed. The outsized federal government and central bank are Hamilton’s grotesque creations, and now the bastard has a Broadway show.

The union is the curse of the One True Way.

I can hear the cries from Team Hamilton, “If the powerful just followed the Constitution as it was intended, things would be better.” While they have a point, the Constitution is not followed as intended. Those who swear an oath to defend our great charter are keen to protect the powers it grants but not the limits it sets.

Generation after generation of politicians and judges have done their best to get around it—hiding behind it when it’s convenient, cutting out bits they don’t like, or calling it a “Living Constitution” so they can practice legal legerdemain.

But here’s a fact: Whenever there is a strong, central government, partisans, ideologues, and sociopaths will fight bitterly over the money and power that come with it.

Therefore, even if you think a strong, central government is a good thing, it must always be staffed by good people for you to be right. Yet if you think your party is good, which distorts all notions of goodness, politics is still a swinging pendulum. That means whoever you believe is bad will be in power again soon, and their power will grow.

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When it comes to America, there are more or less only two possible games:

Tug-o-War and Parallel Play.

With Tug-o-War (elections), everyone is supposed to play, and the losing team gets dragged through the mud, which means everybody gets humiliated eventually. With Parallel Play (polycentric law), people can set up their own games locally according to the rules they want to play by.

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of Tug-o-War, especially as those who sit it out still end up in the mud.

So what should be done?

The most obvious thing we can do is devolve power, that is, divide the United States into 50 relatively independent jurisdictions. The simplest way to do this politically would be for a significant bloc of states to threaten secession unless the federal government restores the Tenth Amendment. If not, secede. Otherwise, someone would have to take a landmark Tenth Amendment case all the way to the Supreme Court and win. Either ought to shrink Washington's power, as the Chevron decision should shrink the federal register.

This simple solution is not ideal, but maybe there’s wisdom in splitting the baby.

In other words, there is still a lot of money and power associated with the responsibilities the Constitution actually does for the federal government, such as the military-industrial complex and the postal service. So the pigs will still come running to the federal trough. But it will be a smaller trough.

In the meantime, healthcare, welfare, and the endless laundry list of gimmes would have to be handled by the states, the counties, and the people. Many of the fifty options would be shitty options, even with more local governance. But not all.

With less attention on national spectacles and more on state spectacles, we’d at least enjoy the benefit of more tightly coupled feedback loops, which would mean more competition, governance innovation, and evolution.

Lysander Spooner’s ghost haunts me whenever I engage in the pragmatic compromise of constitutionalism and appeal to its nostalgia. Spooner wrote,

Government is in reality established by the few; and these few assume the consent of all the rest, without any such consent being actually given.

No doubt, the ideal scenario would be to enable people to secede, self-determine, and sign a genuine social contract and otherwise live according to common law. A few jurisdictions might even become panarchist. That might quiet Spooner’s ghost.

But ‘ideal’ is just a synonym for improbable.

We can dream of being a strong, courageous people unified in a common purpose. But most people are too weak, disoriented, and cowardly to throw off their chains, much less their comfort. We can dream of politicians passing a Constitutional Amendment that would fix everything. But we can’t count on politicians to find coherence. We can dream of California breaking up into five states, or New York staters cleaving off the Rotten Apple of Zohranistan. But that is more likely to happen as a consequence of civil war, not civic engagement.

Pragmatism offers us too few openings to realize these superior systems, at least right now. Reviving the Tenth Amendment somehow seems the most feasible path, and a grand compromise that, while not ideal, would likely lead to a cessation of violence that appears to be escalating.

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