Lean Left

I ask because things like this do not make it seem so:

Rep. Zach Wamp (R-03) suggested TN and other states may have to consider seceding from the union if the federal government does not change its ways regarding mandates.
“I hope that the American people will go to the ballot box in 2010 and 2012 so that states are not forced to consider separation from this government,” said Wamp during an interview with Hotline OnCall.
He lauded Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX), who first floated the idea of secession in April ’09, for leading the push-back against health care reform, adding that he hopes the American people “will send people to Washington that will, in 2010 and 2012, strictly adhere” to the constitution’s defined role for the federal government.
“Patriots like Rick Perry have talked about these issues because the federal government is putting us in an untenable position at the state level,” said Wamp, who is competing with Knoxville Mayor Bill Haslam (R) and LG Ron Ramsey (R) for the GOP nod in the race to replace TN Gov. Phil Bredesen (D).

I am not entirely unsympathetic to the notion of secession. The Constitution is silent on the matter. But, to be frank, the Civil war was not. It was officially fought in order to restore the Union and the fact that the country was reconstructed on those terms seems to be a fairly strong argument that that issue has been settled absent a change to the Constitution. Secession is treason: the real greatest generation, those men in the long blue lines at Shiloh and Antietam and Fredericksburgh and Gettysburg made it so.

But what strikes me most about this kind of rhetoric is just how whiny it is. It is as if Wamp and Perry and others of their ilk cannot wrap their heads around the notion that Democrats can govern legitimately. Obama and the Democrats have done nothing other than govern — they have passed laws, they have used the executive order in the same fashion as every other modern President, they haven’t even so much as attempted the nuclear option to make the Senate governable. But Wamp thinks they are so illegitimate that their actions require treason in response.

Here is a little thought experiment: suppose that a GOP government took power on the heels of a questionable Supreme Court decision. Suppose further that that government failed to prevent the largest terrorist attack in US history, failed to catch the people behind that attack because they preferred to wage war against a country that had nothing to do with the attacks, officially sanctioned torture and thus gave the terrorist a golden recruiting tool and lied about the justification for ignoring the real threat and attacking the other country. Now suppose that New York State decided hay had had enough and tried to leave the Union. Do you think that anyone supporting secession now would have supported New York State?

Unfortunately for the country, we already ran that little experiment during the last decade. Considering that merely expressing the opinion that invading Iraq instead of fighting Al Qaeda was a bad idea was enough to get you accused of treason by the right wing, the notion that the GOP is fine with secession as a general principle doesn’t pass the laugh test.

No, this is just childish whining. We have a democratic republic with a system of government that is, broadly, representative of the people’s will. The GOP has gotten its collective ass handed to them in the last three electoral cycles. They don’t seem to be able to come to grips with this fact — which is actually fine. It is very human to not want to believe that the people reject you. The Democrats went through a similar phase after 1980. I suspect that you could find the same kind of denial after every major realignment in US — heck in World — history. But that is not what Wamp and his friends on the right are doing. They aren’t rejecting the notion that they lost because the people have rejected them. No, they are doing something much worse: they are rejecting the not in that the people legitimately rejected them.

Bringing up secession in response to the governance of the other party is to argue that the other party did not come to power legitimately or is not using that power legitimately. Neither point has a factual leg to stand on. The GOP was slaughtered at the polls and the Democrats have passed laws in the same way that laws have always been passed. But still the cry comes up: leave the Union unless Obama is thrown down. It is dangerous and delusional and makes sense either as the most cynical power play in American history or as the pathetic whining of a group of people who cannot believe that they could ever, ever lose.

I am not sure which is worse: that Wamp is deliberately trying to destroy the dully duly elected government of the country or that Wamp is so far gone in right wing delusion that he cannot conceive of anything other than right wing triumph.

UPDATE [tgirsch]: Corrected, 2,478 typos.