​Secessionist Sentiments at a Time of Political Polarization

The Rockefeller Plaza is lit up in red and blue the day before the 2016 presidential election night, on Nov. 7, 2016. (Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images)

Commentary

In recent years, families have fragmented and friendships have been fractured by clashing political ideologies and beliefs. What’s happening on the micro level is happening on the macro level, too: Secessionist sentiments are strengthening as American politics becomes ever-more polarized.

Several counties in eastern Oregon are actively seeking to secede from Oregon and to join the neighboring state of Idaho. Many of the rural denizens of eastern Oregon feel that their conservative values are not only ignored but threatened by the predominant progressivism of the more densely populated western part of the state. With Idaho being noticeably more conservative, eastern Oregonians think that the state government in Boise will be more in sync with their values and more responsive to their concerns.

The secessionist movement in Oregon hints at a much larger split in the United States—one that exists in multiple states: An ideological political chasm that divides large cities from small towns and rural areas within states. Indeed, when looking at electoral maps of the United States after recent presidential elections, one can’t help but notice the striking predominance of red, signifying counties where Republicans won a majority of votes with scattered spots of blue marking the urban counties where Democrats prevailed. Clearly, if presidents were elected by acreage rather than by head count, Republicans would win national elections by landslides.

There’s a stark divide in state after state. Take Philadelphia out of Pennsylvania, the Big Apple out of New York State, Detroit out of Michigan, Chicago out of Illinois, Milwaukee out of Wisconsin, St. Louis out of Missouri, etc., and a lot of blue states would instantly be red. Indeed, whereas secession in the 19th century divided the country between north and south, today the fault lines lie between urban and rural parts of the country. While nobody realistically anticipates a separation of large cities from the states of which they are currently part, if the United States were to realign itself along ideological lines, one can see the makings of two distinct political entities: a League of Liberal Cities and a Confederation of Conservative States.

What explains the pronounced partisan/ideological divide between urban and nonurban areas?

One obvious explanation for the overwhelming Democratic majorities in big cities is the Curley effect. Named after pre-1950 Boston Mayor James Michael Curley, the Curley effect is the attainment of one-party hegemony by bestowing financial favors on large voting constituencies while driving out one’s political opponents by raising taxes and otherwise making life miserable for them. This phenomenon has come to pass in many large cities.

Another plausible explanation for our major cities being solidly Democratic is more innocent and unintentional. I’m not sure whether to categorize this factor as psychological, but it has to do with how urban dwellers perceive how the world works. Those perceptions are often different from the way people out in the hinterlands see the world.

Those who live in cities are relatively insulated from how difficult and challenging it can be to produce the food, energy, equipment, devices, etc., that urbanites often take for granted. In their urban cocoons, city-dwellers have grown to expect that what they want will be there at the click of a mouse or the sending of a text. Push a button and—presto!—you’ve got what you want. And if there are things that you don’t have, well, why not vote for political candidates who promise that they will make it easier for you to have them?

Many well-to-do, educated urbanites see no downside to supporting stricter regulations and higher taxes on energy producers. To them, energy is something that’s always there at the flip of a switch (although the growing trend toward brownouts and blackouts will hopefully awaken some of these people from their self-delusions).

Affluent denizens of our metropolises see no inconsistency in supporting the Democratic jihad against “greedy corporations” and “the rich” while also expecting their every whim to be supplied, often by those same corporations and successful entrepreneurs. This is because they are removed from the harsh daily realities of life that confront those who are on the front lines of mankind’s ongoing struggle to produce wealth. They have forgotten that mankind’s natural state is poverty and that strenuous, heroic efforts are required to produce the astounding bounty of our modern, affluent lifestyles. To use Marxian terminology, urbanites have become “alienated” from economic reality.

Rose Wilder Lane, the daughter in the “Little House on the Prairie” stories, who later became a globetrotting journalist (even traveling alone to Vietnam to report on the Vietnam War when she was 78 years young) remarked on the illusions that can beguile urbanites long ago. In her 1943 book, “The Discovery of Freedom,” Lane blasted the myth that government can and should guarantee economic security that’s so prevalent among progressives today, writing:

“Anyone who says that economic security is a human right, has been too much babied. While he babbles, other men are risking and losing their lives to protect him. They are fighting the sea, fighting the land, fighting diseases and insects and weather and space and time, for him, while he chatters that all men have a right to security and that some pagan God—Society, The State, The Government, The Commune—must give it to them. Let the fighting men stop fighting this inhuman Earth for one hour, and he will learn how much security there is.”

Lane perceived that liberals and progressives suffer from a self-deluded notion about how the world works. Like the ivory-tower academics who enthuse about socialism because they have never lived under the harsh realities of a socialist polity, so today, many denizens of our big cities are afflicted with a “metropolitan blind spot” that causes them to support Big Government policies that are economically irrational and ultimately self-destructive.

Here’s a thought experiment for you: If, magically, large American cities were to split off from their states and become independent political entities, which would suffer most from such a secession, the cities or the states? Don’t you think the cities would need supplies from the rural parts of the state to survive more than vice-versa?

But no such secession is on the horizon, despite the pronounced urban/rural ideological split. Thus, we can expect America’s metropolises to continue to be painted blue in upcoming elections. The people in my theoretical League of Liberal Cities will continue to vote for candidates seeking to impose pernicious progressive policies on their more conservative fellow citizens in the outlying red regions of their respective states.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.