"Liberals have long opposed the growth of state power, and for good reason. The century's most significant clashes over federalism have been over civil rights, with the national government forcing the South to submit to desegregation. Since then, fights over everything from abortion to school prayer have pitted Northern liberals, who want to use the federal government to enforce individual rights, often in the face of hostile majorities, against Southern conservatives, who believe that communities should be free to set their own norms.
Now, though, it's liberal enclaves that feel threatened by the federal government, and who will likely need to muster states' rights arguments to protect themselves from Bush's domestic policies."
An interesting question. Setting aside the issue of whether secession is possible or would lead to another civil war, and setting aside my suspicion that the election of Bush was less about morality than about foreign policy, I want to deal solely with the philosophical/moral issue:
How does one draw the distinction between the modern liberal secessionist and the old Southern secessionist? Each would seek to uphold a minority view in the face of a diametrically opposing moral view of the majority. You can't utterly dispose of it by saying that modern secession is for "individuals' rights" either, despite what the article says, because every "right" that is enforced by the government as per one group necessarily infringes on the "rights" of another group. The racist drug store owner of the old South would argue that the government was interfering with his freedom of association by telling him who he could or could not serve at his own lunch counter, for example. Making a law against hate speech necessarily infringes upon the right to free speech of the speaker. Forcing a conservative church to hire a homosexual pastor infringes on its right to freedom of religion.
You could make the blanket statement that the liberal position today is "good" and the old Southern position of yesterday is "bad". But good and bad are relative terms and open to reinterpretation, how do you prove that one position is inherently good or bad without reference to current societal norms, which are themselves open to revision as time and cultures change? For example, I learned the other day that the textbook at issue in the Scopes monkey trial included eugenics and advocated not allowing certain "degenerate" members of society to breed. The same progressives that were fighting against the 'backward thinking' of the religious right were themselves engaged in a brand of backward thinking of their own. At least by today's standards. Which will probably not be tomorrow's.
Here's an interesting one that the Salon.com article uses as an example: abortion. Take the abortion issue and spin out possible philosophical evolutions against current liberal pro-choice philosophy: As science advances over the next hundred years, we should be able to save babies born earlier and earlier in the pregnancy, and correct more and more birth defects. We are already doing elaborate surgeries in the womb, what if we develop ways to take cameras within the uterus on a regular basis to monitor fetal movement? It would start out as a medical tool, but once it became routine, wouldn't eventually someone want a "day in the life" video of their developing child? And what if we could learn to communicate with them by tracking and interpreting brain waves, first as a diagnostic tool of sorts, but later to enhance development and the bonding process? What if that leads to earlier and earlier development and we discover the ability for complex thought or feelings in the fetus at the second-trimester level? Could these new abilities and knowledge eventually lead to a general decline in the view that a fetus is not a person? Could there come a time when the complex thinkers of the day condemn the pro-choice movement as backward; killing off the handicapped and the disadvantaged before they are born, rather than enacting social programs to protect them? Couldn't they then analogize the fetus to the African-American of the Jim Crow days, and find the pregnant women's argument that she has the "right to choose" whether or not to play host to the fetus as exactly as untenable as that of the racist drug-store owner?
It seems that the idea of an absolute "good" or "bad" is not solid basis for the distinction. So what is? Okay, I'm philosophically rambling, but the issue has caught my interest. Any thoughts?
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