Claremont Independent

"Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God."

This was the personal motto of Benjamin Franklin, and yet it is a specious assertion in the minds of many 21st century Americans.

For many, a rejection of divine mandates in general is an understandably default stance, and even the theists among us seem to vary only between whether they wish to use their religion as a guidebook for tyranny, or to divest their God from politics altogether.

In a society where it becomes more difficult everyday to keep count of how many 'post's are prefixed on our 'modern', a divine, moral, or even ideological appeal for the preservation of human rights and liberties lacks the rhetorical clout of an appeal to hurt feelings or denied entitlements.

When recently asked about the possibility of his state seceding from the Union, Texas Governor Rick Perry responded, "if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that."

This statement has been largely dismissed as chest-beating - some primitive expression of jingoistic Confederate pride. Even apart from the sensationalism of the media, the outrage against Perry comes as little surprise.

His implicit threat leveled against the federal government, Defender of Feelings and Entitlements, would no doubt seem like madness to one who fails to grasp the ideological origin of such statements.

To be clear, in their common American use, the terms "secessionism" and "separatism" have slightly different meanings. Separatism is a symptom of an empire-state, usually a racially or religiously motivated backlash against a nation that is defined not by ideological or cultural unity, but rather by the mere ability to hold dominion over a tract of land.

Secession, by contrast, is the desire for a recognized governmental entity to sever ties with the larger government that controls it. Thirteen colonies seceded from the British Empire; the motivations and aspirations of this action are well documented in the Declaration of Independence.

The American Founders, knowing that empires necessarily rise and fall, sought not to establish a new empire-state. Rather, they sought to establish a federation of governments united by the common, uncontroversial ideal of Liberty.

By giving the power of self-determination to governments at a local level, the Founders ensured that separatism was unlikely to become an issue and, by assuring state rights, sought to circumvent any desire of the states to secede once again.

It was under the mandate of Liberty - the resistance of tyranny - that the United States was formed, and so measures were put into place to protect the system of states' rights, called Federalism.

It attempted to prevent the country from deteriorating into a centralized empire, which is unsuited to the interests of a diverse population and has little defense against the rise of tyrannical leadership.

But the maintenance of Federalism proved to be an inconvenience for the federal government, and gradually it became neglected by convention.

Eventually the federal government began to drive legislative nails into Federalism's coffin, including legal precedent claiming incredibly broad interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment (which establishes that rights, privileges and immunities exist for all American citizens).

In his book Federalism, the Supreme Court, and the Seventeenth Amendment, CMC professor Ralph Rossum asserts that the well-intentioned Seventeenth Amendment represented the death knell of the Federalist system.

By putting the power to elect senators - the states' representatives to the federal government - directly in the hands of the people, the amendment disregarded the structure of state governments and essentially made them nothing more than fingers of the federal government.

It is in this era that we now live, and it is in this era that Rick Perry hinted at secession. The federal government has taken upon itself the role of providing for the welfare of all of our nation's 300 million people, and in so doing has become a juggernaut against anyone who disagrees with governmental management or clings to the hope of self-determination for the states.

In a country where local government is stripped of its power, the voter is also stripped of his power to do anything more than vote for a president and then vote into Congress a measure of how much power that president will have.

As the federal government seeks to unite the nation under nothing but its own power, our nation will start to find itself host to all of the problems inherent to an empire-state.

Rick Perry speaks of secession? Rick Perry remembers an empire too large and arrogant to hold itself together and the thirteen colonies that were the first to leave. This is not a threat but a warning to reverse course before disenfranchised Americans see a tyranny in need of rebellion. Rick Perry speaks of secession? This country's politicians are lucky that nobody is speaking of separatism. Now let's see if there is still time to pry the nails out of Federalism's coffin.

Alexander Rhodes PO '11 is a staff writer for the Claremont Independent.