Is the political and cultural divide in the United States still recomposing or are we heading towards a secession?
We receive and gladly publish an interesting analysis by Dr. Daniele Biello on the latest post-electoral developments in the United States
The Texas appeal rejected by the Supreme Court has led some authoritative leaders of the US conservative world to evoke secession. But it is a malaise that comes from afar. With its recent cover, Time celebrated Biden and Harris for their ability to change the "narrative of America". A new narrative that however led to the demolition of the statues and whose supporters made intolerance their distinctive sign, not granting the right of moral citizenship to those who bear different values and recognize themselves in the "contract" of the founding fathers. Who violated the terms of the original contract? The sun threatens to set over the "city on the hill"
Unsurprisingly, the US Supreme Court rejected Texas' filing to quash the result of the vote in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan on Friday, December 11, saying Texas has no right to make such a request. “The Texas State complaint asking for permission to file a motion contesting the result of the vote in other states is denied for lack of legitimacy under Article III of the Constitution. In fact, Texas has not shown a judicial interest in how another state conducts its own elections. All other pending motions are filed accordingly, ” the Supreme Court wrote in its ruling. In other words, the Court considered it more correct to give, as constitutionally envisaged, an answer of "law" than to enter the slippery field of "merit".
The Austin attorney's just rejected complaint was formally supported by 17 states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia. Another 21 had also pronounced themselves against the Texan complaint.
The case would be closed if it were just the umpteenth defeat of Trump and his supporters through the courts. However, some "authoritative" reactions to the sentence have shown that the American malaise has deep roots, which go far beyond and which far precede the last electoral contest of last November.
A few minutes after the US Supreme Court ruling rejected the Texas complaint came the reaction of Allen West, the president of the Republican Party of Texas. In a harsh press release, with deliberately specious content, West even goes so far as to invoke the possibility of a secession of Texas from the United States:
"The Supreme Court, rejecting the Texas complaint that was shared by 17 other states and 106 members of Congress, has ruled that a state can take unconstitutional actions and violate its electoral law […] Perhaps the time has come for it States that abide by the law unite together and form a union of states that intend to abide by the Constitution. The Republican Party of Texas will always respect the Constitution and the rule of law even when others no longer do so ”.
The words sound like a provocation and a forcing of the law of the States, provided for by the Constitution, but they are not spoken by a "nobody": the president of the majority party of the second largest American state by population.
In the same vein, on the same day, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh – recently honored by Trump with the prestigious Presidential Medal of Freedom – suggested in a radio speech that the United States is moving towards secession. of conservative states. After a radio listener called asking if American culture will ever be dominated by conservatism again, the presenter responded by stating that the country is "moving towards secession": "It can't go on like this," the radio presenter continued. “There can be no peaceful coexistence of two theories of life, two theories of government, two completely different theories of how to manage business. We can't go on that long without someone deciding to leave on the street ”. Limbaugh's comments come after a Republican state congressman from Mississippi suggested this possibility following President-elect Joe Biden's victory in last month's election. In a tweet, later deleted, MP Price Wallace (R) wrote that his state had to "secede from the Union and become independent".
How concrete are these threats? It is early to tell. It is certain that the only echo of that lemma, pronounced by authoritative exponents of a nation that lived – just 160 years ago (20 December 1860) – a tragic secession that had been smoldering for decades, and which led to a bloody civil war of four years, and the military occupation of part of that country for another twelve years, makes your wrists tremble.
It is precisely the American legal tradition that makes the call to secession credible. It should not be forgotten that the Anglo-Saxon world has a strongly “private” and contractualist vision of public law. Starting from this assumption, the "right to secede" is one of the essential "pre-political" faculties on which institutional systems are based; therefore, even if it is not explicitly mentioned in the Constitutions, it represents one of the points from which political aggregations start and return. In other words, "secession" also represents the right to "be with whoever you want". Basically, in positive law, there are no perpetual and eternally binding contracts. There is an underlying contradiction in the American political tradition that is very evident these days. Faced with an original liberal and, therefore, "individualistic" structure, the evolution of the history and institutions of the United States has passed through the comparison and mediation between "groups" and "sectionalisms", sometimes impermeable to each other .
The appeal rejected by the Supreme Court is only a pretext to highlight a malaise that comes from afar.
It would make no sense, here in Italy, to take sides for one cause or another. However, an effort is needed to understand what is happening on the other side of the ocean. If there are instances that claim the right to secede, that is, to make null a contract that binds one or more states to the union, it is necessary to understand who has violated the terms of the original contract. The first decades of American history were characterized by a long series of "compromises", some successful, others unsuccessful, to regulate the relations between the different souls of the American people. The last of these was that of 1877, with which the southern states returned full jure within the Union, subsequently tempered with amendments to the constitution which affirmed the rights of the African American population and natives. From this political "tradition" – fictitious like all traditions, but solid in practice – the same narrative of the "American myth" was born. Those who claim the need for a "secession" sink their motivations – for better or for worse – in that founding myth. They therefore have a conservative vision, in the sense of continuity, of American history and a marked (obviously for America) ideal and ethnic uniformity which, at most, accepts the ancient assumption of the "melting pot" as it was described – even before the term was coined – by George Bancroft in the late 19th century. On the other hand, there is a galaxy of people and personalities who – in part – cannot recognize themselves in the “contract” of the founding fathers, because they were excluded from it and, therefore, live those principles with hostility. Another part repudiates those principles, seen as something archaic and hopes that history will become a process in total discontinuity with the past.
Proof of this is the last cover of Time Magazine , where the president and vice president elected as "people of the year" for their ability to change the "narrative of America" appear (and this is already an absolute anomaly compared to the past) . It is this new narrative that led to the demolition of the statues of the Confederate generals, without it being remembered that those statues (erected after 1877) were a contribution to the regrouping of American values, compromised by the civil war. Thus poor Christopher Columbus was brought to the scaffold of the "new narrative", considered a colonizer and an exterminator of natives and therefore unworthy of being a symbol of American history. It is funny that the statues of the great navigator were not beheaded by the "natives", who might have had a little reason, but by the great-grandchildren of those colonizers who crossed the ocean in different ways from east to west. These facts should not be interpreted as carnival riots of bored urban populations, but are the manifestation of a true cultural revolution, albeit poor in true content. To this we must add that the supporters of the "new narrative" have made intolerance their distinctive sign and, consequently, do not grant the right of moral citizenship to those who bear different values.
With these mutual assumptions, the future of the largest democracy in the West is bleak.
Jefferson, in his inauguration speech of 1801, said: “All diversity of opinion is not diversity of principles. We have assigned different names to brothers born from the same principle ”. Today – more than ever – these words sound splendid, but light years away from the America of these years.
It seems that the sun is setting over the "city on the hill".
The post Is the political and cultural rift in the United States still recomposable or are we heading towards a secession? appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/e-ancora-ricomponibile-la-frattura-politica-e-culturale-negli-stati-uniti-o-si-va-verso-una-secessione/ on Fri, 18 Dec 2020 04:54:00 +0000.