Coming Soon: The Disunited States?

By Doug Bandow

Russian academic Igor Panarin has been long predicting that the U.S. is going to fall apart. For years he was ignored, but now he's being sought out by the media and invited to Kremlin receptions. Could America's time be over?

Despite the burst of interest in his work, most learned observers find his scenario to be, well, unlikely. But might not a Disunited States be better than the United States?

Prof. Panarin obviously is a bit of a nut. The Wall Street Journal summarized his views: ``Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces ― with Alaska reverting to Russian control.''

Indeed, he expects foreigners to take over everything else as well: California will go to China, Hawaii to China or Japan, the plains states and Midwest to Canada, the South to Mexico, and the Atlantic seaboard to the European Union. It makes you kind of wonder if his brain cavity has filled with fruit flies or something.

Still, Prof. Panarin rightly recognizes that the United States is not all that united. Why are Hawaii, Alaska, Texas, Michigan, and Massachusetts, along with everything else, stuck in the same nation?

Secession gained a bad reputation in America from the Civil War. The Southern cause was irrevocably tainted by slavery, even though racism was endemic in the North, which would have preserved slavery had the conflict ended quickly.

However, the victors write history, which is why most accounts of the Civil War assume that the death of the Confederacy was a grand victory for America. But it was a triumph of the centralized American state headquartered in Washington, D.C., not of Americans.

After all, there was no obvious reason why South Carolinians should be forced to live in political union with New Yorkers. Rather, it should have been a matter of choice, and choices can change.

The destruction of slavery was a wonderful, unintended consequence of the war. But that isn't why President Abraham Lincoln called on Northerners to march south and conquer their erstwhile countrymen ― at the ultimate cost of more than 600,000 lives.

Even if the pro-union faction was correct on constitutional and practical grounds, from what stemmed its moral right to bloodily pinion the South to the North with bayonets?

The United States is a wonderfully diverse and interesting country. Yet much of today's so-called culture war reflects attempts by different groups to dominate national policy.

Where government is limited, individual rights are respected, and people are tolerant, a federal republic is much easier to maintain.

But as power has been centralized in Washington, and a distant and largely unaccountable bureaucracy has asserted increasing control over ever more individual decisions, it becomes harder to share a political union with so many other people. (America's foreign policy of constant intervention is one outgrowth of today's centralization of power.)

Obviously, the U.S. is not alone in finding national unity ever more difficult to attain. Nevertheless, Prof. Panarin's musings could usefully trigger some serious soul-searching.

What once united Americans was a shared commitment to individual liberty and to restricting government power to ensure respect for other people's choices. That commitment disappeared decades ago.

People still reflexively refer to the U.S. as a ``free country,'' but that is only true relative to less free peoples around the globe.

Thus, today disunion might prove to be a blessing. If the Midwest wants socialism, with government control of manufacturing, then it should be separate from the South, which holds to a stronger if not exactly pure ethos of self-reliance.

If California wants to be in the forefront of cultural relativism and experimentation, then it also should be separate from the South, which retains much of its heritage as home of the Bible Belt.

The western mountain states prefer more of a rough libertarianism in economic and cultural affairs. New England and the mid-Atlantic states have their own cultural peculiarities and economic assumptions. If we can't just leave each other alone, then maybe we should live separately.

The U.S. isn't likely to crack-up on Prof. Panarin's schedule. If Americans want disunion, they will have to choose to make that happen.

A simpler solution would be to return to America's tradition of limited government and individual liberty ― and the corresponding foreign policy of nonintervention.

A national government which left its people alone would provide a far more hospitable home for the increasingly diverse people who live within America's boundaries. Otherwise, Prof. Panarin's predictions ultimately might just come to pass.

Doug Bandow is a former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan and the author of ``Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire'' (Xulon Press). He can be reached at ChessSet@aol.com

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