'Secessionist' Movements Underscore The Far Right's Hatred Of Democracy
If you needed a reminder where those folks on the far right who naive mainstream Democrats keep mistakenly treating as rational actors are coming from, just survey the "secessionist" campaigns in various states, most notably Maryland at present.
Strzelczyk said the biggest concerns are increasing taxes, and the Democrat-controlled legislature gerrymander voting district so that the state’s big metropolitan areas have the most representation and tighter gun laws enacted this year, which he calls “the last straw.”
The movement is just one of several across the country that includes the Upper Peninsula in Michigan, Northern California and several conservative northern Colorado counties.
The Colorado effort is backed by the Tea Party movement and has gotten the issue put on the November ballot as a non-binding referendum. The movement was also driven in large part by state lawmakers passing tighter gun-control legislation this year that was signed by Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper.
... Still, secession will not be easy, for a variety of reasons, including that many of these remote, rural regions rely on money generated in their state’s more commercial and populated cities. And secession leaders would need state and federal approval, which seems unlikely considering the last time a region broke off was 1863, when 50 western Virginia counties split to form West Virginia.
As he always does, Go read it all.
This is the reaction we've come to know and expect from people on the hardnosed edges of the American right: At the end of the day, they don't really believe in democracy. They don't believe in putting up with other citizens who believe differently, who pray differently, who dress and wear their hair and their clothes differently and eat differently and most of all who think differently from them.
They like the idea of America as a big all-white nation. They don't like the idea of America as a democracy.
Their antipathy to democracy always creeps out, even in their conspiracy theories (how many times have we heard the far-right refrain, "This is a republic, not a democracy!"), but more importantly in their actions and their political strategies, embodied most recently in the gutting of the Voting Rights Act and the ongoing efforts at voter suppression by conservative Republicans.
And when they realize they are not going to get their way, their solution is not to accept the verdict of democracy. Their solution is to drop out.
That's why we get people like the Threepers and the white supremacists who want to form their own enclaves off somewhere in the woods.
In the 1990s, we had survivalists, "Freemen," Patriot-movement militiamen, "sovereign citizens," and various cranks doing similar things here in the Northwest woods. Here in western Washington, we had far-right factions in rural areas that attempted to secede from the large urban counties in western Washington.
It's always the same old story. And at the end of the day, what they really hate most of all is democracy.