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You Can’t Stop the Hackery, You Can Only Hope to Contain It

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Glenn Reynolds wants you to know that when it comes to secession, bothsidesdoit:

Since the election, we’ve seen more interest in secession. Hundreds of thousands Americans in all 50 states have petitioned to secede. Is the United States breaking up?

Nope. No more than in 2004, when disappointed Democrats were talking about secession…

Oddly, the cites are omitted. He does mention that “Jesusland” map, which while in all honesty pretty dumb was not actually a call for secession. I’m inclined to think that this was because the only Democrats talking about secession were in Glenn Reynolds’s head, although admittedly I do live in the kind of liberal cocoon that can’t see Mitt Romney’s inevitable victories in Pennsylvania and Minnesota.

(As an aside, Kindly Old Ron Paul, who liberals really should have taken much more seriously during the primaries, says that secession is a “deeply American principle.” Jeff Goldstein finds these ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to his newsletter.)

Anyway, this is just garden-variety high broderism. What makes Reynolds special is this kind of thing, which he works into his argument that when parties he oppose win elections it’s bad if they can do things:

America has an unfortunate history with secession, which led to the bloodiest war in our history and divisions that persist to this day. But, in general, the causes of secession are pretty standard around the world: Too much power in the central government, too much resentment in the unhappy provinces.

Yes, clearly the American civil war was about the highly principled Confederate belief that the central government was too powerful. This is why South Carolina seceded as soon as Congress squinted hard and found the power to pass a new Fugitive Slave Act in Article IV. And who can forget Breckenridge and his followers leaving the Democratic convention after Douglas called for a federal slave code?

Somebody who can pack so many bad ideas into columns he has a chance to think about and edit probably shouldn’t go anywhere near twitter, and sure enough:

First of all, hardee har har — ol’ “More Rubble Less Trouble” still finds massive bombing campaigns hye-larious. And second, as BT says I must have missed the American campaigns against Sweden and Denmark. You have to be worried about far around the bend Reynolds will do if the defense cuts in the sequester go through.

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