When 9/11 happened, I felt very much that it was as bad as Pearl Harbor. My father, who volunteered for the Navy soon after Pearl Harbor happened, told me with a knowing smile and shake of the head, "Nowhere close."
So when this book invokes a "secession threat" facing the United States, I feel like shaking my head in this way. And the odd thing is that author French is like me a child of the South. The even odder thing is that French is very well-educated, informed, and accomplished. Aware that the initial American Revolution was as much a secession as the breakaway that produced the Civil War, he somehow fails to see that on both occasions the underlying end was the substitution of a new union (or "confederacy," if you will) for the one that was deemed to have failed: the ironic goal of both American secessions was as much (if not more) joining together as it was breaking apart.
Secession tout court -- if it means going it alone -- seems not to be a very good deal. One doubts that even California wouldn't secede if it came to the kind of insurmountable federal-state conflict that French posits as a possible cause. Consider the case of Scotland: a "secession" from Great Britain is unlikely unless the European Union offers a better set of supports than the "union" that offered the advantage of cohesion in 1704. Consider also that one of the primary, principal arguments for the U.S. Constitution during the ratification season of 1788 was that the compact under question was necessarily stronger than any individual state would be.
Nor is there the kind of unity among today's discontents that there has to be in order to push through secession. The best example of this is French himself, a self-described "former Republican" so repulsed by Trumpcore that he his now looking for a third way (this book seems to be a result of that search). Trumpcore is in fact well-served by federalism. It's concentrated enough in my (and French's) state -- TN -- that it has legislative supermajorities and executive power. At present Trumpcore state houses are focusing on controlling voter turnout to their own advantage and denying healthcare to transgender people. Their power is not absolute, but it is considerable. Will they be limited by national legislation or by the federal courts? It's anybody's guess. Texas, always ready to talk up the secession game, is now a cautionary tale: their power grid seizes up and FEMA suddenly looks like a good thing. It's a long game, and a complicated one. My money is on the same union of discontents that we've alway had.
Which leads to my chief complaint about this book: French's sneaky use of "federalist" and "federalism." He uses them essentially as shorthand for the advocacy of states' rights as against central power. This is obvious: the term doesn't appear except in counterpoint to "nationalization," which seems to have been a process the country had to go through in order to defeat racism and the Nazis, but which it no longer needs because we got through all that and everything's fine, except that it's not, because Ronald Reagan said the federal government had gotten too big.
Actually, French doesn't invoke Reagan at that point in his argument, but to anyone who lived through the Reagan revolution, he doesn't need to. As a curative to French's misuse and misappropriation of the "federalism," I recommend going back to The Federalist to get a sense of how things lay at the time the word came into circulation. There is no absolute, standardized, weighted definition of the distribution of power between the states and the national government. The national government should be adequate to the accomplishment of its purpose, which is in part to stand for the needs of all citizens, particularly when factions in state government stand in the way, now and forever, amen. Federalists are those who believe in the adequacy of that power, even if no one can agree in the absolute terms what they should be (as French implies).
This seques nicely into the subtitular "how to restore our nation." Here French trots out Founder pabulum about virtue by such as John Adams: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people." Adams, of course, was not a writer of the Constitution. He was also as old school as George Washington when it came to believing in the necessity of virtue for the survival of the republic. However, this leaves out of the account James Madison, who has always served us as the principal explicator of the theory behind the Constitution. According to him, the Constitution was designed to discount the need for virtue by at once atomizing the power of state-level factions and also balancing them with the weight of a national government capable of sticking up for minorities. It's all right there -- in The Federalist.
Virtue would be nice. But don't count on it. Yes, our division is wide and painful -- as it has always been in a bathtub of faction. There is no Kumbaya. You might even say that division is what unifies us, so you might as well get used to it. Surprisingly, French comes pretty much to the same conclusion. He doesn't seem very happy about it. Nor should he. As French points out, toleration -- in order to be actual toleration, rather than acceptance -- is neither easy nor fun. Nobody shoots off fireworks in praise of toleration.
French's final call for civil courage, with biblical scripture to match, is at best a sermon to determined backsliders. You can feel his lack of confidence, his doubt, his awareness that this just isn't going to work, despite the hortatory rhetoric that it has to work because it's all we have. And that's where he leaves it.
Heaven forbid that we try anything institutional rather than merely volitional. French seems to feel that politics is always downstream of culture. That is certainly not the case during times of change and upheaval, Politics and institutions can help provide cohesiveness and a sense of direction that culture cannot. The lesson of war and economic depression is that organized, shared effort can provide a meaningful, enduring, and influential sense of commonality.
But why wait for war or economic depression? Many of our national needs, from infrastructure to defense, can and should be served by a shared, obligatory pittance of our time. Require national service. Make it a duty.
Believe it or not, the Founders did this very thing. That's what their militia was. It was universal and obligatory. No, it didn't last. The centrifugal forces of American culture -- in the obverse forms of avoidance and volunteer enthusiasm -- killed it, leaving it to the eventualities of war and economic depression to drive us back together again.
But why should we be so heedless and forgetful? Why wait for war and economic depression to force us to do what we can do already if we only put our political will to the task? The spirit of the Founders is to learn from the past and design an institution for the future. It's turned out to be a longer game for us than some of them expected. Re-introducing institutional teamwork has a much better chance of healing divisions (or making the toleration of them less painful) than any number of sermons.
