Luke Ford

Paul Gottfried writes: An astrophysicist who is perhaps best known for his 1979 best-seller (that sold over 50,000 copies) A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in World History, Michael H. Hart (1932-) has just brought out a new work, Restoring America that seems as stimulating as earlier publishing success. In this book, Hart elaborates on a detailed plan for enabling the US to split into two different political entities. This division would occur without violence, and the American federal government from which the secessionists would be withdrawing would be confronted by an accomplished fact by the time the new American state would be formed. A constitution would be framed and elections to office would take place even before the break was completed; and those who choose to live in the new federal republic would transfer their allegiance to it while still technically under the US government.

This secession, according to Hart, is being forced on constitutional and lifestyle traditionalists because the federal government and its obliging subordinates at the state level have been on a power trip for decades. In the name of fighting discrimination and working toward “social justice,” administrators and politicians have worked to control every detail of our social life, including our private associations and what we can say to each other. At the same time, the power elite has opened the flood gates to Third World immigration, creating an emerging electoral majority that benefits from the victim industry. Hart believes that given the political and demographic turns undergone by Americans since the 1960s, it is no longer possible to reverse the direction of our “liberal democracy.” His pessimism may be fully justified. And unlike the author, who intermittently equates “conservatism” with adhesion to the GOP, I would argue that our bogus “conservative” establishment is at least partly responsible for government overreach. Throughout the West fake opposition parties are happily cutting deals with the totalitarian Left while persistently marginalizing serious opposition.

If secession is still an option for those who don’t want to continue the march into a rigidly administered multicultural society, Hart sketches what may be a possible plan for separation. The “red” secessionists (personally I wish that Hart hadn’t adopted these fox-news tags.) would give the feds the most populous and most heavily industrialized regions, including valuable territory on and around the two coasts. The “reds” would move into those parts of the country in which they were already dominant, thereby ceding to the feds enormous initial advantages in accumulated wealth and resources. Since the more populous states would fall into the “blue” column, Hart insists that fairness requires that counties, not states, be allowed to choose on which side they wanted to go. For example, it shouldn’t be necessary that the rest of Michigan live under a regime that the inhabitants find oppressive but which is elected by a left-wing majority in the Southeast corner of the state, plus Lansing and the inner cities of Benton Harbor, and Grand Rapids. Deciding who lives under what government at the county level, argues Hart, seems more just, even if it means that some people may be obliged to transfer their residences in order to find a congenial regime.

At least initially the USA, although demographically and territorially reduced, would enjoy overwhelming assets in relation to the secessionists. Not only would it possess a larger work force and most of the industrial and natural resources. It would also remain in control of the majority of first-rate universities, large banks, and economically useful professionals, many of whom lean toward the political Left. But eventually these advantages would be outweighed by the destructive force of an inept collectivist state nurtured by an expanding welfare class and largely unrestricted Third World immigration. These negatives would work against the success of the blue administration, while the combination of limited government, traditional lifestyles, and well controlled borders in Hart’s American Federal Republic would allow the “reds” to pull ahead.