Bands of brothers, not so brotherly
Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto/Radachynskyi
The protest came first.
Thousands of gun-rights supporters, some armed, descended last month on Richmond, the capital of Virginia. They were upset about the agenda being pursued by Democrats who had taken full control of the statehouse for the first time since 1994. That agenda includes gun-control measures.
Then came the joke, or what sounded like one: Secession.
West Virginia's Republican Gov. Jim Justice and Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. last week invited any Virginia counties unhappy with the state legislature to secede and join West Virginia. They primarily targeted southwestern Virginia, where Falwell's school is located, a decidedly more rural and more conservative part of the state. Much of it borders West Virginia.
Cut-and-run isn't a strategy one associates with gun-rights supporters, and, realistically, it has as much chance of happening as California has of seceding from the union (which has been pitched several times in the past decade). And it was met quickly with derision in Virginia, including from a Republican state senator who said Justice and Falwell were doing "a comedy routine."
But secession does have a long history in America, beginning with the Declaration of Independence establishing the right of Americans to secede from England. Secession has ranged from the monumentally tragic (the withdrawal of the Confederate States and the resulting Civil War) to the utterly whimsical (the mock 1982 secession of Key West from Florida to form the Conch Republic), and points in between — Texas was admitted to the United States in 1845, nine years after seceding from Mexico, precipitating the Mexican-American War; Staten Islanders voted to leave New York City in 1993, a move blocked by the State Legislature, which didn't stop two Staten Island politicians from revisiting the idea last year; proposals on Long Island for the five East End towns to become their own county never really die.
Grimace or chuckle as you like, West Virginia's pitch tapped into a troubling trend. Americans have been sorting themselves for years. We do it now on social media with the tribes we choose to join, but we've been doing it longer with decisions on where we live.
Journalist Bill Bishop put a name to it back in 2004, calling it the "big sort." Americans, he said, were moving to places populated with those who share their beliefs and lifestyle. Studies and polling since then show he was right, whether it's a 2014 Pew Research Center study finding that three-quarters of those who identify as "consistently liberal" favor urban communities while three-quarters of "consistent conservatives" prefer small towns and rural areas, or an analysis of census data by economist Issi Romem in 2018 that found more affluent, better educated, younger people move to New York, San Francisco and other coastal cities while less affluent and less educated people flock to metro areas in the Sunbelt. Red areas get redder, blue areas turn bluer.
The secession pitched by Justice and Falwell is in that vein: Join us, we're like you, we understand you.
But banding only with those similar to us has left many of us unable to talk with, or listen to, anyone else. Civil discussion, negotiation and compromise have suffered. The need to dominate prevails over the need to tolerate. Wouldn't it be nice, for reasons both symbolic and real, if our lawmakers at every level did not sit only with members of their own party on opposite sides of their great halls, but instead were mixed? After all, majorities of Americans consistently tell pollsters they want to see bipartisan cooperation in Congress.
Too bad those majorities don't consistently seek that in their own lives.
Michael Dobie is a member of Newsday's editorial board.
Michael Dobie is a retired member of the Newsday editorial board.
