A campaign by Oregon communities to join Idaho could open Pandora’s box.
A campaign by Oregon communities to join Idaho could open Pandora’s box.
R ural, conservative counties in eastern Oregon are raising yet again a hardy perennial idea: seceding from their state to join another state. Organizers of the Move Oregon’s Border effort want 18 Oregon counties, and parts of three others, to vote to leave the state and join Idaho, and they eventually would like parts of northeastern California to go with them. Thus far, voters in seven of the counties have approved the secession plan. Some voices on the right would like to see more of this. Michael Anton, writing at the Claremont Institute’s American Mind, argues that the red parts of blue states across the map should do the same.
Oregon’s eastern counties make up 70 percent of the land mass of the state. The eastern half of the state comprises one of Oregon’s five districts in the House of Representatives, with Cliff Bentz currently filling the seat; the second district has been Republican since the 1980 election. But they have just 21 percent of the state’s population, so they are routinely outvoted by Portland and the rest of the left-leaning coastal areas of Oregon on the west side of the Cascades. Eastern Oregon is represented by just four of the 30 seats in the Oregon state senate and by seven of the 60 seats in the Oregon house of representatives. Oregon last elected a Republican governor in 1982; only neighboring Washington has gone longer without one, and only two other states (Utah and South Dakota) have longer streaks of one-party rule. Washington is similarly bisected, with a rural, conservative section east of the Cascades and a more populous coastal region dominated by urban progressives.
None of this is really new. We’ve had separatist movements for quite some time: people who want their states to leave the country, people who want their county or city to leave the state, people who want Staten Island to secede from New York City. I wrote with some sympathy but skeptically ten years ago about a plan to break up California. Ryan Mills details more efforts currently under way:
In Colorado, some residents in Weld County on the state’s northern border are pushing to be annexed by Wyoming. In Minnesota, a Republican state representative proposed legislation this year to allow most of the state’s rural counties to become part of South Dakota. Last year, the Republican governor of West Virginia told conservatives in rural Virginia that “we stand with open arms to take you.” And there are efforts under way to form new states out of the more rural and conservative parts of California, Nevada, and Illinois . . .
More than 20 downstate Illinois counties have already passed advisory referendums supporting a plan to form a new state, part of an effort by another Illinois secessionist group. And for a couple of years now, an Illinois state representative has been pushing a bill urging Congress to lop off Chicago and declare the progressive city the 51st state.
Divorce, American-Style
Legally, the proper process for secession is to follow Article IV, Section 3 of the Constitution, as was done when Maine separated from Massachusetts in 1820: “No new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.” (Anton nods in the direction of an argument that Oregon’s consent might not be required, but he doesn’t really bother to offer any plausible reason why the Supreme Court would, or should, allow two-thirds of a state’s land to be stripped without the consent of its legislature.)
A community changing states has been done before, but it’s rare. Besides Maine, the other two occasions are unique to Virginia’s contentious relationship with the national government: Alexandria was retroceded from D.C. back to Virginia in 1846, and West Virginia seceded from Virginia in 1863 while the state was fighting the Civil War to get out of the Union. The latter move was ratified by a loyalist government of Virginia in exile and affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1871.
The foundings of Maine and West Virginia were both done for substantial reasons that were more than momentary. Maine was not even geographically contiguous with the rest of Massachusetts and had its own distinct and then-disputed border with Canada. West Virginia’s secession was a choice of sides in the Civil War; it reflected the division between slaveholding and non-slaveholding Virginia and kept the state out of the succeeding decades’ dramas over Reconstruction.
There is something to be said for redrawing the map of the United States into more politically homogenous zones, so that more people live under state and local governments in line with their own values. There are certainly blue enclaves in red states that feel much the same way that rural Oregonians do about their state governments. But there are serious reasons not to take that step, and Anton’s argument does not really address them.
Stay Where You Are Planted
First, there is simply tradition. The very existence of American states, and the American federalist system, is an accident of history, not design. The borders of some of our states are drawn along logical geographic frontiers, but many just happened for political reasons that have been obsolete for centuries. Still, people are accustomed to their states and state traditions. The system has worked for enough people for enough time that it has become deeply ingrained. Tradition alone is never a sufficient reason to entirely rule out change, but one of the central conservative insights is that long-standing things should not be discarded lightly, and the burden is on the people arguing for change to make the case that what worked in the past is no longer tolerable and that the new solution is worth the upheaval.
The accidental nature of federalist structures and their internal borders is typically true of other countries with federalist systems, such as Germany, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Argentina, India, Nigeria, and Switzerland. In some of those countries, as in ours, civil wars were fought over questions of separatism or federal–state balance, mainly in the middle of the 19th century. Yet state structures have endured there for the same reason they have endured here: The shared experiences of time together created communities with their own political traditions.
Second, there is the related question of legitimacy. One of the core goals of the Left today is to destroy the federalist system, reducing the states to mere abstractions. We can see that in many areas, from the attacks on the Electoral College, the Senate, and the filibuster (which in practice preserves the importance of states in the Senate) to efforts to strip states of most of their role in drawing House districts, regulating the registration of voters, and conducting elections. The broader aim is to have as much policy set uniformly from Washington as possible, with state governments simply implementing decisions over which they have little say.
It is not coincidental that voices on the Australian left have been championing something similar; former Labor Party prime minister Bob Hawke, who died in 2019, favored eliminating the Australian states.
The great obstacle to that assault is the long-standing legitimacy of the states. While voters oppose some of the Democrats’ nationalizing plans because they oppose the policies, they also see them as radical because they usurp traditional state functions. But what if we start redrawing state borders willy-nilly? The more voters see states as contingent and fungible and easily remade to fit the political moment, the more they will become inured to invasions of the states’ powers.
Napoléon Bonaparte, full of the French Revolutionary fervor for efficiency and the remaking of the world from scratch, shattered many of the small states of Central Europe. He created, for the first time, a Kingdom of Italy, which once had been a welter of kingdoms and duchies. In Germany, composed of hundreds of states in 1789, he established a Confederation of the Rhine, which itself included a number of subsidiary monarchies that Napoléon created out of whole cloth. Napoléon also destroyed the thousand-year-old Holy Roman Empire. Even when the powers of Europe rolled back Napoléon’s innovations, they did not restore all the old states. The Congress of Vienna after Waterloo in 1815 redrew the map into 39 German states, leaving a great many of those old houses disenfranchised and assigning their people to new rulers whom they had no traditional reason to respect. The Austrian Empire did not attempt to revive the crown of Charlemagne. In the decades that followed, the European crowned heads found that the ancient legitimacy of all those old thrones no longer commanded the respect of the people. Revolution came in 1848, and the forging of the new nations of Italy in 1860 and Germany in 1871.
American states are democratic republics, not monarchies, but the nature of legitimacy is fragile; crack it, and you may find that it can no longer be glued back together. Anton appears to believe that the United States of America is so badly fractured anyway that we should have little regard for stripping its remaining defenses to a wholesale leftist revision of the constitutional order, but conservatives in particular should understand how things can always get worse.
Third, redrawing lines for purposes of dividing people up by political tribes would require difficult bipartisan compromises that might prove very bad at predicting the political future — and even if successful, could drive us ever deeper into national divisions. Getting the consent of Congress and of the state of Oregon for the current proposal probably means giving in on D.C. statehood and other Democratic wish lists for new or redrawn states. It might be practical to work out a grand compromise, but it will involve a huge number of moving parts.
The outcomes could surprise us. In 1959, Alaska was expected to be a Democratic state, and Hawaii a Republican one; they immediately switched once admitted. Utah aligned with the Democrats for much of its territorial history from the 1850s to the 1890s yet veered into the GOP swiftly during William McKinley’s presidency. Republicans added six states in advance of the 1892 election, and three of them voted for the Populist Party candidate.
Even in our own time, remember the “Blue Wall” states of the Midwest that, as late as 2015, were supposed to give Democrats an unbreakable advantage in the Electoral College? After the 1988 election, there were similar lists made of states that gave the Republicans a lock — and those states included California and Illinois. After the 2004 election, the very model of the Republican base was exurban Colorado and Virginia — two states that changed very quickly.
That’s a healthy development. Too many one-party states means an ever-more-arrogant ruling class that need never fear being out of office. Our two-party equilibrium is why various American groups — white Southerners, African Americans, Catholics, Mormons, Hispanics — have been pursued successfully to change parties, and always will be. Tolerance of federalism is an easier sale to people who remain insecure about their grip on national power, too. Moreover, conservatives in particular should not abandon the muscle memory of work on political and cultural persuasion rather than just retreating into our own warring silos. In states and localities, just as in institutions, we should stay where we are planted and fight for converts.
Anton argues that we have precedent for balanced compromises:
It became an informal but strictly observed custom after the Missouri Compromise to admit states to the Union only in pairs — one slave, one free — so as to preserve the balance in the Senate. Modern political scientists don’t know much, but they do have a very good bead on who votes for whom. It would be easy enough to redraw state lines with senatorial balance in mind — not to guarantee any particular outcome but the opposite: to prevent either side from achieving lasting dominance.
The Missouri Compromise and its sequel, the Compromise of 1850, were indeed successful in keeping the peace for a time. But even aside from the contested question of whether they had extended the life of American slavery, their long-term impact was to deepen the divide between slave and free states and raise the stakes of new entrants to the point of a civil war within Kansas over which side it would take, followed by the entire country falling to civil war. That is hardly an encouraging parallel.
Maybe the local pressure in eastern Oregon will be enough to change things without setting us down that path. But color me skeptical that this particular Pandora’s box is one we should open.