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Liberals who can’t stand living with conservatives
While some conservatives fantasize about seceding from liberal America, some liberals fantasize about seceding from conservative America—or, in this case, from conservative Arizona. As the Wall Street Journal reports, there is a serious-seeming effort afoot in Pima County, Arizona to secede from the state and form a new state, tentatively called Baja Arizona (with the Spanish name providing an idea of how this group feels about their state being Mexicanized). Pima, a huge county that runs along the Mexican border and includes Tucson, has always been more liberal than Arizona as a whole, and the anti-illegal immigration bill passed last year by the Republican legislature and signed by Gov. Brewer, followed by a bill (which was defeated) to allow the state to nullify certain federal laws, convinced some of Pima’s residents that Arizona was just too right-wing for them.
The idea of an individual county seceding from its state reminds us of Jeffersonian’s articles at VFR last year laying out the steps by which America could divide into two separate nations. Secession of individual counties, not just of states, was Jeffersonian’s most original point. Here is the first, short version of his article (which is followed by a long discussion), and here is the long version, in which he responds to the criticisms made of his first article. For some readers, Jeffersonians’ idea of county secession made the division of the U.S. into a liberal and a conservative nation seem plausible for the first time. Email entry |