re: Here's why the Libertarian Party cannot be taken seriously

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 But according to Jake, they're the grownups

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Where did I say that?

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Libertarianism is both a parking spot, and a fanciful worldview. Always has been.

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B.S.

Many libertarians promote a return to first principles and the foundational ideals of our nation. A return to true federalism offers both a peaceful and pragmatic solution to the continuing crisis.



The Prospects for Soft Secession in America….

Empires desperately fear losing control over their provinces, and that appears to be happening in the US. Those of us on the anti-interventionist right sometimes forget that DC is very much an imperial power with respect to the fifty states, not just in the Middle East.

So any discussion of soft secession and its prospects in the US begins with identifying domestic pushback against this empire. And contra the self-styled progressive saviors, any political arrangement which denies people the right to walk away peacefully is not liberal by definition.

What do we mean by soft secession versus hard secession? It is something more than de facto versus de jure, because everything about American laws and political norms already became blurred over the past century. De facto violations of constitutional provisions, for example, become de jure over time, by operation of federal regulations or the terrible Supreme Court.

Garet Garrett’s 1944 essay “The Revolution Was” explains this as a “revolution within the form.” Everything ostensibly remained the same: a constitution, fifty states, three “branches” of government. The country was overthrown a hundred years ago—beginning with Woodrow Wilson and reaching full form in FDR’s New Deal. But America's second revolution was managerial, a seizing of jurisdiction over every aspect of life by a centralized federal bureaucracy.

So by soft secession we mean a counterrevolution within the form: aggressive federalism, regionalism, localism, and an aggressive subsidiarity principle, operating in de facto opposition to the federal state—or at least sidestepping it. Sometimes it takes the form of direct nullification or flouting of federal edicts, which it turns out are fairly hard to enforce without the support of local populations.

Biden’s vaccine mandates will be an instructive test of this; several governors already filed suits. Or it can take the form of legal grey areas, as we’ve seen with more “liberal” US states in their approach to immigration sanctuaries and marijuana laws.

Soft secession also sidesteps the thorniest issues: what to do about federal land, federal entitlements, debt, the dollar, military bases and personnel, nuclear weapons.

Hard secession, by contrast, means an outright division of the US into two or more new political entities, complete with their own boundaries and governments and a surviving rump state. This is far more difficult; among other obstacles there is a Reconstruction-era Supreme Court case which claims the various states must agree to let a particular state secede.

Yet the possibility remains, and this scenario could be reasonably peaceful or quite violent. It could look like the former Soviet Union and the Baltics, or it could look like the former Yugoslavia. But this is far less likely absent an outright economic collapse….