Even Obama doesn't warrant this conservative pessimism
Texans have provided enough signatures to demand an official White House response
If at first you don’t succeed … secede! That seems to be the attitude of the folks in 20 states who have reacted to the re-election of Barack Obama by petitioning for independence from the United States. Anyone over thirteen can sign up on the White House website and it requires only a first name and last initial to do so. The petitioners in Texas have reached the threshold of 25,000 signatures necessary to trigger an official response from the administration. The answer will doubtless be a big fat "no" – and Governor Rick Perry has affirmed that Texas should stay in the Union. But it’s interesting to note just how many in the Lone Star state would rather go it alone than suffer "four more years".
The mood on much of the Right is pure Götterdämmerung – as if America had just elected Lenin himself. [Mark Steyn: “Americans as a whole have joined the rest of the Western world in voting themselves a lifestyle they are not willing to earn.” Charles Cooke: “If we are to lose America as it has been, could we not ask that it be lost to something better than this?”] A common theme is that the only way a candidate as radical as Barack Obama could have won is because the tipping point has been reached and America has tipped beyond redemption. The old values of self-reliance and moral liberty are out; the welfare state and youthful permissiveness are in. Given such fatalism, who can blame the conservatives of Texas for wanting to break away and start all over again? Who hasn’t felt the desire to secede from everybody else – to ride off in to the sunset with nothing but a gun for company? Ah, to live in a righteous republic of one…
Some of those signing the petition will be libertarians, others will be Confederate chauvinists. But I also detect the lingering influence of Calvinist pessimism. When John Winthrop told the Puritans of the 17th century that they had come to the New World to build a city upon a hill, he warned that it was possible that they would fail. It didn’t take long for the Puritans to decide that they had. Two generations later and they were writing Jeremiads complaining that the spirit of the early colony was lost; church attendance was declining, the children were rebelling and society was just hurtling towards destruction. The American experiment was over barely before it had begun.
So was born a common theme in American history: the declension from an honourable beginning to a dishonourable end. In the 1790s, partisan politics threatened to splinter the republic. In the early 19th century, industry destroyed the agrarian ideal. Catholic immigration undermined the Protestant hegemony. Alcohol promised apocalypse. Cults rose and fell that pledged to hold back the tide of progress and maybe even reverse it a little. Such was the static purity of the Shaker church that they eschewed breeding altogether and took children only through adoption. It was not a smart way to do business; today there are only three Shakers left.
The sheer number of Jeremiads testifies to the number of times that America has been predicted to die … and hasn’t. The Jeremiad is actually best understood as a challenge rather than a prediction of doom, but it is invariably defied by history. Of course, there is a temptation to add, “Until now.” After all, a country with so burdensome a debt and as large a government is more destined to fail than the patchwork of farms that made up the old colony (and to bring the rest of the world down with it).
But the reality is that 2012 is not the end of America. Obama's Hispanics will not always vote Democrat (the idea that they will borders on racist), gay people will form their own little nuclear units and become dully conservative, the young will mature into frugal taxpayers, and Texas will not secede. It's far more likely that liberalism shall dig its own grave. Recall that in 1964, the liberal pundits declared the death of conservatism because Goldwater lost the election so decisively. Four years later, and riots and war – fuelled by the over-extension of the welfare/warfare state – caused the election of Richard Nixon and the birth of the Silent Majority. Obamanomics will go the same way. It’s only a matter of time before the Silent Majority has cause to be heard again.
What conservatives must do in the meanwhile is convert their Calvinist pessimism into evangelical optimism. Ronald Reagan loved to quote John Winthrop and his idea that America could be a city upon a hill. But he put a Gipper spin on it: it was a shining city upon a hill that had both a figurative and a literal meaning: “a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” There’s a reason why Reagan won the presidency by two landslides. People vote for hymns of hope, not Jeremiads.
As for the conservatives of Texas, they should stop all this foolishness about quitting the Union. Don't secede, guys. Get even.