{pic by luna715}

The idea of secession from the United States is often bandied about in Far Right circles as if it were the dire Nuclear Option within the conservative political arsenal. Just last week, on September 4, conservative economist Walter E. Williams broached the topic on the Rush Limbaugh Show. Williams—an occasional fill-in and hand puppet for the Dark Lord himself—was discussing the not-quite-mass movement for secession that is afoot in New Hampshire and opined that secession didn’t work “last time” (that unpleasant Civil War incident), but it did work “the first time in 1776,” and it would be nice to “see whether we could break the tie” and “have a sovereign nation.” Similarly, Texas Governor Rick Perry, appealing to the nebulous Right Wing populist rage at one of the Fox News “Tea Parties” last April, floated the possibility of secession “if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people” (apparently, he forgot which party won and which party lost in the elections last November). And there is no shortage of neo-Confederate hate groups, such as the League of the South, which are devoted to the idea of secession as a means of escaping federal intrusion upon the God-given right of states to enslave human beings for fun and profit.

Implicit in Right Wing chatter about secession is the assumption that it somehow constitutes a “threat”; that the inhabitants of a newly shrunk United States would bemoan the day they lost the invaluable contributions which the Far Right makes to Human Progress. But let us consider what would actually be “lost” were the United States of America (U.S.A.) to jettison the original 11 members of the Confederate States of America (C.S.A.): Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. Even a cursory examination of available data indicates that the U.S.A. might benefit enormously from a southern-style divorce of this kind.

For instance, at a time when reigning in health care expenditures is a top priority for nearly every policymaker in the country, the Secession Option makes fiscal sense. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate that the U.S.A. spends more that $75 billion on obesity-related medical expenditures each year, and the C.S.A. states account for roughly 30% (or $22.3 billion) of that total. In fact, the C.S.A. states have some of the highest rates of obesity in the nation. Based on my own calculations using the CDC’s obesity-rate data for each state and the U.S. Census Bureau’s state-population totals from the 2007 American Community Survey, I estimate that secession would permit the U.S.A. to shed roughly 26 million medically expensive obese individuals, which would reduce the size of the obese population in the country by one-third.

However, the benefits of secession go far beyond the fiscal advantages of shedding excess baggage from the health care system. Allowing the C.S.A. states to secede would eliminate nine of the 22 “red” states that swung Republican in the 2008 election. More precisely, based on popular-vote totals compiled by the U.S. Electoral College, secession would remove 36% (or 21.6 million) of those U.S. voters who thought that a McCain-Palin administration would have made a nice sequel to eight years of Bush-Cheney.

Shedding surplus Republicans from the U.S.A. would be advantageous not only from a partisan political perspective, but would vastly improve the general state of knowledge among the reduced U.S. population. The base of the Republican Party consists of Evangelical Protestants, a rather Taliban-esque group that tends to frown upon Enlightenment-era ideals such as scientific discovery and the use of human reason. For instance, 65% of Evangelical Protestants believe that all forms of life have always existed in their present form ever since a magical Supreme Being zapped them into existence—the fossil record and genetic mutation be damned. Not surprisingly, Evangelical Protestants are heavily concentrated in the C.S.A. states. Based on state-level estimates of religious affiliation from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, and adult-population totals reported for each state by the 2007 American Community Survey, I conclude that secession would remove 44% (or 25.5 million) of all Evangelical Protestants from the U.S.A.

In short, the secession of the C.S.A. states might be just the sort of fiscal, social, and intellectual stimulus that the U.S.A. needs to move forward into the 21st century rather than backward into the Middle Ages. There is an apocryphal quote that is widely attributed to Miriam “Ma” Ferguson (Governor of Texas, 1925-1927 and 1933-1935), and is said to have been uttered in response to a question about the use of the Spanish language in Texas schools: “If English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for Texas schoolchildren.” I think that pretty much says it all.

{pic by stevegarfield}

Let us hope that Sarah Palin’s erratically graceless exit from the governorship of Alaska does not portend her exit from the national stage of electoral politics. We need her not merely in the same way that any village has a collective psychological need for its idiot, but in a more pragmatic, political sense as well. The woman is beloved by the GOP’s ever-shrinking “base” of angry white Bible Thumpers. In fact, a mind-numbing 84% of white evangelical Republicans profess a favorable view of Palin despite (or, perhaps, because of) her numerous and well-publicized instances of stupidity and dubious judgment. They even kept loving her after she demonstrated her foreign-policy erudition to Katie Couric by explaining that “as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska… It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there, they are right next to our state.” Truly inspiring words to the faithful.

At any rate, if the Republican Party is to assume its rightful place in the U.S. political landscape as a permanent minority party that provides a reliable source of fodder for late-night comedians, it is essential that Palin become the GOP standard-bearer. And, if Palin is to effectively rise to the top of the Republican Party, she must be on the GOP presidential ticket in 2012. But every presidential ticket requires two candidates, so let us hope that another conservative heavy weight can be persuaded to join her. Specifically, I’m thinking of another darling of the Republican base; the jowl-jiggling hero of the 2009 Conservative Political Action Committee’s annual meeting; the man who thinks that both global warming and the health-care crisis are elaborate hoaxes perpetrated by socialist Democrats and liberal media elites; the Right Wing’s favorite pain-killer junkie: Rush Limbaugh.

If ever there were a ticket that could energize the GOP base like no other, and—in the process—alienate most of the Democrats and Independents needed to actually win a presidential election, it’s Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh. Given Palin’s superior star power and hair styling, she should probably be at the top of the ticket, but that would probably be denounced by Limbaugh and his fans as a Femi-Nazi plot to emasculate the red-blooded American male. Real men are always Tops; never Bottoms. So Limbaugh-Palin 2012 it must be.