Annals of Secession

The appeal of seceding from the Union did not die at the end of the Civil War. (Note: the Confederacy lost.) Secession fantasies of leaving the U.S. to form a new country have morphed into schemes to form a new state — the “State of Jefferson” has been agitating for that since 1940 — or separating from one state and joining with another.

The latest is “Greater Idaho.” Denizens in the politically-conservative rural parts of Oregon are gathering petitions to remove themselves from the tyranny of the state’s Democrat-majority government and join with deep-red Idaho. Part of eastern Washington and northern California have joined eighteen Oregon counties in the effort. The proposed boundary for Oregon would be the northwest corner of the state: Portland to Eugene and from the Pacific coast to the east side of the Cascade mountains. Bend, apparently infested with Californians beyond redemption, would remain within Oregon, as would most of the people and economic activity.

The state of Washington suffers the same rural-urban resentment. Not long ago, aggrieved non-Seattle-area voters managed to get Initiative 976 on the ballot. If passed, it would cut funding for voter-approved transit projects in King County (Seattle). The irony is that King County taxpayers subsidize the rest of the state. A recent report documented that sixty-three cents of every tax dollar collected in King County is spent elsewhere. As a Seattle Times columnist put it, “The entire state is mooching off King County, not the other way around.

On the Federal level, more tax money flows into red states than they pay; blue states pay more tax than comes back into their states. Possibly more lately since the recent tax-cut legislation included provisions inflicting pain on states whose voters preferred Hillary to the current occupant of the White House.

Which brings us to the Cascadia Independence Movement. Various groups propose secession from two countries, the United Staes and Canada, to form the Republic of Cascadia. The new nation, comprising British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and maybe northern California — possibly some of Idaho and Alberta — is based on the idea that as its own sovereign state this bioregion and economic sector would do better on its own. The eastern border might be somewhere between the Cascades and the Continental Divide.

The urban-rural, conservative-progressive, subsidizer-moocher, gun lover-weapons regulator dichotomies are not directly addressed in the various manifestos, though.