What if Barack Obama fails? The subject has already been broached far and wide, and in perfectly respectable circles, but the question of consequences is usually restricted to the economic fallout if his administration is unable to put the system on a better, more stable footing in his four years. Yesterday’s tax-deadline tea party protests should be enough to remind everyone that there would be political consequences too–and, like the economic crisis itself, they may be unlike anything we’ve seen in living memory.
The screaming red headline at Drudge this morning: “Governor says Texas can leave the union if it wants.” The backstory here is that Texas Governor Rick Perry recently endorsed a state House of Representatives resolution declaring that “all compulsory federal legislation that directs states to comply under threat of civil or criminal penalties or sanctions or that requires states to pass legislation or lose federal funding be prohibited or repealed.” As Politico’s Andy Barr notes, that’s a direct reaction to the near-$800 billion stimulus package, a portion of which–$550 million for unemployment assistance–Perry rejected because of future obligations it would have posed for the state.
Yesterday Perry, with no small glee, intimated to a flock of the red-meat right at Austin City Hall that Texas just might secede from the union at some point. He didn’t use the word himself–no self-seeking pol can do that publicly, yet–but the Dallas Morning News reports that many in the crowd did, and with Perry’s implied blessing. As he said to the military vets in the crowd, “I’m just not real sure you’re a bunch of right-wing extremists. But if you are, we’re with you.” That last is a reference to a recent Homeland Security report (embedded here) calling right-wing extremists a domestic terrorism threat, which has demagogues on the right screaming bloody murder.
Perry, who is running for reelection in 2010 and dreaming of bigger things for 2012, was careful to half-disavow exactly the sentiments he was encouraging: “We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that.” It isn’t hard to discern his point, which is that there’s anti-federal and anti-Obama insurrection in the air and that’s a good thing.
And so, three years and six months before the next presidential election, we have not one but two apparent White House aspirants who have professed sympathy for secessionist impulses. Sarah Palin, you’ll remember, has a much longer-standing secessionist pedigree than Texas’s Johnny-Reb-come-lately governor; her husband Todd was a member of the Alaska Independence Party until it became a potential blight on her political career. And though Sarah was not, she was great friends with them.
Apparently post-partisanship is not all it’s made out to be. I don’t think for a moment Perry, or probably even the Jesus-drunk Palin, is serious about wanting a breakup of the United States. What would be left to run for? What they really want is a mob to propel them to–the heights of federal power. But here it really is the thought that counts: Rick Perry is not likely to fire on Fort Hood anytime soon, but the energies he and his fellow travelers are helping to coalesce will more likely than not overrun them in time. Fear of falling on the scale that Americans are now experiencing inevitably spawns a widespread wish for order and security that has always raised the stock of fascism. Is there a Mussolini in the house? A Cromwell?
