Everett Acorn
Author Andrew Tanner descibes himself as a “researcher, cat devotee, and autistic true neutral pro-science anti-authoritarian Pacific American, if you must have categories.” He has written two pieces for Medium on what he calls the death of “Fourth America.” While I don’t agree with all of his extrapolated predictions, his base analysis is sound, and worthy of attention.
Tanner’s recent articles are sobering pieces based on a June 2021 survey by Bright Line Watch, a research group of scholars who monitor American democratic norms and institutions. Bright Line’s survey found, among other things, that a “distressingly” high proportion of those polled responded positively to secession from the United States, in favor of new unions within their respective regions. Bright Line constructed five hypothetical unions: Pacific, Mountain, “Heartland,” South, and Northeast; while they cautioned that the “survey item reflects initial reactions by respondents about an issue that they are very unlikely to have considered carefully,” they found that across all averaged regions, an average 37% of respondents — whether Democrats in the Northeast or Republicans in the South and Midwest — were willing to secede. Bright Line had conducted a similar survey in January-February 2021, immediately after the January 6th Capitol uprising, and found it surprising that — rather than a diminishment of secessionist ardor after the passage of time following the Trump administration — there were instead increases in all surveyed groups, including the subordinate groups (e.g., Democrats in the south) within each region.
Tanner starts the article by outlining the truth of a number of validated predictions he made since the rise of Trump in 2016 — that Trump would win the general election, that the Mueller investigation would be a big nothing, that 2020 would repeat the claims of election subversion that led up to 2016 (the latter not a surprise to anyone who watched Trump’s behavior prior to November 2016). Tanner then outlines a temporal series of operationally-defined “Four Americas” — times when America died and became reborn: Colonial (1619-1776), Founder’s America (1776-1861), Imperial America (1865-1945), and Fourth America (1945-present).
“Fourth America is collapsing as the postwar global international order decays, the digital generations — Xers, Millennials, and Zoomers — become the majority, and wealth inequality within and between nations reaches the same extreme levels they did back in the Gilded Era, during Third America before the Great Depression.”
Evidence for decline, says Tanner, should be obvious, and includes basically everything we see argued about on social media, from mass shootings, goods and services declines, evictions and housing shortages, debt, disease, and climate disaster; “If you go back and look at the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, the pattern should jump right out at you,” says Tanner. “The country is falling apart, and the billionaires and political hacks running the show are selling inadequate solutions. Linear treatments to exponentially growing problems.”
I couldn’t agree more, at least with this part. Tanner predicts that the 2024 elections will again feature Donald Trump, that they will be acrimonious, and that the results will be brutal.
Again, I agree; in fact, the only thing one might disagree with is Tanner’s assessment that anything as rational as regional succession might result from the mess. Whereas Tea Partiers were once functional only at local or regional scales, the Republican establishment realizes they now have to elevate such interests to a national game. Republicans — who for decades under establishment leaders like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell could get elected with patronizing nods to conspiracy-minded regional voters as long as they could ignore them once in office — have shown that they are no longer willing to do this, with only 6 Senate Republicans (not including McConnell) voting to condemn Trump for his role in facilitating the Capitol riot — with those voting against the condemnation having it both ways by voting against it for “procedural” reasons.
The effort for a sensible succession must be preemptive, Tanner insists; it must happen before the next election, rather than as a post-election embroilment wherein the military might be forced to take sides: “…worse, the armed forces could fracture, creating warring factions within the wreckage of America. This would fast escalate to ethnic cleansing…” Ethnic cleansing is a valid concern; as a liberatory community defense organization concerned with marginalized populations, it’s the basis of why many of us joined this club; conflicts like these are things that we, perhaps like Tanner, have been warning about for years. If nothing else, surely the riots by the far right, attempted takeovers of state capitols, and the sacking of the national capitol should finally convince the liberals in the audience that such possibilities are no longer far fetched.
Where I disagree is that something as sensible as voluntary governmental succession through constitutional amendment, as Tanner proposes, could even occur:
“The Constitution must be Amended to split the federal government into at least five, if not eight, Autonomous Federal Regions made by states self-grouping…. Each AFR must be given the existing Constitution, all the federal laws and bureaucratic rules and caselaw, and invested with the right to interpret and further amend it according to the will of the regional electorate… ALL existing federal roles except declaring war and maintaining a common currency and the right of travel between regions will be ported down to the new sub-federal governments. This includes military formations.”
Hmm. Well, something as proactive as succession seems extremely optimistic, because (one) similar to most insurrections and revolutions in history, social forces thus far being restrained will be too powerful once unleashed, and (two) because the groundwork for orderly succession (or succession as anything other than an indignant show-boating regional response to perceived wrongs) has not been laid in any rationally conversational way; the media, the politicians in Washington, and society at-large as yet have no framework for such a sensible consideration.
As a believer in localism — not based on ethnic or regional similarities and differences, but for democratic reasons based on community logistics and needs — Tanner’s vision suggests a start, but just seems too unlikely and far-fetched. It seems much more likely that societal factioning will lead to continued decline and dysfunction in the best case (disruptions from climate, economics, disease; problems in food, healthcare and shelter procurement; the concomitant rise in authoritarianism — arguably, these are already here) — and collapse in the worst.
In the event of the latter, the 2nd-best we might hope for after Tanner’s vision [1], is the creation of semi-sustainable democratic autonomous zones similar to places like Chiapas or North & East Syria. Communities having a preponderance of healthy grassroots activists, community-defense groups, and local food initiatives, such as Columbia, Missouri, already have in place the ingredients to build such a vision; the components just need to be oriented away from individualism and consumership (at least in the case of most food initiatives as they are now) and towards a liberatory, non-elitist and participatory cooperation.
Given everything, while one can disagree with the likelihood of implementation of the succession scenario Tanner has built from the Bright Line Group surveys, the underlying concerns he has made explicit are worthy of concern.
“Powerful forces have been unleashed,” Tanner says, “and events are preceding as they must.”
Footnotes
1. While a group of smaller “nations” based on the Bright Line Group’s surveys divisions might be a promising start to creation of local democratic structures, even smaller bodies, especially the right-oriented groupings, could ultimately take on any of the negative qualities inherent in nation states.