They Aren’t What They Used to Be

[kalian]

http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040527.shtml

If I had to sum up American history in one sentence, I’d put it this way: The United States aren’t what they used to be.

That’s not nostalgia. That’s literal fact. Before the Civil War, the United States was a plural noun. The U.S. Constitution uses the plural form when, for example, it refers to enemies of the United States as “their” enemies. And this was the usage of everyone who understood that the union was a voluntary federation of sovereign states, delegating only a few specified powers, and not the monolithic, “consolidated,” all-powerful government it has since become.

Maybe Americans prefer the present megastate to the one the Constitution describes. But they ought to know the difference. They shouldn’t assume that the plural United States were essentially the same thing as today’s United State, or that the one naturally “evolved” into the other.

The change was violent, not natural. Lincoln waged war on states that tried to withdraw from the Union, denying their right to do so. This was a denial of the Declaration of Independence, which called the 13 former colonies “Free and Independent States.”

...more...

[Miss Authoritiva]

1. Ummm, well, I'm not so sure.

The author should brush up on the established definitions of "federal republic," "confederation," "democratic federation," and "unitary (or indivisible) republic."

As to a state's right to secede -- that's way beyond my grasp. However, a good number of US states have more or less active secessionist movements, ranging from the lone crank to organized groups. And of course within most states there are local municipalities that want to secede from the state, and neighborhoods within local municipalities that want to secede from the municipality.

There's no telling what would happen to zip codes and area codes if all these movements are successful, and FedEx might have to change its name.

[struggle4progress]

2. Please don't waste DU bandwidth posting wingnut stuff.

Sobran is an old National Review groupie and Clinton basher, whose most recent book has an intro written by the Demon Coulter.
http://www.sobran.com/bio.shtml

Do we really need to spend time debunking this lunatic crap?

Lincoln didn't begin "waging war" -- the South did; the author's disregard for historical accuracy seems to me to be a warning about the value of the remaining ideas. Under the constitution, Southern acts such as firing on Sumter were treason, for which Confederates should have been prosecuted after the war.

The Confederate sympathies indicated by this historical misrepresentation strongly suggest that the author's use of "states' rights" is the well-established Southern code talk for Jim Crow nostalgia.

And, of course, any proposal to disassemble the US into states is really a proposal that we should been ruled completely by corporations, since many have budgets dwarfing state budgets.

<edit: clean-up>