This:
Setting aside for the moment the question whether secession is actually even an “attack on our democracy” … and also setting aside the fact that America is a Republic, not a Democracy … Beschloss is so full of excrement.
There are much better choices for “worst attack on our democracy” than what was at worst riotous behavior by a relative handful of protesters on January 6th that no rational person could honestly consider an “insurrection.”
On such choice is the lawless tyranny so many Americans have been living under this past year, which the tyrants … various Governors, bureaucrats, complicit legislators and judges, the press … have dishonesty claimed is essential to protect us from COVID. Under our system of government, Governors do not get to hit a “pause button” on our constitutional rights whenever they deem a situation an emergency, never mind continue that state of emergency for as long as they wish. Nor do Governors get to exercise legislative powers whenever they deem a situation an emergency. Nor do legislatures get to grant such rights and powers to Governors. The tyrants may call it a “state of emergency” but what it really is is a subversion of our system of government.
Another choice for “worst attack on our democracy” is Big Tech’s censorship and misinformation during the 2020 election. When voters are prevented from learning about information adverse to Big Tech’s chosen candidate (e.g. Hunter Biden’s laptop) and instead are fed misinformation about the other candidate (e.g. “Russian bounties”) … which is undeniably what happened during the 2020 election … the election is reduced to a sham and a sham-election obviously produces a sham-democracy.
Secession is actually far less anti-democratic … if it is anti-democratic at all … than either of the examples above. In the case of the Civil War, the South did not seek to force any State that wanted Lincoln as its President not to have Lincoln as its President.
To be clear, it is not my intent to justify or romanticize the South’s secession. The South seceded not over “States’ rights,” but in order to preserve and protect slavery, which the Confederacy’s founding-fathers (and various founding documents) expressly justified on the basis of “white-supremacy.” In other words, it was a fabulously good thing that this attempt at secession failed and the Civl War amendments put an end to slavery and put us on the road … albeit a frustratingly long and meandering road … to equal civil rights for African-Americans.
The Civil War, however, was actually the second time that secession had been attempted in America. The first, of course, was the Revolutionary War, which was, of course, successful, and which made America more, not less, democratic.
