The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Could New England secede from the union? This group hopes so
With the idea that “smaller countries” are better, one group is hoping and planning for a time when New England will secede from the United States.
The group, called the New England Independence Campaign, consisting of an 11-member administration team from across the region and a few thousand followers on social media, has decided on what Madeline Lee called a set of “core principles.”
Politically, those values
include the benefit of smaller countries, non-alignment and non-intervention “politically and militarily, not necessarily economically or socially,” Lee said.
“And then I would say, our social values would just be, not even political stuff,” she said. “Just cultural things like clam chowder and lobster rolls, or the Boston Red Sox.”
The group has a flag, featuring a pine tree in the upper left quadrant, though during a recent interview, Lee, a web developer from Marlborough, Mass., and Old Saybrook’s James Carver were still politely bantering about whether the national animal would be the humpback or the north Atlantic right whale.
Members of the administration team come from across the political spectrum.
“Our statement of purpose is that everyone's welcome except for fascists,” Lee said. “We're everywhere except for like the top right corner of the compass ... We do have people who are very progressive, but they're not the only people. We also have people who are more centrist or conservative or libertarian.”
The campaign has largely stayed away from the specifics of how secession would happen, focusing instead on building momentum and support for the idea. The motivations for secession are as diverse as the members’ politics.
Some, like Carver and Lee, believe that, “When we have a small country, it's easier for people to care about each other,” Lee said.
There are also those who focus on the ideal of nonintervention as a fiscal policy.
“There are some of us who are fiscally conservative and we feel like interventionism and war and all that just raises taxes too high,” Lee said.
Lee and Carver said Fairfield County, which has residents who are often aligned and connected with New York City, would be included.
“It is part of Connecticut, therefore, it's part of New England,” Carver said.
They do acknowledge there are cultural differences between the southwest portion of Connecticut and the rest of New England.
“We've already talked about the Sox-Yankees line a lot over the years and, for New England, it's better for us to keep the Yankees part of Connecticut, just because that is the revenue-generating portion of Connecticut,” she said.
“For us, it's important to keep it and I think for them, even if they support a different sports team, it's like, well, do you want to go with us or do you want to get stuck in the same country as Alabama?”
The group recognizes there will need to be cultural and economic ties to the mother country. They avoid logistical details for the most part, but Carver envisions no need to shift from the American dollar.
“In terms of border crossings, we would definitely not be in favor of a controlled border with the rest of the United States, at least I certainly wouldn't be,” Carver said. “So there would definitely be a kind of a European Union-style, Schengen Area type thing, certainly with the rest of the United States.”
For Carver, central to the organization’s philosophy are the works of British primatologist Robin Dunbar, specifically “Dunbar’s number,” which the Oxfordbased researcher described as a “cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships.”
“His research suggests that there's a limit to the number of other human beings that one human being can have meaningful relationships with at any given time,” Carver said.
That, Carver said, makes it difficult or impossible to effectively govern a country as culturally, economically and ideologically diverse as the United States. Larger nations are more difficult to manage and ultimately lead, he said, to larger wars.
“If you look at the history of the 20th century, a lot of the really, really bad big things that happened during the 20th century were the result of either intentional or accidental missteps by the various great powers,” Carver said.
The movement has been bolstered, both Lee and Carver said, by what they said was the mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic and the election of former President Donald Trump.
“I think it's fair to say that Trump's election was a pretty big catalyst for the movement expanding,” Carver said.
The idea that there are already several countries within the United States is evident in vaccination data, Lee said.
“The two biggest waves of our growth and support, if you look at just people reaching out to us, one was the Trump election and the second one was corona,” Lee said. “One of our selling points is like, ‘Hello, there's people in Missouri spreading the virus.’”
That vaccination data is a gauge, Lee said, of how regions of the United States differ.
“At the individual level, there are people in New England who play banjos and watch NASCAR every day. And in Alabama, there's people who eat kale and like shopping at Whole Foods,” she said. “But when you're looking at populations of millions of people, an average difference in intelligence or education or cultural preferences or hobbies, it adds up and it creates substantial cultural tension.”
When asked about the chances of New England seceding from the United States, Lee and Carver believed that it’s an inevitable certainty. How soon it will happen is another question.
“We're trying to hasten that because we think that most people will be better off if we do it now,” Lee said.
There are other active secessionist movements in the United States, and Lee does not believe New England will be the first region to break off. She believes it will be the third.
“If the United States splits up, California and Cascadia are gonna go first,” she said. “And then after those two areas, what's going to be the third area to secede? Probably us. And by that time, I don't think that the Yankees fans are going to want to stay in a rump state that's basically like 90 percent Mississippi.”