brendan halpin

I am old enough that to have watched countries that once existed simply stop existing. I’m not talking about countries from my youth like Rhodesia and Zaire and Burma that changed names. I’m talking about countries that just stopped existing in the form in which I knew them: The USSR. East and West Germany. Yugoslavia. Czechoslovakia.

National borders aren’t immutable facts of nature: they’re just imaginary lines enforced by social contracts or the threat of violence. The fact that a country has existed is no guarantee that it will continue to exist or even a rationale for it existing at all. Just ask the Holy Roman Empire. Or the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Which brings us to the United States of America. What’s the rationale for this country existing in its current form? We share a continent? Well, we share a continent with Canada and Mexico too, and the rantings of our figurehead-in-chief aside, we’ve been pretty content to share the continent with other countries.

Okay, but we’re bound by a belief in democracy and adherence to our constitution. Except no we’re not. Our Vice President has already proclaimed that the executive’s power is not subject to judicial review. And, more importantly, Congress’ power of the purse has been usurped by a billionaire and his toadies who have unfettered access to the computers at the Treasury Department. So government funds now get appropriated not by Congress, but at the pleasure of Elon Musk.

I live in a state—indeed, a region—that did not vote for the person now running the country, or for Donald Trump. The argument, I suppose, is that we lost fair and square, and now we have to be shackled to a kleptocracy we tried to prevent, because those are the rules set out in the constitution.

Except see 2 paragraphs above. The people in charge have declared adherence to the Constitution optional. So why can’t we do the same? Would you play a game where your opponent proclaimed, “I’m not bound by the rules, but you are”? Only if you were a total chump.

So, philosophically, there’s no good reason for New England, or the Northeast in general, to remain part of the USA. There’s no prize for being the only person following the rules except living under Musk’s boot.

But what about practical reasons? After all, we have a federal government that does all kinds of things, from air traffic control to funding scientific research, to defense, to funding education, to enforcing anti-discrimination laws…you probably see where I’m going with this. The current Federal government will probably continue to maintain the interstate highways, though given that they’re doing away with anticorruption rules, we can’t even expect that this will be done safely and with proper materials.

Otherwise the Federal Government, in the form of Elon Musk, has announced that it will refuse to fund most of the things we use it for. Once they’re done hollowing it out, the federal government will exist principally to facilitate the transfer of public money into private hands.

Okay, but what about defense? Well, the United States spends more money on “defense” than any other country by a long, long shot. And for what? To protect us from China? I mean, I certainly don’t want the government of the PRC to take over the US, but what would they do that’s worse than what our current government is doing? Hell, at least we’d probably have free health care.

Even before the current coup, there was no justification to spend so much more than our “enemies.” Now that we have met the enemy and he is us, there’s no need for a defense budget at all.

But how then will the United States maintain its global military empire? Who cares? How does said empire benefit me?

Still skeptical? Well, if just New England were to secede, we’d have a population of 14.7 million people. Small by the standards of the entire USA, but this would put us right between Belgium and the Netherlands in terms of population. And we’d have more people than Sweden, Finland, or Norway. You know, the countries that always finish above the USA in happiness surveys.

It’s certainly possible to run a country at this scale—lots of countries do this, and do it well. And if we wanted to get together with some other countries, maybe we could join the EU—Boston is only a little further from Dublin, the westernmost EU capital, than Dublin is from Bucharest, the easternmost capital. Or maybe we could join together with Canada and Mexico and form some sort of North American Free Trade Agreement!

The flaws in the United States’ system of government have been found and exploited by bad actors. This country as currently constituted is a menace to both its own people and the rest of the world. Let’s break it up.

We’ve already got a bangin’ national anthem. Take it away, Jonathan!