Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Break It Up with Richard Kreitner

Episode Date: June 14, 2023

On today’s episode of Here’s Where It Gets Interesting, Sharon talks with author of the book Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America's Imperfect Union, Richard Kreitner. Richard and Sharon talk about the theme of division throughout American history. We may say we are one nation, united, but there have always been ideas, events, and people who have challenged that notion of unity and union, even back at the very start of the nation’s founding. Special thanks to our guest, Richard Kreitner, for joining us today. You can purchase Break It Up here. Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Guest: Richard Kreitner Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. Welcome. Thank you so much for joining me today. This conversation today, I bet you're going to have some big feelings about. You're going to either find it so interesting or you're going to be like, I don't, I do not like it. But either way, you're definitely going to learn something because I'm chatting today with Richard Kreitner, who wrote a book called Break It Up, which is all about America's secessionist movements. So I think you're gonna find this both educational and just so thought provoking. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. I am very interested to be chatting today with Richard Kreitner. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you so much for having me. You wrote a book called Break It Up. And this is a topic that a lot of people in my community find interesting in part because I find it interesting. I have spent a good chunk of my career trying to educate Texans on why they can't leave the United States. Why the whole Republic of Texas to secede, exclamation point, bumper stickers, why that's not a thing. But you have a very interesting premise in your book. Why don't you share it with everyone else? It's basically that the main theme of American

history is this question of whether we are united or whether we should be united, whether we should be one country or whether we should be many countries. And, you know, I'm tracing the idea as it has been in American history from before the founding of the country itself. The very first settlers in what we now call the United States, you know, the first European settlers, called themselves separatists. You know, the pilgrims were called separatists at their time because they wanted to separate from the

Church of England. And I think that right from that very beginning to, of course, today, you've got some kind of strain of separatism that's never too far from the surface of American political life. And it's always seems to be the remedy that the American discontents kind of reach for the moment that things start going, you know, against their wishes. And I just wanted to kind of unearth that history from, I don't want to say cradle to grave, but you know, cradle to grave, question mark? No, no question mark. No, put a strike through. No, I'm just teasing. But I understand what you're saying. Because even as you mentioned, very recently, we have members of Congress who are referring to things like the great divorce, where we're like, we might have to be red states and blue states. I don't know. Like, I don't know if we can work this out. Yeah, well, I mean, to put it another way, like you say to the Texans that it's not a thing. Well, you know, it actually is a thing. It keeps it keeps being a thing. So there's something there that I think has gone unexamined really until this this moment. And I want to kind of flesh it out and show people what is this thing, you know, and how seriously should we take it?

Well, I think it's good to start at the beginning. I think it's very apparent from this nation's inception that there were different ideas. I think some Americans were taught potentially that all of the colonists came here and they really just loved each other and they wanted to be one happy nation. And they had these great big dreams of like, we're going to form our own thing. And we're going to throw off the shackles of that despotic king. And we're going to just be our own country. despotic king, and we're going to just be our own country. And that was not the intention from the inception. That was not the intention. And that was not even the widespread or most commonly held belief from the very beginning. So what was it? Yeah, far from it. I mean, really quite the opposite. Instead of this group of people just

realizing over time how much they really liked each other and wanted to be together forever, it was quite the opposite. They wanted nothing to do with one another. They had nothing to do with one another. There were no interstate highways or trains or really even roads connecting all the different colonies on the eastern seaboard. They had much stronger connections with England than with one another. And people very rarely traveled to different colonies. They didn't know anything. They had different kind of religious identities. Often different languages were spoken, totally different cultures somewhere, you know, more dominated by slavery than others and different economic interests. So for a century and a half after the founding of Jamestown, the founding of New England, the colonies are in this kind of disunited state. So I say that disunion is actually the original

state of things in America. And anytime somebody, some kind of supposed visionary, William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Franklin in the 1750s, proposed that they get together and form some kind of union, they were either laughed out of the room, so to speak, or they just got a resounding thumbs down because the people believed that some kind of larger colonial union would only take power away from them. They would lose their local autonomy. Far from kind of suffering under British despotism, the American colonists were kind of left to their own devices and left to themselves. And it was only when that ended in the 1760s, for various reasons that Gajilian books have been written about, that they decided, you know, union on our own terms

is the lesser evil than being forced together under some kind of English tyranny. So union was a last resort. It was a means to the end of maintaining that independence that they thought that they had had and was now being threatened. It was, you know, forming some kind of perpetual nation was the very last thing on their minds. And, you. And many who even fought in the revolution and led the fight for American independence doubted that the union would survive the end of the war at all. I love that you say that it was kind of like the lesser of two evils. It was either unite and I guess do things on our own terms or be subject to, in many ways, they viewed themselves in some cases as they did not want to be enslaved to the British. Although that's certainly not a correct term based on our understanding of enslavement today.

But there was that sentiment that I guess it's better to do it ourselves than to let them do it for us. Yeah, totally. better to do it ourselves than to let them do it for us. Yeah, totally. I mean, I think a lot of people learn in school, maybe they remember the Benjamin Franklin political cartoon that says, join or die, and it shows a snake. And I think in our memory, it's some kind of early version of the American nationhood that would eventually be created. What we forget is that the people chose die.

They didn't choose join. It took 20 years after the publication of that cartoon for them to form a union. And Benjamin put that cartoon out there to support his plan, the Albany Plan of Union, which said, let's all get together and organize our military affairs, our diplomacy, some economic stuff together. And the people said, no, thumbs down. We'd rather run the risk of death at the hands of the French and their Indian allies in the Seven Years' War than join together, because we so don't want to have anything to do with one another. The people chose die. Join or die. I'm going to go with die. That's how badly they didn't want to join. Yeah. And you can even see evidence of

how reticent they were to join based on the Articles of Confederation, right? The Articles of Confederation are kind of sketchy by our standards today where there's not a judicial branch. Like the organization was so loose as to be greatly ineffective. Totally. And the most amazing thing that I think that I found about the Articles of Confederation is that they were only ratified because the Americans were blackmailed by France, which was the kind of, you know, the way that the U.S. today is kind of supporting Ukraine and its war against Russia. France was supporting the United States in its war against Britain. And, you know, there's no way that the Americans would have had any chance at all to win if not for that support. But they also didn't want to sign the Articles of

Confederation because they continued to see a union as kind of a mortal threat to their liberties that they were then fighting for. And they didn't really want there to be a union, or at least they couldn't agree as to what it would look like. So when several years of the war went by, this is now 1779, 1780, you know, four years after the Declaration of Independence, and they still hadn't ratified the Articles of Confederation, France said, well, if you want to keep getting our guns to, you know, to fight the revolution, you're going to have to sign this constitution. And that's why they did. So I think that's like one of many things that just like, wow, if you think about it, just really undermines like in one fell swoop, like pretty much everything we've ever thought about America

and American exceptionalism. Give us some of the other examples, aside from this idea of like, we choose death over joining, aside from like having to be coerced into signing the articles of confederation, which were very ineffective. And then we all, you know, most of us are familiar with the story of how the constitution came to be and how basically James Madison had to, you know, there wasn't even this sense of like, we're going to write a new constitution, gentlemen. They had to be kind of lured there in some cases, and then a quarter of them went home. Yeah, I mean, they did. They only did it because the country was falling apart, as so many had predicted. They went into it not really wanting

to form a union at all, and then it immediately kind of fell apart when they did. So there's nearly a civil war in 1786, and it's only that fear of disunion and anarchy, really, and the Europeans kind of swooping in to take advantage that gets George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, all the great guys to the table in Philadelphia in the first place. And then, you know, there's a whole long saga about ratification, which, you know, I think is kind of BS, honestly. Does it make any sense that we're governed by this constitution that only once in American history has ever been put up for a vote? 250 years ago, almost, only by white men voting? It seems crazy to me that we consider that to be a self-government. But there's all kinds of illegalities and voter suppression and whatnot that happens in that ratification fight. It wasn't like they proposed the constitution, everybody was like, thumbs up, let's do it. It was super bitter and divided. And it only squeaked to passage largely because of all these kinds of coercive measures that the founders undertook to kind of bludgeon

people into submission. It's just kind of another one that's just like, whoa, what does that say about how much we worship the Constitution today? Yeah. If everybody was like, yes, we love it. Oh my gosh, it's so good. Then we wouldn't have needed the Federalist Papers, right? We wouldn't have needed to write all these dozens and dozens and dozens of letters being like, here's why you need to vote for it. Yeah, totally.

Which if you read them also, they're obsessed with the question of disunion. They recognize that there's this kind of innate tendency in the American public to want to break apart and to want to go off and do their own thing. And so the Federalist Papers is basically like a laborious kind of argument for why we should stick together. But it's only necessary because so many people didn't want to. One of the things that never ceases to amaze me about the ratification of the Constitution, of course, is that some states were holding out and they were like, this has no Bill of Rights. We're not going to sign it. One of the things they do to force people's hand is to be like, but you know what? We're going to add it.

We're going to add it. We're going to add the bill of rights. Just sign it as is. And we're definitely going to add it. Don't worry about it. The idea that it was like, don't worry about it. It's coming later. That is like, that would never ever fly today. Can you imagine any bill being passed to the entire United States? Any bill could be a bill to rename a street sign. And nobody would accept this premise of like, don't worry about it. It's coming later. That's absurd. The anti-federalists were kind of like some of the most interesting people that I came across in reading through like all of American history, I mean, they were the ones who were kind of warning, like, this is going to keep growing, and it's going to be kind of anathema to American liberty, which I think a lot of Americans,

there's a rich tradition of anti-federalism, I think, that runs through both the left and the right in subsequent American history. And they're kind of these like forgotten founding fathers, as I see it. Okay, everybody knows about the founding era, and they know about the Civil War as being times and they know about my thing about Texas trying to secede a million times. But there have been many, many, many, many other movements of disunion, secession. We don't want to be part of this state anymore. We want to join that state. Like y'all are not right for us. We want to be part of Idaho or West Virginia or whatever it is. Give us some other examples of times in history when this idea has really bubbled to the surface. Yeah, certainly. I mean, obviously going into the project, I knew about the Confederacy and

they're in the book, but I kind of wanted to not downplay that, but kind of focus on all the other people who had the idea. And, you know, one thing I quickly found was that plenty of people in anti-slavery reasons, who wanted the North to secede from the Union. So the first kind of movement of that nature happens after the Louisiana Purchase. Another one of those things that we kind of celebrate as like, oh, of course you would want to do that. But people in the Northeast were like, well, you're probably going to have to expand slavery to this territory. That's going to take away from our power and kind of ruin this whole freedom and equality thing that we were trying to do here. So maybe we should not do that. Or maybe we're going to separate from America if you're going to do that and either become our own nation of New England or rejoin Canada, rejoin Britain, basically. So there was a movement in the early 19th century, you know, under Thomas Jefferson.

country, you know, under Thomas Jefferson, and then during the War of 1812, where these New Englanders were like, we kind of like England again, we don't want to fight them, to secede from the Union in protest of slavery and in protest against the war. And there's a very interesting kind of turning point, right, when 1814 turns into 1815, where New Englanders are gathered in Hartford, Connecticut, to debate whether they want to push for secession from the United States. And they decide not to for the moment, but they will in a couple months if the War of 1812 is still going on. And just when they send their delegation to Washington, D.C. with this list of demands, comes news that American diplomats in Europe have struck a peace at ending the war quite miraculously. Because just a couple months earlier, the White House had been lit on fire by the British, and the war was going just atrociously for the Americans. And so, of course,

the New Englanders look like traitors, and they're kind of laughed out of Washington, DC. But if, you know, if that timing had just gone a little bit differently, you know, I think it's very likely that the New Englanders would have gone through with it. And, you know, I don't know if there would have been a civil war at that time, if James Madison, the president, would have tried to force them to stay. But that's, you know, one of those pivot points of history, where it's like, you know, I don't know if there would have been a civil war at that time if James Madison, the president, would have tried to force them to stay. But that's, you know, one of those pivot points of history where it's like, you know, if you look over all of American history, sure, secession only happened once, but there are plenty of moments where it came really close to like somebody else who we don't associate with it. You know, Massachusetts was like the most radical state trying to break up the United States. to break up the United States. A couple decades later, some of those same people, some of their sons are Northern abolitionists in New England. Of course, Massachusetts, Boston was the hotbed of abolitionism. William Lloyd Garrison was a disunionist. He's the famous editor of the Liberator newspaper that pushed against slavery for decades and decades and decades until the

Civil War. And he was strongly in favor of the North seceding from the United States, not simply to protest slavery, or a lot of historians say that those guys just wanted to keep their own consciences clean and they didn't care what happened to the slaves. They had a practical program for why withdrawing tax dollars, withdrawing support from the federal government would undermine Southern slavery and ultimately lead to its abolition. That's one that just kind of blew my mind. I hadn't realized that there were such kind of righteous people who had wanted to break up the United States to protest slavery. Have there been strong secessionist movements post-Civil War? No. The war was a huge trauma. 700,000 people dead. You know, nobody wanted to go through that again, even the Southerners. And for most of the 20th century, you can see the idea crop up here and there, mostly on like this kind of agrarian populist

thing in the Midwest, in North Dakota during the depression, things like that. Then you get Black nationalists in the 60s, you get white nationalists at some point, various kinds of fairly fringe characters. But in the last 20 years, it's kind of gone up and up in terms of its prominence among more or less the mainstream. After each presidential election, we're seeing talk about secession, calls for secession become more and more prominent. Until now, we're kind of back to like where it was in the early to mid 19th century, where you have like the Texas GOP platform calling for a vote on secession. That's genuinely new. That would have been quite shocking six years

ago to see that happen. And it's on both sides of the aisle, however. After the 2016 election, this is where the book kind of begins and ends. People in California, of course, were talking about secession. So after each election, whichever side loses, the other side is going to be talking about secession. And it's just becoming, after each election, more and more serious. and it's just becoming after each election more and more serious. And one of my kind of requests of people that I make in the book is to stop kind of reflexively criticizing one another for talking about secession when their side loses, because when the other side loses, you know what I mean? It just kind of goes back and forth and I feel like a more mature conversation is in

order. So what do you mean by a more mature conversation? A more mature conversation about whether or not states or regions should or could be able to secede? Yeah, a more mature conversation about what the union is supposed to be. Is it so necessary that we stay together? We just kind of assume that, I think. I think that's kind of a leftover from the Civil War. But clearly, given this kind of escalating rhetoric on both sides, generally, and about secession in particular, suggests to me some kind of interest in the idea. And we kind of don't allow ourselves to pursue that thought. And, you know, really just like tally up the numbers as to what this would look like,

what this would mean, what an outcome might be, because of that trauma, I think, from the war. And really because of just centuries of platitudes that if you look at the actual history of the nation are really based in quicksand. So I think a more mature conversation would be like, oh, a blue state talking to a Texan. Oh, you want to secede? Why? What would that look like? How would we arrange these things? Are you sure? I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends.

And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It is my girl in the studio. Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments.

So join us for brand new Office Lady 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. So your position is that thinking about like, yeah, okay, well, if Texas wants to secede, let's talk about what that would look like. To you, that makes more sense than just being like, nope, you can't. Already decided, already tried it.

You already tried that. And we said no, and you didn't, it didn't work before. Yeah, it's not even you tried it. Your grand, already tried it. You already tried that. And we said, no, and you didn't, it didn't work before. Yeah. It's not even you tried it. Your grandpappy tried it. Or, you know, a lot of us, like our ancestors, my ancestors weren't here at the time. Like I would like to have the conversation about union that people had in the

19th century. I think it was a rich conversation. It was a real conversation, you know? And I think that it wasn't necessarily inevitably going to end in civil war. I think that part of the reason why they got there was that each side was kind of playing this game of treating the other side like every single day I think we should break it up. It's only some days. I was interested in the history of other people who had had that idea and to try to get people to think that none of this was inevitable, none of it is inevitable now, and maybe we should entertain the thought like that. What are the benefits of entertaining the thoughts in your mind? What are the benefits

of even contemplating breaking it up? I think that if we believe in self-government, then we have to be willing to ask fundamental questions about the nation, about the national enterprise. To just assume that this structure, which you could say it has worked for 250 years, I don't know that it has. I think there's an entire kind of racial equality element that we can open up. Some people have said when I've raised this idea, well, it's not a real thing. It only happened once a session. Otherwise we've been remarkably united as a country. That unity has been based on racial segregation, enslavement, and anytime that anybody is threatened to kind of disrupt that status quo, that's when things

have gotten messy. So I don't know that it actually has worked. And I think that if something seems like we've never actually been united, which is what it seems like to me, without excluding an entire group of people, then we should ask whether it's, you know, it's worth continuing. I say in the book, like my preference would be, as I say, to finish the work of reconstruction. So reunite the country, not only in form, but in spirit, you know, in substance, and ensure for the first time a multiracial democracy. And we're having that fight right now. That's what I think this is all about right now. And so we should push for that. But if it's not going to happen, then rather than revert to some kind of

white supremacy, or just kind of wallowing in our divisions, it seems to me that secession or disunion should at least be an option on the table as a last resort. I hear what you're saying. And I agree with your general premise that we should finish the work of reconstruction, that this country has never been truly equal for a huge variety of people, right? But here's one of the problems as I see it with your premise, Richard. Let's say we're like, fine, you know what? Y'all aren't going to participate. We're going to create

our own country that actually is based on equality. We're going to start over with a constitution that is not based on rich white men. You know, like, okay, that's fine. That's great. Let's say we agree to that. What then of the refugees that are left in the country that they have found themselves being forced to live in that wants to be based entirely on racial segregation? What kind of position does that put the nation that wants equality? And what kind of position are we forcing the racial and ethnic minorities who do not have the numbers to overpower the people who are perpetuating that sort of white supremacy in the seceded nation? Haven't we just now made conditions for them worse than if they stayed in the union? If it looks like we're all kind of going down the

road of minority rule and anti-democracy, which is what a successful January 6th looks like and means, then I think there is something noble. It's not a perfect solution by any means, but about a group of states somewhere on the West Coast, the East Coast, or maybe kind of all over the place saying, we're not going to support this. We're not going to support fascism, to put an imperfect kind of label on it. So I don't see that as any kind of abandonment. I see it as an obviously dystopian kind of solution, but not the worst possible solution, which would be just national submission. Other than that, as I say, when I think through these things and I come up with subsidized population transfers, I just stop thinking about it because I'm not interested

in that. I'm not interested in like a violent form of this whatsoever. Perhaps the other place I kind of land on is that a solution might not be breaking up the country, but kind of breaking it down, calling a truce and saying, okay, we don't need to figure out everything in one place in Washington, DC. It's kind of like a revised or a revived anti-federalism, perhaps, where you say, let's break things down back to the more local level. And I don't think that means 50 states, but perhaps we can have eight to 10 regions scattered throughout the country, maintain the form of the United States for perhaps outward purposes. And these regional governments take most of their powers from the states and the

federal government, and you kind of argue things out at that level. And you remain affiliated in some kind of loose way, but we don't all have to have the same policy on abortion, for instance. Again, not my preferred solution, but I think also, you know, I've got a line, I think, in the book, like, we fought a war in the 1860s to avoid disuniting. It may be the case that now we have to disunite in order to avoid a second civil war. That would be the kind of context in which I think this idea should be considered. I see what you're saying. Instead of breaking it apart, breaking it down into these sort of more regional governments,

wouldn't that then perpetuate Jim Crow? If there's no central government ensuring the civil rights of their citizens, and we just say, listen, you guys are region one, we're going to have region two, let's just say nine regions, whatever, I'm just making this number up. Wouldn't that be akin to allowing the Southern states to continue their previous Jim Crow efforts of like, hey, state governments, local control, we're going to do what we want. Voter suppression is fine. Wouldn't it allow that to continue and flourish? Well, maybe.

I don't know. Voter suppression is fine right now. So I don't know. I don't think this is like 1953 anymore, where it's going to immediately snap back to Jim Crow or even worse you know I don't know I don't know what it would look like in say the south the southeast I think you would see massive movements of people and just again this is something I hope to avoid seeing in my lifetime I just do think it needs to be on the table. If there is a movement afoot, as I believe there is to kind of subject us all to that kind of undemocratic

regime. Would you support the movement to have a constitutional convention? I've written at length on the subject and I do. Yeah. Yeah, I do. I do think that the left, I do. I do think that the left, this is kind of, I wrote an essay for The Nation about this a couple of years

ago, should kind of accept the invitation on the right because it's a much more prevalent movement among conservatives right now to have a constitutional convention. I think it should be televised. I would support a form of sortition, which is like kind of the Athenian assembly model of you get like jury duty. You just get a letter in the mail, like, congratulations, you're the new delegate from New York to the Constitutional Convention. I'd have at least some of the seats filled that way. And yeah, let's just have it out. Absolutely. Yeah, I totally do. I totally do. I really think that's kind of our only hope, actually. Every time I bring this up, this idea of a constitutional convention, because I think most Americans believe that the system, you know, like when you look at polling

data, 80% of Americans believe that billionaires should not be controlling our political system. And yet, by and large, they do. People on the left and right are like, heck no, I don't want no billionaires. And of course, the left has a different billionaire boogeyman than the right does. But nevertheless, they unite around like the idea of billionaires controlling the system aren't bad. So anytime I broach this subject with people that like, let's have a constitutional convention, let's completely top down, redo our entire electoral system. Let's scrap what we have and get a new one, right? Like that doesn't have gerrymandering, that doesn't allow dark money,

you know, like all these things. Most people are like, yeah, I want that. That sounds good. Except where I get pushback from that idea is from people on the left who worry that people on the right will usurp power and will use it to remake the country in a way that is worse. Yeah, well, that's what happened last time. That's what happened in 1787. It was a bunch of right-wingers like George Washington, Alexander Hamilton came in and said, we're taking over. It'd be the equivalent of like the Koch brothers and George Soros getting together in a room and writing a new constitution. Unlike last time when they totally ripped up the existing ratification procedure, you know, all 13 states needed to agree to ratify the Articles of Confederation.

They got into the room in Philadelphia and came out and said, no, actually, Nye will do it now. You know, so that's, in my opinion, a coup d'etat. I think that this time, the actual ratification procedures, absent some kind of national emergency, would hold. So you would need three quarters of the states to ratify any amendment. I'd be worried about things like freedom of religion and all those things, but I kind of think that's a really, it's been strong enough now to block anything from ever happening except instituting prohibition and repealing it basically. So, you know, it's a pretty strong procedure. And I just think the kind of experiment of, of getting, I think ordinary people is an important facet of it

on television, talking about the fundamental issues and yeah, like, like seeing where we all agree on certain things can only be a healthy exercise. And I just think that if we actually do believe in self-government, then it's the only way forward because there's the filibuster. There's so many like mechanisms that are blocking us from addressing just a long list of like super pressing crises in our country. So yeah, I I'm glad you mentioned that if, if we do want some kind of, you know, future together and that's not a violent one, I think we do need to kind of get together in a room or in a kind of future together, and that's not a violent one, I think we do need to kind of

get together in a room or in a kind of imagined room and talk about it. I like your idea too, about like just summoning people like jury duty, at least some of the seats so that you do have this sort of cross section of just ordinary, or not rich Americans, necessarily, not billionaire Americans, just ordinary Americans, that we should have a broad cross section of Americans, we should not just pick and choose only a handful of people that we should bring all of the ideas to the table and let the good ones rise to the top, generally speaking. Well, it's just not going to work otherwise. What is something that if somebody were to pick up your book, break it up,

what is something you hope they would take away from it? What do you hope the reader might take away from having better understood these secessionist movements in the United States? I would hope that they would understand that there is nothing inevitable about the United States being formed, nothing inevitable about it surviving or about the union winning the civil war or something. And there's nothing inevitable about it surviving now. And there's nothing kind of written in stone about it. It's our choice, you know, and it should be weighed just as we would weigh anything else. Do we think that this should exist or not? It's up to us. It's up to us to decide whether this is working for us

or whether we're giving up too much to make it work. So that kind of sense of empowerment and a kind of renewed understanding and appreciation for self-government, I think is pretty much what I would like them to think about. And to consider this idea of disunion, I think it's got this dangerous kind of aura about it or something where people kind of don't let themselves entertain the thought, you know, just entertain the thought. If you come out of that process with a renewed love for the union, that's where I start the book, you know, with Walt Whitman saying that's what he saw, that Northerners, you know, in the 1850s, they saw the slave power kind of rising and in firm control of the government. They had kind of doubted whether the union should survive.

And there were people who supported Northern secession. As soon as the Civil War started and the union did in fact break apart, it was seeing that that made people kind of rally around the flag. And this glimpse of the possibility of it going to pieces was what gave them a renewed affection for the union and interest in seeing it survive. So I kind of hope the book and really like our political stuff today will do something similar for people where they can kind of look at it and determine for themselves, and maybe they'll come out of it as people at that time did with a renewed love for the union and an insistence

on making sure that it endures no matter what, or maybe they won't. And it's up to us. It's not just George Washington had his say. It's our turn now. It's a little bit like when you're planning your wedding and your family wants to be involved and they're like, well, you really should. You should wear blue shoes instead of black shoes. And you're like, who's wedding? You had a wedding. This is my wedding. It's a little bit like say, y'all had your turn. Now it's our turn. It is pretty much like that. You know, it's, it's, it's, that should be empowering. That should make us feel good. It's definitely a pessimistic kind of take as I've been saying all along, but like the idea that it is up to us, I think should feel good, you know,

and whatever we choose will be our kind of burden to bear. Thanks so much for being here today. This is super interesting, thought-provoking. And if you want to learn more about the history of secessionist movements, you can check out Richard's book, Break It Up. Thanks, Richard. Thank you so much, Sharon. You can find Richard Kreitner's book, Break It Up, wherever you prefer to buy books. Thanks for joining me today. This show is researched and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. Our executive producer is Heather Jackson. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder.

And if you enjoyed this episode, would you consider leaving us a rating or review on your favorite podcast platform? That helps us so much. And we always love to see your shares and tags on social media. We'll see you again soon.