When John Randolph of Roanoke looked at the America of 1806, into Thomas Jefferson’s second and disastrous term as President, he could have been describing today: “Everything and everybody seem to be jumbled out of place, except a few men steeped in supine indifference, whilst meddling fools and designing knaves are governing the country.”

He was opposed, in Washington’s words, to “foreign entanglements,” and to an America that seemed to want to thrust herself onto the world as the answer to human fault and failure: “I scorn this idea of a mission for America.”  He also opposed unchecked Western expansion: “No government, extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific, can be fit to govern me or those I represent.”

But the most important of Randolph’s ideas, and the one that resonates most today, is the cause of states’ rights.  He was in many ways an Antifederalist, despite serving in the U.S. Congress for three decades, for he saw in the growth and centralization of the government a threat to the power of the states, the only power that could check the progression toward the tyranny that is inherent in government.  In the great debate on what was called “internal improvements”—the reading of the Commerce Clause to mean that the government could build and control such things as the roads and canals—Randolph was outraged:

Never was greater violence done to the English language than by the construction that, under the power to prescribe the way in which commerce shall be carried on, we have the right to construct the way on which it is to be carried.  Are gentlemen aware of the colossal power they are giving to the General Government?

(As it turns out, they were.)  Ending his peroration that day, he said, “We did believe that there was, in the power of the States, some counterpoise to the power of this body [the House]; but if this bill passes, we can believe so no longer.”  It did pass, but that didn’t dissuade Randolph from his ultimate belief in states’ rights and his continued defense of the states.  As he was to say at one point, when he was attacked for not ceding some sovereignty from his state for the general common good, “Asking one of the States to surrender part of her sovereignty is like asking a lady to surrender part of her chastity.”

Hence, Randolph was eventually to come out, reluctantly, in favor of nullification—the penultimate expression of states’ rights.  Nullification was a theory enunciated by both Jefferson and Calhoun in the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of 1798.  In Jefferson’s words, “The states, being sovereign and independent, have the unquestionable right to judge of [the Constitution’s] infraction; and that a nullification by those sovereignties, of all unauthorised acts done under colour of that instrument, is the rightful remedy.”

Randolph was a proponent of the Principles of 1798:

What provision is there, either in the constitution of Virginia or the Constitution of the United States, which establishes it as a principle that Virginia should be the sole restraining and regulating power on the mad and unconstitutional usurpations of the Federal Government?  There is no such provision in either—yet in practice, and in fact too, Virginia has been . . . for more than 30 years, the sole counterpoise and check on the usurpations of the Federal Government, so far as they have been checked at all. . . . And it is because I am unwilling to give up this check, or to diminish its force, that I am unwilling to pull down the edifice of our State Government from the garret to the cellar.

Secession is the ultimate expression of states’ rights.  Randolph began what he regarded to be the distasteful acceptance of this option when debating the tariff law of 1824, which would put an enormous economic burden on the agricultural states of the South.  “Should this bill pass,” he declared,

one more measure only [confiscatory taxation] requires to be consummated and then we south of Mason and Dixon’s line . . . have to make up our own minds to perish like so many mice in a receiver of mephitic gas . . . or we must resort to the measures which we first opposed to British aggressions and usurpations to maintain that independence which the valor of our fathers acquired, but which is every day sliding from under our feet.

And then—and this on the very floor of the House of Representatives—

Sir, this is a state of things that cannot last.  If it shall continue with accumulated pressure, we must oppose to it—associations, and every other means short of actual insurrection. . . . We shall keep on the windward side of treason—but we must combine to resist, and that effectually, these encroachments, or the little upon which we now barely subsist will be taken from us.

The Union was not so sacred—“there is no magic in this word ‘union.’”  The nation was really a confederation, which “contains within itself the seeds of preservation, if not of this Union, at least of the individual commonwealths of which it is composed.”  Secession, though a desperate remedy, was a “right undeniable.”  “Self-defense is the first law of nature.  You drive us into it.”  And, as he put it on a later occasion toward the end of his life, in a resolution passed in his home state, Virginia was a sovereign state “which had but delegated the exercise of certain powers” to the federal government, and she retained the right to secede, “whenever she shall find the benefit of union exceeded by its evils.”

John Randolph died in 1824.  As we know, 36 years later some states were forced to the extremity of secession, as they asserted the same states’ rights that Randolph had upheld.

What does “states’ rights” mean today?

There is more interest in this subject now than at any time since the concept was misused in defense of segregation 50 years ago, and this time around the cause has no less a shining aura to it than constitutionalism and sovereignty and liberty.

The impetus behind it is excessive federal power, which over the past half-century under both parties and all Presidents has grown far more intrusive and extensive than ever before, operating at a greater geographical reach and economic might than we have ever known, and intruding itself in more areas of life, upon more people, in more places, than it has ever done.  And this flagrant power has two inherent and irreparable flaws that make it exceedingly noxious and oppressive: It is so overreaching that it is incompetent and inefficient, and it is so corrupt that it is clandestine and uncontrollable.

This assault on our liberty is what Chronicles seeks to confront.  And never doubt that it is an assault, even though it comes disguised in the various blandishments of celebrity worship, sports circuses, overclass prosperity and underclass passivity, state surveillance, captive media, mindless entertainment, pretend elections, government payoffs, materialism, technological wizardry, and easily available, widely consumed drugs, legal and other.  It is an assault that we must confront, somehow, as we oppose the world that is being thrust upon us, as we create communities of resistance.

The system we confront is, for all its ineptness and misguided flailing, a powerful one and practiced in the ways of advancing its interests.  But resistance is the only sane, intelligent, moral, and practical choice.  And the only agency, the only locus, for that struggle is to be found in the individual American states.  It is not to be found in the family, the neighborhood, the community (where such a unit still exists), or even in the so-called transition towns (where such experiments have been tried)—all too limited, too powerless.

The American states for the most part have the four criteria that make them fit locations for resistance.

First, they mostly pass the Goldilocks test—they are large enough to have serious economic and political clout yet small enough to be amenable to public influence and persuasion; indeed, as I wrote in these pages in “Small Is Bountiful” (Views, October 2010), 39 of the states have a population size—1 to 7 million—similar to the sizes of the most successful and prosperous nations in the world; and the other 11, such as California, New York, Florida, and Texas, could readily be broken into suitable sizes.

Second, states are coherent units that we don’t have to invent, with machinery and systems already in place that are well known and manipulable, familiar to the populace.

Third, states generally have underlying cultures of identity and loyalty and attachment, occasionally of affection and allegiance, a field on which citizens can be energized and motivated.

And finally, states have a long tradition, if not always exercised, of states’ rights, including the well-known and well-defined concepts of nullification and secession, honed in the workshops of history, the very engines that can make them the most effective units for resistance to federal domination.

Already, there is a growing movement among the states for stances that are very close to nullification.  For example, the federal REAL ID Act (2005) demands that states issue new ID cards for their citizens, and to date 25 states have voted against compliance—they didn’t called it nullification, but that’s what it really was—and 25 others have just plain refused to follow it.  It is still on the books, but it is dead.  In addition, 35 states have introduced legislation making some possession of marijuana legal, in defiance of federal law, and such legislation has actually passed in 13 of them.  Thirty states have considered laws asserting their right to have the manufacture and sale of guns wholly within their borders free of any federal regulation or restriction, and eight of those states have passed such laws—even though the federal firearms agency has declared them inoperable.  And 35 states have introduced laws or amendments that would prohibit any federal healthcare law from having any effect within their borders, and seven states have passed them.  There is no more blatant nose-thumbing at federal jurisdiction imaginable.

All this suggests that there is already some movement in the states toward the assertion of rights that might provide the kind of resistance to the federal government that would succeed in advancing the cause of liberty.

There is one more indication that something is brewing at the state level.  In 2010, there was more talk about the s-word—secession—than at any time since 1865.  There are legitimate independence groups in at least 15 states, and there is talk, learned and earnest talk, about secession at approximately 50 websites and blogs every day.  And they are not from kooks—the authors may be, for the moment, fringe, but they are intelligent people of a great many ages and walks of life, trying to deal forthrightly with a serious strategy that seems increasingly popular and increasingly realistic.

John Randolph would be pleased:

This [Federal] Government is the breath of the nostrils of the states.  Gentlemen may say what they please of the preamble to the Constitution, but this Constitution is not the work of the amalgamated population of the then-existing confederacy, but the offspring of the States.  And it is the power of the States to extinguish this government at a blow.  They have only to refuse to choose members for the [Senate] or refuse to send electors for the President and Vice President, and the thing is done!

Let them hear that in the corridors of Congress, let them heed that in the chambers of the White House and the bureaucracy beyond, let them know that in the pressrooms and studios of the running-dog media: The federal government is the offspring of the states, and the states have the power to assert their individual sovereignty against that overweening gargantuan disguised as Uncle Sam.