Getting Back to Basics

Steve Hayward notes some delicious irony regarding the vote to make Michigan a Right-to-Work state this past week:

But the really big news came out of Michigan this week, with the state legislature’s vote to make Michigan a right-to-work state. No one saw this coming, which is one reason why it succeeded. It is a dagger at the heart of union power. First Wisconsin, and now Michigan. Notice, also, how Democratic legislators walked out of the capitol in Michigan. That’s the face of liberalism today: rather than abide by a democratic election result, walk out and try to prevent the legislature from functioning. And then holler about “secession” talk from conservatives. Heh.

Of course, the exact same thing happened in Wisconsin in 2011 when the legislature voted to reign in the collective bargaining power of the teachers' unions among other public unions.  Just as it happened then, Democrats, knowing that they didn't have the necessary votes, decided to break the democratic principle of majority rule and secede.  Conservatives, however, open themselves up to charges of hypocrisy (which, isn't the worst charge when considering that La Rochefoucauld called hypocrisy "the tribute that vice plays to virtue") when they resorted talk of secession in the wake of the re-election of President Obama.

This section from Lincoln's First Inaugural is what conservatives should take to heart:

If the minority will not acquiesce, the majority must, or the government must cease. There is no other alternative; for continuing the government, is acquiescence on one side or the other. If a minority, in such case, will secede rather than acquiesce, they make a precedent which, in turn, will divide and ruin them; for a minority of their own will secede from them, whenever a majority refuses to be controlled by such minority. For instance, why may not any portion of a new confederacy, a year or two hence, arbitrarily secede again, precisely as portions of the present Union now claim to secede from it. All who cherish disunion sentiments, are now being educated to the exact temper of doing this. Is there such perfect identity of interests among the States to compose a new Union, as to produce harmony only, and prevent renewed secession? 

Plainly, the central idea of secession, is the essence of anarchy. A majority, held in restraint by constitutional checks, and limitations, and always changing easily, with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people, Whoever rejects it, does, of necessity, fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible; the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy, or despotism in some form, is all that is left.

The majority, however, is only rightful if it is based upon the previous unanimity of agreement on the first principles of the regime, which, in the case of the United State, are the principles of the Declaration of Independence.