We're outta here!

Common Cause Magazine, Winter, 1992 by Peter Overby

Secession offers the tantalizing prospect of escape, just as "white flight" to the suburbs did from the 1950s through the '70s. Since then, America's upper classes have continued to insulate themselves from social problems by choosing private schools over public, country clubs and health spas over parks, closed communities over neighborhoods - "the secession of the successful," as political economist Robert Reich dubbed it. The new movements are a political secession of the middle class.

"This isn't a separatist movement of rich from poor," says Brian Burke, a businessman-politician who organized the South Boston secession drive. "It's a middle-class movement that wants control of its own destiny."

But by seceding, as Richard Briffault, a Columbia University law professor who studies secession movements, tartly notes, "whites would not even have to go undergo the inconvenience of moving" to segregate themselves.

The secession movements also have become a catchall for runaway anxiety. In a global economy, Kansas farmers find themselves worrying about European agricultural policy, notes David Aubrey, editorial page editor of the Wichita Eagle. They can't do anything about Europe, but they can do something about property taxes. "You really see it out there in western Kansas: |I've got mine and I'm going to build walls around it so you can't get it,'" Aubrey says.

Anxiety, in turn, leaves communities ripe for exploitation. Fuchs, the Barnard College political scientist, compares secession to the mid-'70s tax revolt that started in California - middle-class people trying to get control over their lives." They are manipulated by cynical politicians, Fuchs maintains.

"It's elites who mobilize it," she says. "You can channel discontent into a secession movement or you can channel it into something more constructive. It focuses attention away from those legislators who haven't delivered effectively."

Fuchs blames the political discourse of the Reagan-Bush years, with its theme of looking out for No. 1. She adds: "It's selfish, is what it is. The reality is the richer counties don't want to help the poorer counties."

Indeed, secession movements have used the rhetoric of resentment. Listen to Queens Republican Serphin Maltese, a state senator and sponsor of the borough's first secession bill, compare New York Mayor David Dinkins unfavorably to the Nazis: "At the worst time of World War II, when the Germans occupied Paris," Maltese said in a widely quoted remark, "I think they paid more attention to the local city fathers than the mayor of the city of New York pays to Queens."

Another Queens pol, Democratic Assemblyman Anthony Seminerio, said: "I want the people of Queens to decide to get the hell out of New York while the going is good."

Outward Bound

If American secessionists have a guiding spirit, it's the New York City borough of Staten Island.

And Staten Island has one dominant symbol of the discontent: the Fresh Kills landfill. Fresh Kills - the name is topographic and in no way descriptive - is the largest landfill on Earth. Despite sharp reductions, it still takes some 15,000 tons of refuse daily.