Last week the far-left Middlebury Institute, which wants Vermont to secede from the United States, joined with the far-right League of the South, which essentially wants to re-establish the Confederacy, for a two-day secessionist convention. Why wasn't Connecticut represented? For that matter, why wasn't Fairfield County?

Secession simply means withdrawing from a distant political power and governing yourself. When it happens halfway around the world, it is called self-determination, self-government, or democracy, and we've sent lots of our own soldiers and firepower over to help. When it happens here, it is called a revolution or a civil war.

But it shouldn't be. Donald Livingston, an Emory University professor of philosophy (who has some ties to the League of the South) put it nicely a few years ago: "There was no American Revolution, but a war of secession. And there was no American Civil War, but a war to suppress secession."

He also notes that it used to be libertarian Yankees that were the ones most likely to call for secession. For a period of time in the 19th century, New England threatened to secede about once every five years. Then the Civil War put a real damper on anybody who tried to secede from Lincoln's America.

But that same American drive for self-determination that won us our freedom two hundred years ago never died. It was merely napping. And in recent years, it's started to awaken. In the past ten years, we've seen people try to create, through secession, the Republic of Texas, the Republic of Cascadia in the Pacific Northwest, a sovereign Hawaii, and, last year, a separate Alaska, in addition to the two biggest movements of Vermont and the South.

What is it about the past decade or so that has spawned so many distinct movements to secede from the U.S.? What is happening to make even socialists and paleoconservatives get along? It's looking an awful lot like rats fleeing a sinking ship.

Phillip Seff notes in his book Our Fascinating Earth that this skill of rats was observed two thousand years ago by Pliny the Elder, who wrote that "when a building is about to fall down, all the rats desert it." Seff explains why rats seem to be able to anticipate aquatic disaster. "Rats live in the deepest recesses of the ship, in the bilge," he notes, an area that is essentially inaccessible to the crew, and so they are the first to have their nests flooded. They issue shrill cries of alarm and "build up into a large, frightened mass of rodents making a panicky exodus." The upstairs crew sees the rats deserting the ship even though as far as they can tell the ship itself still looks fine.

The analogy is pretty striking. The secessionist movements today are not, as a rule, being led by powerful politicians, captains of industry or famous celebrities. They are led and strengthened by everyday people who see their wallets pinched, their phones tapped, and their speech silenced by a powerful central government, one that was never intended to get so big. And, being Americans, they want their freedom back.

It would be hard for Connecticut as a whole to secede. Last year, an attempt to put an initiative on the Alaskan ballot to secede was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Alaska. And of course, we still remember the bloodshed that resulted the last time a state actually tried to leave the Union.

But perhaps it is possible for towns and cities in Fairfield County to form a political entity and disassociate from the rest of Connecticut. After all, for this, precedent is on our side: West Virginia seceded from Virginia during the Civil War.

Our county has about one-quarter of the total population of the state and includes five of the nine most populous cities, including Bridgeport, the largest. Yet we pay, by a variety of measures, for about half of Connecticut's budget. For some of our wealthier towns the disparity is even greater: Greenwich, Stamford, Fairfield, New Canaan, and Westport combine to pay for 25 percent of the whole state budget despite having about 8 percent of the population.

Fairfield County is only about 10 percent of the total land area of Connecticut but even as a separate state it wouldn't be too small: It would be about half the size of Rhode Island or about ten times the size of Washington, D.C.

Just imagine what we could do without the burdens of the entire state of Connecticut, and much of the rest of the United States, on our shoulders. We could reject the federal "grants" that come with so many strings and handcuffs attached. We could constitutionally prevent an income tax from ever being levied. We could educate our children, build our roads, and care for our elderly in any way we choose, not how distant politicians think we should. Cities like Stamford and Bridgeport would prosper and we would be known as the Fairfield Miracle—all for merely getting out before it was too late.

And what of the many state politicians we leave behind to try to finally fix their budget woes now that their golden egg has hatched? They, like the fabled captain, would have to go down with the ship.

phil@maymin.com