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Comment by mothballed | Hacker News Reader

Bob should be able to secede from such a democracy, which was arguably an implied right of a voluntary union up until the Civil War. Otherwise democracy is just a tyranny of the majority, and bob is only 2 votes away from being dinner and legitimately so.

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Allowing an entire state to secede does bupkis to prevent a tyranny of the majority. You just need a smaller number of people to be a tyrannical majority in your newly independent state.

At some people you can secede to an individual size of 1, at which point you can only tyrannize yourself. But it's a valid point, you're only mitigating not eliminating tyranny of the majority by picking which democracy you choose to be a part of. It is harder to tyrannize people with options, though, and much easier if it's either follow the company line or be massacred.

The Somalis basically have this system, which has been more successful than their geographic attempts at democracy, where you can essentially go under an entirely different legal system even in the exact same geographic spot by accepting a sponsor of another tribe, or possibly by marrying ('xeer'), or if you so choose you can secede from the whole thing and make your own tribe and take the risks that come with that.

It's really weird describe secession as even "mitigating" tyranny of the majority when your example is the Confederacy. The whole point of seceding was to try to ensure they could continue the white majority's tyranny over their black slaves. There's nothing inherently better about being ruled by a smaller state.

I said it was an implied right up until the Civil War, not that the Confederacy was the shining example on a hill (in fact the confederates would no doubt deny the slaves themselves the right of secession). You've pointed out to one example of secession that might be worse for black people, ignoring all the while in my relative comment the example I used was of the black people themselves seceding from the tyrannical state (Haiti).

Damning secession because it's not perfect cuz muh Confederacy is just intellectually dishonest. No political system is perfect, having the option is better than nothing. I have never implied that the right of secession should stop at the size of a slave state and the slaves could not themselves secede which they have in fact successfully done.

I'm not the one who picked it as your only example. Your Haiti comment was in a completely different part of the thread and not replying to me.

You did say that the secession of the South mitigated tyranny of the majority, when in fact it did the exact opposite.

If you want to say that it usually does this, that would be one thing, but you put it as a universal and chose the worst example for it.

>mitigating not eliminating tyranny of the majority by picking which democracy you choose to be a part of.

I said secession mitigates tyranny of the majority.

I don't think you understand what mitigate means. It doesn't mean the risk is eliminated. Quite often a mitigation effort will do the opposite (i.e. vaccines mitigate risk of death but some patient has allergic reaction to vaccine and patient dies).

Arguably had black people been able to secede from the union AND the confederacy they might have been better off, but of course, both the union and the confederates would likely have attacked them in that case, because it's not as if white people didn't want to tyrannize blacks even in the north, they just didn't do it with the mechanism of slavery (arguably because slavery was just becoming bad economics in the industrial north and attacking slavery was more of a way to get one up on the south than to help black people that hardly had the rights of whites in the North).

The majority probably didn't want to secede prior to the civil war. Fortunately for those who did want to secede, a massive proportion of the population didn't have the right to vote.

>South Carolina became the first state to formally secede in December 1860

>At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina's Charleston Harbor. Less than 34 hours later, Union forces surrendered. Traditionally, this event has been used to mark the beginning of the Civil War.

I mean, the whole reason for the secession was the fear that at some indefinite point in the future they might be prevented from keeping a large portion (~30%) of the population in chattel slavery, so, yeah, there was a substantial disenfranchised portion of the population who probably wouldn’t have been on board with the cause of secession were they consulted on the matter.

A case of secession more directly attributed to choice by slaves was that of Haiti.

This sort of revisionist history helps nobody. It wasn't a "might" it was an "all but certainly". The election of Lincoln was kind of the nail in the coffin for slavery because it meant that the anti slavery interests would at least be able to do something that ended slavery if not immediately then at some point in the future via the votes from the new free states being incorporated from the territories.

Now, it would've been a lot nicer if they didn't start a war over it, but slavery was done for one way or another and everyone knew it.

> The election of Lincoln was kind of the nail in the coffin for slavery because it meant that the anti slavery interests would at least be able to do something that ended slavery if not immediately then at some point in the future via the votes from the new free states being incorporated from the territories.

I mean, in an alternate universe where the modern cloture rule existed and somehow at least one extra free state was admitted while the South was not paying attention to block it, sure, that’s almost plausible, but...

You mean the alternate universe of <checks notes> Brazil?

They progressively outlawed slavery over the course of 1870 through 1890 without a civil war. The US probably could've done just about the same over a shorter period (because the US was richer and could have paid its way through a lot of the opposition faced in Brazil).

> You mean the alternate universe of <checks notes> Brazil?

Brazil had the same Constitution, Senate Rules, and balance of power between slave and free states as the pre-Civil War USA?

Lincoln favored projects of emancipation with compensation to the slaveholders. In a letter of March 14, 1862, he writes that the paying off all claims in Delaware, Maryland, the District of Columbia, Kentucky, and Missouri, at $400 per head (his term, not mine) would cost less than the expense incurred in eighty-seven days of war. The project went forward only in the District of Columbia.

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