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      We Need to Think the Unthinkable About Our Country

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      A year after the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol, the United States seems perhaps even more alarmingly fractious and divided. Regrettably, the right has sustained its support for Donald Trump and continued its assault on American democratic norms.The next national election will almost inevitably be viciously (perhaps violently) contested. It is fair to say that the right-wing threat to the United States — and its apparent goal of laying the groundwork for a power grab, if necessary, in 2024 — is politically existential.Yet many Americans seem to be whistling past the graveyard of American democracy. In particular, there seems to have been little effort so far at think tanks, professional military institutions and universities to build and contemplate the dire scenarios that have become increasingly plausible. And the worst-case scenario is this: The United States as we know it could come apart at the seams.The worst case isn’t necessarily the most likely, but there’s a natural tendency to assign a vanishingly low probability to events that appear to pose insoluble problems and catastrophic outcomes and thus to dismiss them as fanciful.In the 20th century, constructive doomsaying helped prevent the Cold War from becoming a shooting war. It was ultimately worst-case thinking that stabilized nuclear deterrence and staved off nuclear Armageddon. Herman Kahn’s clinical projections of nuclear devastation dazzled and horrified a growing audience — his warnings began with a series of Princeton lectures and eventually became the basis of his best seller “Thinking About the Unthinkable.” The eventual Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas C. Schelling used game theory to explore the risk that conventional conflict could escalate to the use of nuclear weapons; his work demonstrated the value of arms control and helped establish nuclear deterrence based, however perversely, on mutual assured destruction.In the 1980s, Jonathan Schell’s series of New Yorker essays (and subsequent book), “The Fate of the Earth,” reinvigorated popular alarm about nuclear war and stimulated calls for nuclear disarmament on both sides of the Atlantic. In line with dystopic novels like “On the Beach” by Nevil Shute and movies like “Fail-Safe,” “Dr. Strangelove,” “The Bedford Incident” and “The Day After,” worst-case thinking kept the prospect of nuclear holocaust real and the need to avoid it urgent. Clearly it influenced Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, who seriously contemplated nuclear disarmament in 1986.This urgent brand of collective cultural alertness receded after the Cold War. On the left, worst-casing thinking was blamed for the expansive growth of nuclear arsenals and the ill-fated U.S. war in Vietnam. Now the Republican Party’s embrace of “alternative facts,” aided by the growth of conservative media, has effectively created a separate domestic reality for millions of Americans. Since Jan. 6, 2021, comedians, partisan journalists and public intellectuals have recognized, ridiculed and lamented the state of our democracy and raised the possibility of a “slow-moving coup” (Bill Maher) or a “worst-case scenario” for our politics (Robert Crawford in The Nation). Other columnists and historians (Chauncey DeVega and Max Hastings, for example) have casually mooted the possibility of secession or large-scale political violence in the wake of the 2024 presidential election. A few recent books, like the political scientist Barbara F. Walter’s “How Civil Wars Start” and the journalist Stephen Marche’s “The Next Civil War,” have been discussed.But systematic and dispassionate analysis of such possibilities has not widely emerged. In June 2020, the bipartisan Transition Integrity Project — comprising over 100 former and serving government officials, academics, research analysts, journalists and other experts — held tabletop exercises on four different 2020 election crisis scenarios. Selected teams hypothesized moves and countermoves, responses and counter-responses, and in August 2020 published a broadly prescient report — which suggested that the election could be contested into 2021 and the transition process disrupted. It also included several preventive measures with an eye to 2024-25. Perhaps understandably, given the political climate, most participants were reluctant to identify themselves publicly and only a few talked to the media about the exercise. Two conservative outfits, the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the Claremont Institute, jointly gamed out similar scenarios, concluding that the constitutional order would hold. But these projects were short term and situationally limited and have not generated sustained open-source consideration of the more dire possibilities that have surfaced since Jan. 6.Predictably, far-right groups mobilized to dismiss the Transition Integrity Project’s activities as leftist “psychological warfare,” and some branded it a blueprint for a left-wing coup. That should not stop a reprise of the project’s efforts with respect to the 2024 election. In light of the lack of contingency planning for major violence on Jan. 6 by the Capitol Police and the Department of Homeland Security, such planning is presumably underway at federal law-enforcement agencies and the Pentagon. But that’s not enough.A right-wing minority — including many elected politicians — is now practicing a form of brinkmanship by threatening to unilaterally destroy American democracy, daring what they hope is a timid and somnolent majority to resist them. But that majority has the benefit of warning ahead of 2024.It behooves us to prepare our defenses for the worst. Understandably, the policy focus is now on pre-empting a right-wing steal in the next national election. But success will depend crucially on factors that are beyond control — the midterm elections this year and the identity of the Republican candidate in 2024 — which suggest that focus is misplaced. And even if a steal is thwarted, success might not preclude a coercive challenge of the election results; quite to the contrary, it would provoke one.War games, tabletop exercises, operations research, campaign analyses, conferences and seminars on the prospect of American political conflagration — including insurrection, secession, insurgency and civil war — should be proceeding at a higher tempo and intensity. Scholars of American politics need to pick up the torch from experts on the democratic decline in Europe, who first raised the alarm about growing dangers to American politics. The very process of intellectual interaction and collaboration among influential analysts of different political stripes could reconcile many of them to the undesirability of political upheaval, and thus decrease its likelihood.The overarching idea is, publicly and thoroughly, to probe just how bad things could get precisely to ensure that they never do, and that America’s abject political decay is averted.Jonathan Stevenson, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies and managing editor of Survival, served on the National Security Council staff in the Obama administration and is the author of “Thinking Beyond the Unthinkable.” Steven Simon is a fellow at M.I.T. and a senior analyst at the Quincy Institute. He served in the State Department and on the National Security Council staff in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton and Obama administrations.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      New Caledonia Says ‘Non’ to Independence

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      The vote on the Pacific island territory comes as France’s president has prioritized shoring up the country’s international profile, seeing its military as a bulwark against China.NOUMÉA, New Caledonia — New Caledonia, a tiny scattering of islands in the South Pacific, will not mark the new year by becoming the world’s newest country.In a referendum held on Sunday, voters rejected independence overwhelmingly, with 96 percent electing to stay part of France, according to provisional results released on Sunday evening by the French High Commission in New Caledonia.But while the referendum failed, prompting those who voted “non” to fly the French tricolor in the capital, Nouméa, the result does not signal an end to dreams of New Caledonian sovereignty.“We are pursuing our path of emancipation,” Louis Mapou, New Caledonia’s president, said in an interview, brushing aside any results of the referendum. “That is what is essential.”Mr. Mapou is the first pro-independence leader to hold the official title of president in New Caledonia and the first from the Indigenous Kanak community which makes up about 40 percent of the population. He refers to the territory as a country. (He is also the kind of president who chauffeurs himself in a Subaru Forester.)Volunteers handing out a pro-independence newsletter called for people to boycott the referendum.Adam Dean for The New York TimesResidents at a meeting this month calling for a “non” vote.Adam Dean for The New York TimesA large portion of the Kanak pro-independence bloc boycotted Sunday’s vote after its plea for a postponement was rebuffed, leading to worries that the referendum’s legitimacy was undermined by nonparticipation. President Emmanuel Macron of France, who has made shoring up the country’s international profile a cornerstone of his campaign for re-election in April, refused a delay.“France is more beautiful because New Caledonia chose to stay,” Mr. Macron said in a televised statement on Sunday.With its far-flung island outposts — such as French Polynesia and Wallis and Futuna in the Pacific Ocean, as well as Mayotte and Réunion in the Indian Ocean — France boasts one of the world’s largest maritime profiles. But the recent collapse of a French submarine deal with Australia, a result of the United States and Britain swooping in instead, embarrassed Paris. Mr. Macron had positioned France as a bulwark against China, which is expanding its clout in the Indo-Pacific.“Woe to the small, woe to the isolated, woe to those who will be influenced and attacked by hegemonic powers who will come to seek their fish, their technology, their economic resources,” he said in a speech in July in French Polynesia.Although the “hegemonic power” remained unnamed, the meaning was clear: China.A ceremony in Nouméa last week honored those killed in Algeria, a former French colony. Adam Dean for The New York Times“We are pursuing our path of emancipation,” President Louis Mapou of New Caledonia said in an interview.Adam Dean for The New York TimesSunday’s vote was the third of three independence referendums promised by Paris after years of conflict in New Caledonia in the 1980s, an uprising known simply as “the Events.” In the second vote last year, 47 percent chose independence, up from 43 percent in the first referendum in 2018.By 5 p.m. on Sunday, voter participation had fallen to 42 percent, down from 79 percent during the 2020 referendum. While lines of voters snaked out of polling stations in French loyalist areas of Nouméa and its environs on Sunday morning, they were virtually empty in pro-independence strongholds.Kanak leaders had urged the French government to reschedule Sunday’s referendum for next year because a late-breaking coronavirus wave had disproportionately affected their people. Lengthy Kanak mourning traditions, they argued, made political campaigning impossible.“The French state is disrespecting the relationship between the Kanak living and dead,” said Daniel Goa, the head of a pro-independence political party. “The decolonization process is going ahead without respecting the people who must be decolonized.”A traditional Kanak wedding. Concerns over losing Indigenous customs have played a role in the independence movement.Adam Dean for The New York TimesAn intensive care unit for coronavirus patients in Nouméa. For some residents, the pandemic has highlighted the benefits of remaining a part of France.Adam Dean for The New York TimesThe history of empire is one of centuries of subjugation, but there are few places left in the world where colonization endures. After annexing New Caledonia in 1853 and establishing a penal colony, the French forced the Kanaks off their fertile tribal lands and onto reservations. The French brutally crushed Kanak efforts to repel them.With the discovery of nickel, the French administration brought in laborers from Asia and other parts of the Pacific to work the mines, which remain the territory’s biggest economic driver. Conflict and foreign diseases exacted a deadly toll on the Kanaks, whose population plunged by about half within three-quarters of a century. Today, with an influx of French crowding Nouméa — civil servants can earn salaries double that of back in France — the Kanaks are a minority in their homeland.A nickel mine in Goro, New Caledonia.Adam Dean for The New York TimesA wealthy neighborhood popular with recent arrivals from France and tourists in Nouméa.Adam Dean for The New York TimesTo prepare for the referendum on Sunday, thousands of French security forces descended on the territory of 270,000 people. The aftermath of the last referendum devolved into violence, with Kanak youths setting fire to nickel mine facilities and blockading major thoroughfares.“Half the country is for independence and half is against it,” Charles Wea, a presidential adviser, said before the votes were counted. “We have to rebuild a new social contract. Otherwise, we will always be divided.”New Caledonia is the only place in Melanesia, an arc of islands that stretches from Papua New Guinea to Fiji, that remains under colonial control. Neighboring Vanuatu gained independence in 1980, the Solomon Islands two years before that. French loyalists argue that New Caledonia’s privileged economic position — its per capita G.D.P. would rank it among the top 20 richest countries if it were considered a country — is afforded by its status as a French territory. Subsidies from Paris fill New Caledonia’s coffers, and the territory’s wealth doubled over the past three decades.To prepare for the referendum on Sunday, thousands of French security forces descended on the territory of 270,000 people.Adam Dean for The New York TimesVoters rejected independence overwhelmingly, with 96 percent electing to stay part of France, according to provisional results released on Sunday.Adam Dean for The New York TimesShould New Caledonia eventually become independent, the territory would trade France’s geopolitical influence for that of China, which has extended its reach over Melanesia, French loyalists say. Last month, fatal riots shook the Solomon Islands, with the prime minister blaming the violence on the switch of diplomatic allegiance to China from Taiwan, the self-governing democracy that is Beijing’s political rival.“When you look at France and China, it is totally different when it comes to human rights,” said Christopher Gygès, an anti-independence politician who also serves as New Caledonia’s minister for the economy, foreign trade and energy. “France’s presence will protect us from China’s appetite and efforts to take control of the region.”Mr. Mapou, the president, has held open the possibility that an independent New Caledonia would entrust its defense to France, allowing Paris to maintain a regional stronghold.“We can balance,” he said. “We can be in the Pacific, defend our interests, and maintain a link with France and Europe because of history and culture.”Drawn by New Caledonia’s climate and comfortable living, the population of Métros, as recent arrivals from France are known, has increased sharply in a generation. The center of Nouméa is largely a white town of baguettes and leisurely games of pétanque. New Caledonia’s wealth is concentrated in the Southern Province, where Nouméa is. Even the New Caledonian government gets its office space from the province, which is governed by a white leader.A young adult smoking cannabis outside a subsidized housing unit in Magenta, a neighborhood in Nouméa.Adam Dean for The New York TimesA couple unpacking a donation of food, which included products close to their expiration dates.Adam Dean for The New York TimesDespite New Caledonia’s prosperity, income disparities yawn wide. Kanaks make up the vast majority of the territory’s impoverished, unemployed and imprisoned. Despite government efforts to help Kanaks pursue higher education in France, there are few Kanak doctors, lawyers and engineers.In a sprawl of dilapidated subsidized housing in Magenta, a neighborhood in Nouméa, Jeremy Hnalep, 25, said he drew little hope from politics. The buildings’ lobbies reeked of urine; clumps of young people passed around cannabis, which is illegal in New Caledonia.“The only choice is to live outside the system because the system will not change even if there is independence,” Mr. Hnalep said.Kanak politicians estimate that unemployment among Kanak youth exceeds 40 percent.In villages outside Nouméa, the colorful flag of Kanaky, as Kanaks call the land, flutters from market stalls and fishing boats. It flies over funerals and weddings, Catholic feast days and labor strikes. The French flag is rarely seen.Yet on the eve of the vote, even as she acknowledged the colonial burden on the Kanaks, Anne-Marie Kourévi, the 81-year-old wife of a Kanak tribal chief in southern New Caledonia, said she would vote “oui.”“I am French,” she said, “and I have been for more than 80 years.”Kanak families gathering for a Sunday picnic at a beachside park in Nouméa.Adam Dean for The New York TimesAurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris. 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      Barbados Elects Its First Head of State, Replacing Queen Elizabeth

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      The country’s Parliament chose Sandra Mason, the governor general, to assume the symbolic title, a decisive move to distance itself from Barbados’s colonial past.The island nation of Barbados has elected a female former jurist to become its next head of state, a symbolic position held since the 1950s by Queen Elizabeth II, as the country takes another step toward casting off its colonial past.Sandra Mason, 72, the governor general of Barbados, became the country’s first president-elect on Wednesday when she received the necessary two-thirds majority vote in the Parliament’s House of Assembly and Senate. She will be sworn in on Nov. 30, making Barbados a republic on the 55th anniversary of its independence from Britain.“We believe that the time has come for us to claim our full destiny,” Prime Minister Mia Mottley said in a speech after the vote.“It is a woman of the soil to whom this honor is being given,” she added.Barbados, a parliamentary democracy of about 300,000 people that is the easternmost island in the Caribbean, announced in September that it would remove Elizabeth as its head of state. At the ceremony, Ms. Mason read from a speech prepared by Ms. Mottley that was explicit in its rejection of imperialism.The speech highlighted the urgency of self-governance, quoting a warning by Errol Walton Barrow, the first prime minister of Barbados, against “loitering on colonial premises.”“The time has come to fully leave our colonial past behind,” Ms. Mason said. “Barbadians want a Barbadian head of state.”Barbados has since become the latest Caribbean island to shed the symbolic role of the queen and pursue the formation of a republic. Guyana led earlier republican movements in the Caribbean, cutting ties to the queen in 1970, followed by Trinidad and Tobago, and then Dominica.Ms. Mason, who has been the governor general, a position appointed by the queen, since 2018, had been nominated to take on the position of president, subject to the parliamentary vote, the prime minister announced in August. Ms. Mottley said other steps in the island’s transition included work on a new constitution, which would begin in January.“Barbados shall move forward on the first of December as the newest republic in the global community of nations,” Ms. Mottley said on Wednesday.People in Barbados and its government were “conscious that we are going not without concern on the part of some, but with absolute determination that at 55, we must know who we are, we must live who we are, we must be who we are,” she said.Dame Sandra Prunella Mason was born on Jan. 17, 1949, in St. Philip, Barbados. She was educated on the island at Queen’s College, attended the University of the West Indies and was the first woman from Barbados to graduate from the Hugh Wooding Law School in Trinidad and Tobago.In the early 1990s, Ms. Mason served as an ambassador to Venezuela, Chile, Colombia and Brazil. In 2008, she became the first woman to serve as a judge on the Barbados Court of Appeal.Ambassador Noel Lynch, whose own appointment as Barbados’s representative in Washington, D.C., had to be endorsed by the queen, said in an interview that Ms. Mason’s judicial experience made her “well versed” for the work that needs to be done as the nation transitions to a republic.Ms. Mason’s election is also notable because both the prime minister and the head of state will soon be Barbadian women. “Even if it is mostly ceremonial,” Mr. Lynch said in an interview, “you have got to have confidence if the president and the prime minister have got confidence in each other.”After she is sworn in, Ms. Mason will become the ceremonial leader of an island that is facing labor shortages, the effects of climate change and economic difficulties due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on its tourism sector, the prime minister said.In her speech after the parliamentary vote, Ms. Mottley said the real work would begin the day after the island becomes a full republic.“We look forward, therefore, to Dec. 1, 2021,” she said. “But we do so confident that we have just elected from among us a woman who is uniquely and passionately Barbadian.” More

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      We Underestimated Trump Before. It Didn’t Go Well.

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      Sometimes, and much to our detriment, we find real events are simply too outlandish to take seriously.Many professional Republicans, for example, initially dismissed the movement to “Stop the Steal” as a ridiculous stunt.“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change,” an anonymous senior Republican official told The Washington Post a few days after Joe Biden claimed victory:He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.Republicans went ahead and humored the president, who then urged his followers to assault the Capitol and try to void the election results in his favor.Now, 10 months after the election, “Stop the Steal” is something like party orthodoxy, ideological fuel for a national effort to seize control of election administration and to purge those officials who secured the vote over Donald Trump’s demand to subvert it. Assuming that he is in good health, Trump will almost certainly run for president in 2024, and if he does, he’ll do so in a Republican Party pacified of any resistance to his will to power.The upshot is that we are on our way to another election crisis. Or, as the election law expert (and frequent New York Times contributor) Rick Hasen has written in a new paper on the risk of election subversion, “The United States faces a serious risk that the 2024 presidential election, and other future U.S. elections, will not be conducted fairly, and that the candidates taking office will not reflect the free choices made by eligible voters under previously announced election rules.”Despite the danger at hand, there doesn’t appear to be much urgency among congressional Democrats — or the remaining pro-democracy Republicans — to do anything. The Democratic majority in the House of Representatives has passed a new voting rights act aimed at the wave of restrictive new election laws from Republican state legislatures, and Democrats in the Senate have introduced a bill that would establish “protections to insulate nonpartisan state and local officials who administer federal elections from undue partisan interference or control.” But as long as the Senate filibuster is in place — and as long as key Democrats want to keep it in place — there is almost no chance that the Senate will end debate on the bill and bring it to the floor for a simple majority vote.It’s almost as if, to the people with the power to act, the prospect of a Trumpified Republican Party with the will to subvert the next presidential election and the power to do it is one of those events that just seems a little too out there. And far from provoking action, the sheer magnitude of what it would mean has induced a kind of passivity, a hope that we can solve the crisis without bringing real power to bear.It is here that I am reminded of a previous existential threat to American democracy and how one group of Americans struggled to accept the unthinkable even as it unfolded right before their eyes.On Nov. 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president. The plurality popular vote winner in a four-way race — the Northern and Southern wings of the Democratic Party fielded separate candidates, Stephen A. Douglas and John C. Breckinridge, while conservative Southern unionists coalesced behind the Tennessee Senator John Bell under the Constitutional Union party — Lincoln won a solid majority of electoral votes, 180 out of a total of 303. But his was a sectional victory; not only did Lincoln not win a single Southern electoral vote, but in 10 of the 11 states that became the Confederacy there wasn’t even a Lincoln ballot to cast.The new Republican president was also a specifically Northern president, with a coalition united by its antislavery beliefs. “The country had committed itself electorally to a party which opposed slavery, at least to the extent of agreeing with Lincoln that the institution must ‘be placed in the course of ultimate extinction,’” the historian David M. Potter explains in “The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War, 1848 to 1861.”South Carolina, with its heavy concentration of enslaved people and deep-seated pro-slavery sentiment, took the first steps toward leaving the Union, passing a bill that set the date for a convention where elected delegates would debate secession. The speed of South Carolina’s action, Potter notes, “accelerated the tempo of the disunion movement in a decisive way.” In short order, the legislatures of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Florida announced similar conventions.Secessionists had momentum but, as the historian Russell McClintock writes in “Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession,” “Republicans showed no anxiety about disunion before the election and remarkably little after it.” Lincoln’s first concern, after celebrating his victory, was cabinet selection and the question of patronage since, as McClintock explains, “the individuals Lincoln chose as his advisers would strongly suggest which way he was leaning in his attitude toward the gathering storm in the South and would have great influence over his policy.”Republican-aligned newspapers were nonplused by events in the South. “South Carolina may fume and fulminate, and call conventions and pass resolutions till the crack of doom,” wrote one correspondent in The Chicago Tribune, but “up to this writing nobody is scared that we know of.”Similarly, wrote a like-minded Boston editor, “Almost the only topic of political interest just now, is the rumored insane attempt of a few hotheaded fanatics, to induce the people of a few slave states to secede from the American Union. There is in this nothing new, unexpected, or alarming.”After all, pro-slavery ideologues had threatened disunion in response to policy and political defeats for decades. If the South did not act before, why would it act now?In fact, many Republicans believed the South needed the Union to maintain slavery. In “The Republic in Crisis, 1848-1861,” the historian John Ashworth summarized the Republican view. “How would slave insurrections be put down without federal forces? How could the slaveholders secure the loyalty of the nonslaveholding whites in their own localities?” And, most important, “How could the slaveholders cater to the economic ambitions of the nonslaveholding whites, who because of the inadequacies of the slave system were denied any real economic opportunity?”In short, there was no way the slaveholding South could sustain itself on its own.There was also, for Republicans, the matter of sectional pride. In the past, threats of disunion were part of a Kabuki theater of negotiations. Here’s McClintock: “Southerners demanded political advantages, Northerners balked, Southerners threatened to secede, and Northern Democrats gave in and voted with the Southerners.” The Republicans who scoffed at this latest threat of secession were saying, in essence, that the North would no longer play this game. “Since this is not the first time such cries are heard — since, indeed, they have been long-sounding in our ears, so that their exact value is perfectly understood from the very beginning — there seems no longer excuse or apology for hearkening to them,” the staunchly antislavery Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts said. “They are to be treated as threats, and nothing more.”Unfortunately for Sumner and the Republicans, their confidence was misplaced. Yes, there were Southern unionists, and yes, there were serious political tensions within the seceding states. But the secessionists had the initiative, and within 90 days of Lincoln’s election they had, as Potter writes, “won ten legislative decisions to hold elections for state conventions, held seven such elections, gained majorities in each, assembled seven conventions, voted seven ordinances of secession, and also took the first steps toward formation of a southern confederacy.”When Republicans finally turned to face the crisis, in December, there were few options at hand. Lincoln would not take office for another three months, Congress had just come back into session, and the outgoing Buchanan administration was divided and in disarray, beset by resignations as some members — like Howell Cobb, of Georgia, the secretary of the Treasury — stood with their states and others stood with the Union.There was obviously no appetite, among Republicans, for disunion. There was also no appetite for compromise, even as a few lawmakers — led by John Crittenden of Kentucky, a Whig — tried to forge one last agreement to satisfy the sections and secure the Union. His proposal, a set of constitutional amendments and congressional resolutions, would have shielded slavery from federal power and congressional interference, reinstating the Missouri Compromise by writing it into the Constitution itself.Republicans were not interested. For the past decade, the Northern lawmakers had made concessions to the South. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was one; Whig support for James Buchanan over the Republican John C. Fremont in the 1856 election was another. “From the standpoint of a sincere Unionist,” Potter writes, “there was something self-defeating about getting the Union temporarily past a crisis by making concessions which strengthened the disunionist faction and perpetuated the tendency toward periodic crises.”The only option left was confrontation, and when Lincoln finally took the reins of state on March 4, 1861, he made it clear that this was the path he would take. “I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is perpetual,” Lincoln famously said in his first inaugural address: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.I am not making a direct analogy between the Civil War era and current American politics. There is nothing, yet, that divides us as starkly as slavery did in the 1840s and 1850s. Nor is the crisis of democratic integrity as acute now as it was during the secession crisis. But the value of studying history is that we can see how previous generations of Americans faced the challenges of their time. No one knows, in the moment, how the story ends, and we can use that insight to try to understand the options available to our forebears as they lived through their present.Republicans had good reason to ignore threats of secession. But they also had reason to heed them. With Lincoln’s election, the slave-owning South had lost its almost total grip on federal power. Sectional tensions had never been stressed in this way before, and Southern panic was palpable. Republicans could not have stopped secession, but they might have been able to better prepare for whatever confrontation lay on the horizon.It is impossible to say where we stand in relation to our own crisis. Perhaps the worst is yet to come; perhaps we’ve already sailed through. Either way, we should secure our elections against whatever threat might materialize because if there is anything our history tells us, it’s that everything looks settled until one day it isn’t.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      America Only Punishes a Certain Kind of Rebel

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      For two months after the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump fought to invalidate and overturn the results. When election administrators and judges refused to play ball, he urged his most loyal followers to march on Congress, to prevent final certification of the electoral vote. “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” he told a crowd of thousands on Jan. 6. More

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      Scotland Election Results Complicate Hopes for Independence Referendum

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      The Scottish National Party fell short of an outright majority, though pro-independence parties appeared to retain control of Scotland’s Parliament.LONDON — Hopes for a swift path to independence in Scotland were tempered on Saturday, as the dominant Scottish nationalist party fell one seat short of a majority in the country’s Parliament.The Scottish National Party’s results, though impressive, deprived it of a symbolic victory in a closely fought election. That, in turn, is likely to stiffen the determination of Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain to deny Scottish voters the chance to hold a second referendum on independence.Yet pro-independence parties stayed in control and even expanded their overall majority in Thursday’s election, which will keep the flame of Scottish nationalism alive and ensure that the threat of Scotland’s breaking away from the United Kingdom will continue to bedevil British politics.The number of seats won by the Scottish National Party is in some ways less important than the political winds, which are still blowing in the separatists’ direction. By allying with the pro-independence Scottish Greens, the Scottish nationalists will tighten their control over the regional Parliament.Party leaders have signaled that they will put a second referendum at the top of the agenda as soon as Scotland recovers from the coronavirus pandemic. The last time the Scots voted on independence, in 2014, they opted to remain in the United Kingdom by 55 percent to 45 percent. Polls show close to a 50-50 split on the question now, with support for breaking away having weakened in recent months.While disappointing to the Scottish nationalists, the lack of a clear majority might ultimately work to their advantage, by giving them time to build support for a referendum rather than being stampeded into an immediate campaign by the pressure of an overwhelming mandate.Demonstrators for Scottish independence in Glasgow last week.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesStill, the result is a relief to Mr. Johnson, for whom the dissolution of the United Kingdom looms as a potentially defining event for his premiership. He remains deeply unpopular in Scotland, and it is not clear how well prepared his government is to counter a reinvigorated push for Scottish independence.For his part, Mr. Johnson was basking in the Conservative Party’s victories in regional elections across England, which left the opposition Labour Party in disarray and reinforced his reputation as an inveterate vote-getter.However, some of the same post-Brexit populism that won the Conservatives votes in working-class parts of the Midlands and northern England worked against him in a more liberal, Brexit-averse Scotland.Mr. Johnson vowed to reject demands for a referendum, saying that as Britain emerged from the pandemic, the country should focus on rebuilding the economy rather than fighting over constitutional issues.“I think a referendum in the current context is irresponsible and reckless,” he said on Friday to The Daily Telegraph. “I think that there’s no case now for such a thing. I don’t think it’s what the times call for at all.”That showed no signs of stopping Scotland’s independence-minded leaders. Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister and leader of the Scottish National Party, pronounced the results, which represented a gain of one seat over 2016, as “historic and extraordinary.” She promised to push for another referendum.Speaking in Glasgow on Saturday, Ms. Sturgeon said there was “no democratic justification whatsoever for Boris Johnson or anyone else seeking to block the right of the people of Scotland to choose our future.”She and other officials claimed a mandate like that of 2011, when the Scottish National Party last won an absolute majority and petitioned for a referendum. Mr. Johnson’s predecessor, David Cameron, yielded to their demand.“He saw that there was a clear democratic mandate for it, and there will be another clear democratic mandate this time,” Lorna Slater, a leader of the Scottish Greens, told the British Broadcasting Corporation on Saturday. “What kind of country are we if we ignore that kind of democratic mandate?”Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, center, said on Friday that the country should focus on rebuilding the economy rather than fighting over constitutional issues.Owen Humphreys/PA Images, via Getty ImagesAnalysts said the cause of independence might be helped by a drawn-out battle with the Westminster government, since it would alienate Scottish voters, potentially driving more of them into the separatist camp. There is also the prospect of bitter legal battles, potentially ending up in Britain’s Supreme Court, if the Scots threaten to proceed with a referendum in defiance of London.“That’s not a bad thing for the S.N.P., because Nicola Sturgeon has said our priority is to solve Covid first,” said Nicola McEwen, a professor of politics at the University of Edinburgh. The nationalists, she noted, also do not yet “have answers to tough questions regarding what would happen with the border.”Problems in Northern Ireland, which emerged from Brexit with a hybrid status as a part of the United Kingdom but with no border checks with the Irish republic, underscore the difficulties of even a partial split from the union. Economists warn that the cost to Scotland of leaving would be profound.Pro-independence sentiment in Scotland was fueled by the Brexit referendum in 2016, which a majority of Scots voted against. Many in Scotland would like to rejoin the European Union and view an independence referendum as a step in that direction.That is one reason Professor McEwen and other analysts predict that Scotland would not stage a “wildcat referendum,” since the European Union and other governments would be unlikely to recognize the results.Mr. Johnson, analysts said, would probably seek to blunt pro-independence sentiment by pouring money into Scotland. If the pressure continues to mount, he could offer to delegate more authority to Scotland’s government.Under the terms of limited self-government in the United Kingdom, the Scottish authorities are responsible for matters like health and education, while the British government handles immigration, foreign policy and fiscal policy.Mr. Johnson’s goal, analysts said, would be to play for time, delaying any referendum until after the next British general election, which is due to be held in 2024. But repeatedly rebuffing Scottish calls could backfire.The border between Scotland and England.Andrew Testa for The New York Times“There is a view in Westminster that denying a referendum will only fire independence sentiment,” said Mujtaba Rahman, an analyst at the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy. “This is not a problem that is going away. It is only going to get bigger over time.”For Ms. Sturgeon, failing to win a clear majority by such a close margin was nevertheless deflating. It seemed within her grasp last summer when she was getting credit for steering Scotland’s response to the coronavirus, an approach that was more cautious than Mr. Johnson’s and seemed, for a time, to produce better results.But Britain’s successful rollout of vaccines blurred the differences, and Scotland’s case and death rates — while somewhat lower than those of England — are no longer all that far apart. Analysts cited the British vaccine campaign as a factor in the modest decline in support for independence, which was above 50 percent in polls for much of last year.Moreover, Ms. Sturgeon, 50, became embroiled in a bitter feud with her predecessor, Alex Salmond, over a botched internal investigation of sexual misconduct charges against him. She was accused of deceiving lawmakers, breaking rules and even conspiring against Mr. Salmond, a former close ally.Ms. Sturgeon was cleared of breaching the rules and misleading Parliament just as the campaign got underway, but the dispute dented her image. Mr. Salmond launched a breakaway party, Alba, which did not win any seats but served as a reminder of the internecine split.“This year has been quite difficult for the S.N.P. and for Nicola Sturgeon personally,” Professor McEwen said. Also, she added, “The broad shoulders of the U.K. have helped see us through the pandemic.” More

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      U.K. Elections Likely to Favor Boris Johnson, and Scottish Separatists

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      The prime minister’s Conservative Party stands to gain at the polls on Thursday, despite ethical accusations against him. But growth in support for the Scottish Nationalist Party could create turmoil.LONDON — For an ordinary politician, heading into midterm elections on an unsavory plume of scandal over cellphone contacts with billionaires and a suspiciously funded apartment makeover might seem like the recipe for a thumping. But Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain is not an ordinary politician.As voters in the country go to the polls on Thursday for regional and local elections that have been swollen by races postponed from last year because of the pandemic, Mr. Johnson’s Conservative Party stands to make gains against a Labour Party that has struggled to make the ethical accusations against him stick.Far from humbling a wayward prime minister, the elections could extend a realignment in British politics that began in 2019 when the Conservative Party won a landslide general election victory. That would put the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, on the back foot and ratify Mr. Johnson’s status as a kind of political unicorn.“No politician in the democratic West can escape the consequences of political gravity forever, but Boris Johnson has shown a greater capacity to do it than most,” said Tony Travers, a professor of politics at the London School of Economics. “People see his behavior as evidence of his authenticity.”Yet there is peril as well as promise for Mr. Johnson in the elections, which will decide thousands of seats, including that of London’s mayor, and which the British press has perhaps inevitably nicknamed “Super Thursday.”In Scotland, the Scottish National Party could win a clear majority in Scotland’s Parliament that the nationalists would brandish as a powerful mandate to demand another referendum on independence from the United Kingdom after an earlier one was defeated in 2014.Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, left, with a supporter in Edinburgh last week.Pool photo by Russell CheyneIn that event, Mr. Johnson could emerge in a stronger position in Westminster only to find that he will spend the next few years scrambling to avert a breakup of the union. That could make the tempest over his WhatsApp texting and who paid for the wallpaper in his Downing Street apartment look quaint.“The test of the Johnson premiership is going to be the integrity of the union — not Covid, not Brexit, not Europe, not sleaze,” said Mujtaba Rahman, an analyst with the political risk consultancy Eurasia Group.Whether the Scottish National Party wins an outright majority or is forced to enter a coalition with the pro-independence Scottish Greens, pollsters said, was still unclear. But the numbers are less important than the direction, which is expected to be emphatically behind a new campaign for Scottish independence.In the English elections, the big prize is Hartlepool, a struggling northern port city and Labour bastion where a new poll suggests that the Conservatives could win a bellwether seat in a parliamentary by-election. The Tories could make further inroads in other Labour cities and towns in the industrial Midlands and North, where they picked off dozens of seats in 2019, running on Mr. Johnson’s promise to “Get Brexit Done.”The prime minister did get Brexit done, as of last January. Yet while the split with the European Union brought predicted chaos in shipments of British seafood and higher customs fees on European goods, its effects have been eclipsed by the pandemic — a twist that ended up working to the government’s benefit.Although the pandemic began as a negative story for Mr. Johnson, with a dilatory response to the first wave of infections that left Britain with the highest death toll in Europe, it turned around with the nation’s rapid rollout of vaccines.Customers at a London pub after England began lifting pandemic lockdown restrictions last month.Mary Turner for The New York TimesAs new cases, hospitalizations and deaths have plunged, voters have rediscovered their affection for Mr. Johnson. His poll numbers rebounded from their lows last fall and show little damage from the charges and countercharges about his conduct, even though those have riveted London’s political circles.More important, Mr. Johnson’s message of “leveling up” the economically blighted Midlands and North with the more prosperous south still seems to resonate with people, including many who traditionally voted for Labour. And the government’s free-spending response to the pandemic has pulled the Conservative Party even further from its roots as the party of fiscal austerity.“The party of Margaret Thatcher is becoming the party of a big state and higher taxes, which can quite easily become the party of economic nationalism and ‘Buy British,’” said Mr. Travers, the London School of Economics professor.For Mr. Starmer, the Labour leader, this shape shifting has been confounding. A disciplined former prosecutor who lacks Mr. Johnson’s raffish manner, he has found it difficult to attack the government on its pandemic response, particularly the vaccine rollout, which is the largest peacetime mobilization in British history.Instead, Mr. Starmer has grilled Mr. Johnson in Parliament weekly about who picked up the initial bill for the upgrade of his apartment and why he was texting the billionaire James Dyson about the tax status of his employees, when the two were discussing a plan for Mr. Dyson’s company to manufacture ventilators.But there is little evidence that voters are particularly surprised or concerned that Mr. Johnson does not play by the rules. As political commentators have taken to saying this week, the prime minister’s behavior is “priced in.”The Labour Party leader, Keir Starmer, has grilled the prime minister about ethical issues but has struggled to attack the government’s recent pandemic response.Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA, via ShutterstockThe same is not true of Scottish independence. Analysts say Mr. Johnson’s government is not prepared for the wall of pressure it will face if the Scottish National Party wins a majority. The last time the party achieved that, in 2011, Britain’s then-prime minister, David Cameron, yielded to demands for a referendum. In 2014, Scots voted against leaving Britain by 55 percent to 44 percent.Polls now put the split at roughly 50-50, after a stretch in which the pro-independence vote was solidly above 50 percent. Analysts attribute the slight softening of support to both the vaccine rollout, which showed the merits of staying in the union, as well as an ugly political dispute within Scottish nationalist ranks.Mr. Johnson holds a trump card of sorts. To be legally binding, an independence referendum would almost certainly have to gain the assent of the British government, so the prime minister can simply say no and hope the problem goes away. But that strategy can work for only so long before becoming untenable.“I don’t see any way in the world that Boris Johnson turns around the day after the election and says, ‘OK, you can have a referendum,’” said Nicola McEwen, a professor of politics at the University of Edinburgh.And yet the calls could only grow. “If they manage to peel off a single-party majority,” she said, “it does put pressure on the U.K. to answer the question, ‘If a democratic vote isn’t a mandate for independence, then what is?’” More

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      E.U. Parliament Strips Carles Puigdemont of Immunity

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCatalan Separatist Leader Loses Immunity, Clearing Way for Spain’s Extradition BidCarles Puigdemont has been charged with sedition for leading a 2017 independence bid. His European Parliament membership had shielded him from prosecution.A television showing Carles Puigdemont at the European Parliament in Brussels on Tuesday.Credit…Francisco Seco/Associated PressRaphael Minder and March 9, 2021Updated 8:33 a.m. ETMADRID — The European Parliament has stripped the immunity of Carles Puigdemont, the former separatist leader of Catalonia, clearing the way for Spain to make a fresh attempt to extradite him from Belgium and try him on sedition charges.The European Parliament said on Tuesday that a majority of its members had voted a day earlier in a secret ballot to remove the immunity of Mr. Puigdemont and two other Catalan members of the assembly who face charges in Spain related to a botched attempt to declare Catalonia’s independence in 2017. Spain’s judiciary has charged that their bid was unconstitutional.The vote on Monday ended a lengthy battle by Mr. Puigdemont and his colleagues to use their protection as elected members of the European assembly to shield them from prosecution in Spain. Now it is up to the Belgian judiciary to rule on whether Mr. Puigdemont should be sent back to the Spanish capital, Madrid, to stand trial.“It is a sad day for the European Parliament,” Mr. Puigdemont said. “We have lost our immunity, but the European Parliament has lost more than that and as a result, European democracy too,” he said, adding that this was “a clear case of political prosecution.”The Spanish government welcomed the vote.“The problems of Catalonia will not be solved in Europe or by Europe. They have to be solved in Spain by bringing all Catalan forces around the table,” said the foreign minister, Arancha González Laya. The vote showed that the European Parliament had “respect for the work of the judiciary in our country,” she added.The European Parliament’s decision comes only weeks after regional elections in Catalonia that increased the majority of pro-independence parties in the regional Parliament. Separatist politicians have held control since 2015, but the secessionist conflict has split Catalan society while also remaining a highly contentious issue in national politics.A polling station in Barcelona last month. Regional elections increased the majority of pro-independence parties in the Catalonian Parliament.Credit…Emilio Morenatti/Associated PressMr. Puigdemont and some of his colleagues have been in Brussels since October 2017, shortly after the Spanish central government ousted his regional government for holding a referendum that Spanish courts had ruled illegal and then declaring Catalonia’s independence.During the past three years, Mr. Puigdemont has successfully fought off attempts to extradite him both from Belgium and Germany, where he was briefly detained during a trip.In January, judges in Belgium also rejected a request to extradite another former member of Catalonia’s regional government, Lluis Puig, who is facing similar charges in Spain. The Belgian court argued that the Spanish Supreme Court did not have the legal authority to issue an arrest warrant against Mr. Puig, adding that he should be tried in a regional court.Part of Mr. Puigdemont’s former government, however, stayed in Spain and stood trial before the country’s Supreme Court. Nine Catalans received prison sentences after they were convicted of crimes including sedition and misuse of public funds.One former Catalan leader, Oriol Junqueras, was also barred by Spain’s highest court from taking his seat in the European Parliament. Both he and Mr. Puigdemont were elected to the assembly in 2019.The European Parliament’s vote will allow a Spanish judge to reactivate a European arrest warrant against Mr. Puigdemont that was suspended in early 2020, when Mr. Puigdemont and his colleagues took their seats in the European assembly.The Catalan leaders are not the first members of the European Parliament to be stripped of immunity.In 2019, the European Parliament stripped the immunity of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the far-right National Front party in France. It is still reviewing the case of Ioannis Lagos, who was sentenced in Greece last year for his activities with the far-right Golden Dawn party. The Greek government considers Golden Dawn a criminal organization.The Catalan case has divided politicians in Brussels, many of them loathe to set a precedent of lawmakers being tried over political activity. The removal of Mr. Puigdemont’s immunity was approved by three-fifths of the members of the European Parliament.It could take months for Belgian courts to rule on Spain’s latest attempt to extradite Mr. Puigdemont and the two other Catalan leaders, Antoni Comín and Clara Ponsatí.The Brussels Public Prosecutor’s Office is examining the possibility of renewing legal proceedings in Belgium, a spokeswoman for the office said.Should the Belgian courts block the extradition request, the Catalans would continue to sit in the European Parliament, but without special immunity rights.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More