Why America is Cracking Up

Francis Buckley, a professor of law at George Mason University in Virginia, is the closest thing America has to a Jonathan Swift, the great 18^th-century Anglo-Irish satirist. His writing on politics is the most entertaining of any present commentator I have read on US politics, and his humor illuminates rather than obscures fundamental issues.

I read American Secession when it appeared earlier this year and thought it overstated. Re-reading it after the pandemic brought America to a virtual standstill, it now seems that Buckley pulled his punches.

Buckley, to be sure, does not want the US to crack apart, and initially intended the secession thesis as an ironic foil for his own views, in the spirit of Swift’s Modest Proposal. What he sees in today’s America, though, is alarming.