15 December 2021
What is true regionalism?
True regionalism, unrestrained and uninhibited? Well that's secessionism, General Rosecrans:
Also after the failure of dissolution and the removal of centralist radicals from the center stage, the radical's emphasis shifted more towards ILV's line of thinking and ILV did in fact support removing the Federal gov't. This was a very clever move because it tugs at a fissure on the regionalist side that has existed since 2009.
That was what happened when DFW pushed for a confederation in 2017 and several prominent regionalists like PiT got on board. The thing is the "Regionalist" movement after it broadened its base took on a lot of more mainstream conservatives like myself, Jedi, and Inks among others. This meant that secession and dissolving the federal gov't were off the table. What unified us was resisting the tide of centralization and opposing attempts to strip the regions of what powers they had left (Regional Senate seats, ratification booths etc), but we disagreed on secession and dissolving the Federal Gov't.
If you want to divide the Regionalist movement into blocs, you would have the "Federalists" and the "ultra-Regionalists". Once the Federalist Party was formed, it had unwittingly, while merely creating a history based theme, created an identity that perfectly encapsulated my wing of the Regionalist movement, and yet it spent a year resisting this identity and regionalism in general trying to be a RL style conservative party and I was still sulking about the loss of the RPP to really push it much until after June 2013.
The full rest of your post is a complete an utter straw man that sets "federalism" as articulated by me up in contrast to a construct that is "federalism" though called something else and with all of the Labor centralist pet projects foisted into it and "excused" in the same manner and fashion as Dabbing Santa justified it. "If it is for our stuff, centralism is okay".
To another point that must and should be addressed here is the history of "federalism" in the ex-United States. To begin with, to associate "federalism" with the likes of Hamilton and Adams is to take but a snap shot of the history and also to exhibit a strong bias for the propaganda by said people which allowed them to come in the possession of such a term.
In the beginning, to be a "federalist" meant to support the Articles of Confederation, whereas to be a nationalist meant to be a critic of such. The acquisition of the term "federalist" by the nationalists was a public relations act that served to put them in the driver's seat and relegate their opponents thus to the title of "anti-Federalist". To this day you have the "Federalist Papers" and the "Anti-Federalist Papers" expounding on the views of both as it relates to the constitution. This would be the first "seizure" of the term and I am kind of surprised you did not highlight this as a Laborite to discredit the Federalists even more, since the true heirs of Whig tradition thus had their own name stolen from them by men of money, land (and yes slavery, though their were slave owners on both sides of this debate).
In the second instance, after the ratification of the Constitution you had what could be termed the second hijacking of this term, which was by the likes of Alexander Hamilton, and thus the RL Federalist Party came to be known as a centralist entity, which you expound so much misdirected energy to deride and then engage in tenuous at best and ludicrous at worst attempts to link us to them. If the current Federalist Party, the one founded in 2012 were a successor to the 2007 Federalist Party, you might have a point. However this is not so, the Federalist Party of 2012, in having its origins in the Regionalist Movement would fundamentally stand in opposition to the Party of the same name created by Bullmoose in 2007 and which declared itself the spiritual heirs to the party of Alexander Hamilton.
Since the time of the founding "small f federalism" as a political philosophy has come to be understood to represent the balance manifested in the constitution in opposition to the extremes both in favor of centralism on the one hand and secessionism and confederation on the other. It is to this philosophical tradition that the Federalist Party acclaims its allegiance to, not the bastardized organization of the late 1790s, which within 20 years was itself advocating secession. .
Lastly, I shall deal the "Southern Secessionist Party" reference and the "Keatonite Radicals" reference.
As Hagrid made brutally clear in 2013 when he said "This is not the Regional Protection Party", he was correct though not necessarily for the reasons that he would have said for a motivation. You are correct that the Regional Protection Party was born of the Southern Secessionist Party in 2008, and it featured libertarian politicians like SPC who favored abolition of the federal government and such forth. However, to build a national movement, support for secession was dropped in favor of ever more "federalist" positions. This progression only continued as such under my leadership as I opposed the push for a Council of Governors and for the abolition of At-Large Senate seats as many RPPers supported when I joined. Even so, as should be obvious to anyone, the RPP dissolved in 2012 and has not existed since that time and by that point most secessionist sentiment had long departed to the Populares and then either left the game, or had moderated away from those positions upon returning to the RPP. To associate the late period RPP, which contained people as such Afleitch, Franzl and first labor elected President Marokai Blue, as being "no different than the Southern Secessionist Party of 2008" is to willfully play ignorant with the history in order to score points.
The Federalist Party formed in 2012 was formed in reaction to the radicalism of labor, by ex-RPPers yes, but also a number of others who were not in that party, in order to resist the press of old labor into the South and contest the rise of radical politics that arouse alongside of Labor at the same time to prominence, from previous positions of marginalization. At the same time, there was no set determination on its philosophy on such matters and to the extent that there was a press to restore the late period RPP philosophy as the driving force of the Federalist Party, there was resistance to this, particularly from newer non RPPers and from more centralist minded politicians:
Once the Federalist Party was formed, it had unwittingly, while merely creating a history based theme, created an identity that perfectly encapsulated my wing of the Regionalist movement, and yet it spent a year resisting this identity and regionalism in general trying to be a RL style conservative party and I was still sulking about the loss of the RPP to really push it much until after June 2013.
It seems as if General Pope here is trying to talk out of both sides of his hindquarters here. First he is linking us to a secessionist movement birthed by Southern libertarians almost 15 years ago, and then he is linking us to a former member from half a decade ago, whose most remembered for alienating libertarians and his ill conceived friendships on IRC. I guess that counts as something relevant in the era of pulling random bs from history to play guilt by association.
