Idealizing Eagleexit

Idealizing Eagleexit

Contributed by Clinton Holloway

The previous two editions of The People’s Paper have hosted features by Forrest A. Nabors, PhD., providing a broad overview of the historical and philosophical lineage to the republican impulse charging the Eagleexit movement. Eagleexit is an ambition to “detach” the communities north of Anchorage from the Municipality of Anchorage, creating a new borough with a smaller, more responsive government, one purportedly better aligned with the area’s residents’ ideals.

Communities separating from a parent community for political purposes—based on philosophy, economics, and other considerations—is an American tradition. Sometimes such actions are for worthy reasons, such as our country’s separation from Great Britain in the Revolutionary War; sometimes separation is for less upright reasons, such as the secession of Southern states in the Civil War. (Hooray to West Virginia, who separated from its pro-slavery, secessionist parent state of Virginia!) Regardless, such separations are big deals, ones where ideological differences take front stage. Hence, it is odd—though not uninformative—that Nabors, as Eagleexit’s frontman, devotes little print to explaining the cause’s specific rationale for separation. Instead, he devotes 1,400 words to his version of how American republicanism developed from 3,000 years of religion-based egalitarian impulses, with but a few words to state it is in danger and that Eagleexit is a way to recapture its pure form.

For the record, Eagleexit does have fiscal reasons for its intended separation that are thoughtful and detailed. Whether its contentions are accurate about area residents not receiving sufficient services for tax monies paid—and that Eagleexit can provide better services at less expense—demands real attention, though that’s not what readers find in Nabor’s writings.

Regarding Eagleexit’s political rationale, all that Eagleexit offers are general statements about the importance of self-government, pronouncements about small government’s virtue, and complaints that the area residents’ mindsets are incompatible with those of greater Anchorage. Nabor’s articles, as official philosophical background to Eagleexit, do provide informative context to the movement, though their content should give pause to members of our community. His glib review of egalitarianism’s evolution suggests Eagleexit’s leadership have an overly idealistic view of this history and may indicate their philosophical outlook is not all that egalitarian after all.

Nabors’s review reaches all the way back to Hebrew judges, political leaders of ancient Israelites. Although Nabors frames this period as a “republican form of government . . . the only form of government that God ever ordained,” it is conventionally interpreted that the god of that tradition appointed the judges—they were not formally voted upon. (That the historicity of these stories is questioned by secular and spiritual scholars alike is a worthy sidebar here!) From asserting that the ancient Hebrews believed “all men are created equal”—even though this did not apply to women, slaves, or unbelievers when it came to material existence—Nabors jumps to that bastion of enlightenment, the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages. This institution, which he asserts was “reminding monarchs that they are the servants of the people” and encouraging them to “soften [their] conduct,” was busily subordinating women and exterminating the pagans—culminating in those wonderfully inclusive movements, the Spanish Inquisition and the conquest of the Americas.

Fast forward to those forebearers of American democracy, the Mayflower Pilgrims, and the reader is assured that these “coequal citizens,” with a premium on the “natural equality” of all, governed themselves with pious fairness and frugal effectiveness. Never mind that only male freemen had a say in government, a government with the sort of religiosity interwoven in it that will lead to the excesses of the Salem witch trials, one that will permit slavery and decimate local indigenous peoples after relying upon them for survival….

Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty heroic and commendable to these traditions and histories, but to whitewash them in service of rhetoric is a disservice to the past and the hard work of governing. Eagleexit’s detachment from Anchorage is a very complex proposition, not one well served by facile and constrictive comparisons. Sure, as Nabors characterizes the Plymouth colony, he is focusing on our “embryonic republic,” one not fully developed into maturity. But, notably absent from Nabor’s lineage are the significant contributions of non-Christian cultures such as the pioneering innovations of the Ancient Greeks and the influence of the Iroquois Confederacy. It is hard not to read in Nabor’s commentary the desire to take us back to idealized olden-days, when the unconverted of this land could be relegated to a “howling” in the “wilderness,” and that one’s “results” in life are exclusively due “to God.”

Eagleexit’s vision seems rooted in Leave It to Beaver simplicity, but our world is much more complex and diverse than that. Democracy didn’t stop developing with the Revolution, and it shouldn’t stop now, but let’s move forward, not back.