Hey, Don't Leave Us Behind!

Western Maryland secessionists seek to sever ties with the liberal Free State

West Virginia was the last state to break off from another. Now, 150 years later, a 49-year-old information technology consultant wants to apply the knife to Maryland’s five western counties. “The people are the sovereign,” says Scott Strzelczyk, leader of the fledgling Western Maryland Initiative, and the western sovereigns are fed up with Annapolis’s liberal majority, elected by the state’s other sovereigns.

I might be a little sensitive, but I think I'm detecting a touch of "STFU and take it, we won" in that last sentence.

“If you think you have a long list of grievances and it’s been going on for decades, and you can’t get it resolved, ultimately this is what you have to do,” says Strzelczyk, who lives in New Windsor, a historic town of 1,400 people in Carroll County. “Otherwise you are trapped.”
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What’s different now is how the secession efforts illuminate a hard truth about the country: The rural-urban divide is increasingly a point of political conflict. The population boom in urban areas such as Baltimore and the Maryland suburbs near the District, the Boulder-Denver areas in Colorado, and in Detroit have filled state legislatures with liberal policymakers pushing progressive agendas out of sync with rural residents, who feel increasingly isolated and marginalized.

In Maryland, the five western counties — Garrett, Allegany, Washington, Frederick and Carroll — represent just 11 percent of Maryland’s population, according to 2010 Census figures. They earn less than the people who live in more urban areas. They vote overwhelmingly for Republicans in a deeply Democratic state. Nearly 90 percent of the residents are white, compared with 51 percent elsewhere. About 60 percent were born in Maryland vs. 46 percent in other parts of the state.

Obama (blue) vs Romeny (red) in Maryland 2012 election by county

As noted in the article, such rural/urban secessionist movements crop up periodically all over the county.  I remember being regaled by a proponent of Northern California and Southern Oregon rebelling from their urban masters while trying to grab a hamburger in a joint in Shasta, California sometime in the 60s (or maybe the early 70s?), who proposed to form the new state of Jeffersonia. They never succeed (or secede?), or at least not since West By Virginia in the throes of the Civil War.  But they do tend to indicate intensity of resistance to the tyranny of the majority.

I just wish that the boys out west would look at the electoral map of Maryland and realize that it's not a case of east versus west, it is the city versus the countryside.   Baltimore City, Baltimore County, and the D.C. suburb counties of Montgomery, Prince Georges and Charles went heavily for Obama.  In addition to the 5 counties who wish to secede, the three western shore counties, and virtually all the rural northeastern and eastern shore counties voted for Romney.  Perhaps if they broadened their appeal to the other less counties out of the urban core their concerns would get more respect.