One way or another, the United States is coming to an end. The divisions have become intractable. The political parties are irreconcilable. The capacity for government to make policy is diminishing. The icons of national unity are losing their power to represent. The threat multipliers from economic and environmental sources are driving an underlying tribalism that is shredding the ability of the political order to respond to threats against its own stability. The Constitution is becoming incoherent.
One possible conclusion is violence. The other is civilized separation. At this point, disunion is among the best-case scenarios for the United States.
Secession would not be a failure, given the tensions tearing the United States apart. Separatism is a worldwide political trend. The number of states in the world has tripled since 1945. And there will soon be more. “Right now, there are about sixty secessionist movements worldwide. Sixty independence movements is a pretty large number by historical standards,” says Ryan Griffiths, a professor at Syracuse University who focuses on the dynamics of secession and the study of sovereignty. “In the long run, there will be another secessionist movement in the United States. It will just happen. No country is permanent. It will change. It will break apart in some way.” One way of breaking apart requires mass death. The other requires political courage and the ability to face hard truths.
The first hard truth that needs facing is the most basic: that the United States no longer functions as a nation. The ideas that motivated its system no longer convince. The symbols that once unified its people no longer hold up. The country no longer makes sense.
American tolerance for the idea of secession has been rapidly growing. In 2014, Reuters asked Americans, “Do you support or oppose the idea of your state peacefully withdrawing from the United States of America and the federal government?” One in four supported leaving. That’s not one in four from states with active secessionist movements. That’s one in four from the Union as a whole. America’s taste for secessionism has never faded. Even in the country’s most unified periods, it has always remained a sometimes violent force in the United States’ history of overlapping and competing identities.
Since Trump’s election, intellectuals on both sides have started arguing, tentatively, for an American separation. The Federalist, from the right, has argued that “we both now agree that living under the other side’s value system is wholly unacceptable.” The New Republic, from the left, shared the sentiment: “Let’s face it, guys: We’re done.” American divorce, for the partisans, is a thought experiment, mostly just a chance to explain, in detail, how monstrous the other side is. “The GOP has many problems, but the Democratic Party has turned into something completely un-American. The United States was founded on two things: Judeo-Christian values and a limited federal government,” the Federalist can say. The New Republic has a chance to indulge its contempt to the fullest: “Go ahead, keep on voting against your own economic interests to satisfy your need to control other people’s bodies, sex lives, and recreational habits.” More recent books, from both sides, have taken the issue much more seriously, such as Break It Up by Richard Kreitner and Divided We Fall by David French. Every year secession becomes more popular and every year its arguments become more legitimate.
The dream of disunion is far from a mere thought experiment at this point. Serious people, more of them all the time, are imagining realistic scenarios, planning, and organizing. As the identity of the United States dies, new identities and new loyalties—loyalties to countries that don’t yet exist—are emerging.
The United States might well be better off as separate countries. How would it happen? For all the rhetoric of secession, for all the talk, almost no one, either in the media or in the political establishment, bothers with the specifics. They simply assume that if enough people support secession, it will happen. That assumption is naive. Secession is not easy. Ask any independence movement.
A national separation is a bureaucratic nightmare. Uncertainty over small questions of daily life like pensions and passports is a major reason why Scotland and Quebec are not independent nations today. How would the national debt be divided? Would dual citizenship be permitted? What amendments to the Constitution would be necessary to make secession possible? How would a state decide which country to belong to? What would the terms of new confederations look like? What would happen to the military?
If the pressure to split the United States grew, either through democratic means or through mass violence, how would the government of the United States respond? How would a new Philadelphia Convention, a de–Constitutional Convention, carve up the country? How would a broken America, with a half-legitimate president and fifty governors, work toward becoming future countries?
The United States would have to agree to break up. It would have to know that the time had come. But then there is the question of how it would break. Along which lines? Who would break from whom? The first question facing the negotiators won’t be “How should America be divided?” It will be “How is America divided?”
Simple political disagreement is not enough to make separation realistic. Regions don’t tend to secede over political differences. “The main factor that drives the desire for independence, that makes it possible, is having a separate or ethnic identity,” says Jason Sorens, a political scientist at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, and a leading scholar of secessionist movements. “We don’t have a state that has that identity.” Puerto Rico isn’t a state. Hawaii, the only non-white majority state, has an Indigenous population vastly outnumbered by Asian Americans.
That’s not to say that political differences never lead to secessionist movements, but they are usually at least underpinned by regional identities. The Northern League of Italy is motivated by political differences between the northern states and the central government, but those states had also survived as independent states for centuries before Italian unification. Even in America’s first civil war, the issue of slavery was, beyond question, the primary cause of the war, but secession was possible because the Southern partisans believed they were citizens of their states before they were citizens of their country. It is identity that matters, the sense of belonging to a nation. In Canada, Quebec shares, to a surprising degree, the same political vision as the rest of the country—on education, on health care, on the role of government—but Quebecois are a distinct people, defined by a language and a history. Therefore, they have a large and active separatist movement.
This is essential to understanding the possibility of American secession: mere political differences won’t be enough. It is a question of identity and of whether the divisions of American politics are becoming identity differences. The anger overwhelming American politics, the hyper-partisanship, does not tend to separatism in itself. “You would need to see a gradual unmixing of these populations, and the cultivation of some idea of nation or consciousness. There are maybe glimmerings of that,” Griffiths says. The dark glimmerings of the new separation are that, slowly but consistently, Americans are hiving themselves off into concentrated ethnic identities.
The beauty of the United States as a country is its mixtures. As a country, on all levels, it possesses an extraordinary ability to be many things at once. America is difference. Difference defines it. Differences of opinion. Differences of race. Differences of religion. Differences between the rich and the poor. America has always been overwhelmed with its multiplicity, a country that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense by standards other than its own; it has always been a huge mass of contradictions. And any countries that could emerge out of the United States would themselves be masses of contradiction.
In 1981, Washington Post editor Joel Garreau had a bestseller with The Nine Nations of North America, in which he divided the continent into categories that included Ecotopia on the West Coast, New England on the East, and Dixie to the South. An updated 2011 version of Garreau’s argument, American Nations by Colin Woodard, expanded the number to eleven. Regional identity is more complex than North and South. The South, for Woodard, contains six different nations. The East and the West Coasts contain multiple nations. And neither Garreau nor Woodard deal with Native Americans except as a lump. There are over five hundred federally registered tribes in the United States. And African Americans, as a distinct category, don’t figure in either description.
The country is divided, not only by every available economic and social metric, but also by personality. In 2013, a group of British and American psychologists carved the United States into three “psychological regions” by large-scale psychometric analyses. “Psychological factors are likely to be the driving forces behind the individual-level behaviors that eventually get expressed in terms of macrolevel social and economic indicators,” they hypothesized. They divided America into a “relaxed and creative region” on the West Coast “marked by low Extraversion and Agreeableness, very low Neuroticism, and very high Openness”; a “temperamental and uninhibited” region of the mid-Atlantic and Northeast “defined by low Extraversion, very low Agreeableness and Conscientiousness, very high Neuroticism, and moderately high Openness”; and the “friendly and conventional” region of the South and Middle, “defined by moderately high levels of Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness, moderately low Neuroticism, and very low Openness.” Their research shows the emotional depth of the divide in the United States. “The most common explanations for the American political divide point to religion, racial diversity, education or wealth,” they write. “The present findings suggest another explanation for the differences, stemming from the psychological characteristics of residents.”
The psychological characteristics play out in a variety of social and cultural differences, and those social and cultural differences can easily be defined geographically. Gun ownership is much more likely in the South and the Midwest than in the Northeast or the Pacific Coast. Proximity to abortion access is much more limited there. Corporal punishment in schools is still legal in much of the South and the Midwest. Church attendance is much higher. The percentages of marriages that are same-sex is much lower. And those important social differences—differences fundamentally in the way of life—correspond to which states voted Democratic and which states voted Republican in the 2016 election. And that political divide further corresponds to which states were free states and which states were slave states before the Civil War. These profound distinctions are geographical and they are entrenched. Blue America. Red America. They’re real.
The reason that Republicans and Democrats feel occupied is that both are. Blue America and Red America represent two identities, two styles of life, the mostly white and rural against the mostly multicultural and urban. In the 2018 election, density was the single strongest determinant of who voted Democratic and who voted Republican, with eight hundred people per square mile being the cutoff. Below that number, 66 percent vote Republican. Above it, 66 percent vote Democratic. The year 2018 saw the urban-rural divide in the United States become total: there are no urban Republican congressional districts left. The last one to fall was Staten Island. The pockets of political differences within states—Austin in Texas or the rural parts of southern Illinois—have come to resemble ethnic enclaves.
Each of these Americas promises a Utopia. Red America promises a country where government defers to individual rights, where the traditional family is the bedrock of society, where ordinary people live by the power of faith. Blue America promises a country of open ideas in which people can live by whatever values they choose and where distinct communities work together toward a more rational future. It’s easy to flip these Utopias over. Red America is a bunch of macho hypocrite rednecks. Blue America is a bunch of latte-sipping wimps. Each side accuses the other of hating America, which is only another way of saying that both hate what the other means by America. The pleasure of contempt for the other side has launched media empires: Rush Limbaugh and Fox News for the red, Jon Stewart and MSNBC for the blue. Loathing is the principal emotion that America’s political entertainment industry sells.
On both sides, the sense of being under occupation dominates. It doesn’t matter where you go or who you talk to. The Black teenagers in Baltimore and St. Louis feel under occupation by the police. The ranchers in Texas and Oregon feel under occupation by the federal government. Every political faction operates under a siege mentality—the Democrats from the Republican political machine; the Republicans from demographics, from immigration, from popular culture. Everyone wants to build a wall of one kind or another.
The geographical divide between the competing American Utopias means that, in every election, whoever loses comes to feel like they’ve been dominated by a foreign power. The response is always the same: Begin by delegitimizing the president—“Obama is a Kenyan” or “Trump is not my president”—then proceed by arguing for a shift in power away from the federal government. Red America has argued for states’ rights from well before the Civil War. Blue America is finally starting to come around. “If I live in a blue city, I have my way of life. If you live in a red state or a red city, you have your way of life,” the urbanist Richard Florida argued in a recent interview. “The way to lower the stakes is to make the Imperial presidency and the nation-state less important.” The way across the political divide, in other words, is to accept it. Federalism is tolerable only when my side is in power. The appetite for secession is always highest in presidential out-party states.
And if you imagine a miraculous political figure emerging from the American middle to fulfill the by now cliché political imperative to “unite, not divide,” the bad news is your dreams have already come true. There was a president who preached unity and hope. The other side insisted he was a Kenyan and brought a man who denied his citizenship to power. Significant portions of the United States believed that their government was controlled by a foreign power, as a significant number of Americans came to believe that Russian interference was the primary explanation for the election of Donald Trump. Biden in power has changed nothing. He is most effective insofar as he has abandoned bipartisanship rather than restored it.
America is already countries within the same country. In 2004, the journalist Bill Bishop coined the term the “big sort” to describe how Americans of different political beliefs are self-selecting away from each other. The choices people make aren’t necessarily political: few people move from, say, Los Angeles to rural Texas explicitly because they want to be around Republicans rather than Democrats. But as partisan politics comes to define Americans’ sense of themselves, the decisions they make about who they are and what kind of lives they want to lead inevitably place them in one tribe or another. They want to be in Texas rather than California, and that means the people they want to be around tend to be Republicans rather than Democrats. People who move to Texas go there for its spirit of freedom and individualism as well as its opportunities; they just happen to move into Republican territory.
Since 2004, the big sort has increased in intensity, both nationally and within states. And the trend is pretty much exactly what you’d expect. It’s bicoastal, with more Democrats moving to New England and to the mid-Atlantic and Pacific regions and more Republicans moving to the Midwest and the South. This is the key to the future of the United States as a political entity. The polarization is geographical. Americans with different politics are moving farther away from each other physically as well as ideologically. The separation feeds back into the political system. More states become single-party states, like California and Texas. Ideological unity replaces open debates. The geography of the national government, and the way it apportions power, become distorted. Huge geographical inequalities are baked into the system of government—which is, after all, nearly 250 years old. Sixty-two senators represent one quarter of the American population. Six senators represent another quarter. The same discrepancy, though to a much lesser extent, causes presidential victories without the popular vote, which further skews the power imbalance.
Within that big sort, there’s also been a small sort. American politicians have spent decades breaking their country up into ever more bizarrely contorted districts in order to engineer victories. The technological sophistication of gerrymandering, the quantity and quality of information available for carving up regions into noncompetitive strongholds, keeps advancing. The name of the game is “incumbent protection,” and it works. Whoever is in power, on either side, forges the structures to keep themselves in power. Everybody wants democracy but nobody wants democracy. Gerrymandering leads, quite naturally, to voter suppression, which is increasingly an overt tactic. Once you’ve started making your opponents’ votes matter less by fixing the district, why not make it harder for your opponents to vote in the first place by moving the polling places to less convenient locations? Once you’ve done that, why not simply suppress their vote by any means available?
Each small decision, undertaken for tactical reasons, erodes, slowly but surely, the political system as a whole. The American people don’t want to be around the other side and whenever possible choose not to be. Their leaders don’t want to engage in meaningful competition of political ideas and don’t need to. America is being shaken like a sieve, separating Democrat from Republican into political, social, intellectual, geographical fortresses. The sorting makes life easier for everybody. The only thing that suffers is American democracy.
The men who are planning the destruction of the United States are cheerful men, open, frank, and ambitious. They are very American in their plots against America.
Daniel Miller, head of the Texas Nationalist Movement, lives in Nederland, a town of 17,000 on the Gulf Coast. The TNM is the latest iteration of a decades-old movement. Like the Scottish National Party or many other separatist movements, it began in lunatic fringes and fractured sects divided by method and ideology and then coalesced. The Republic of Texas movement in the 1970s, by Miller’s description, “splintered into a thousand pieces” after two years. In the 1990s, five Texas separatists were involved in a standoff with federal authorities. Some were shot. The others were sentenced to extensive prison sentences. “When we were founded in 2005, any of the polling data we could find put us in single digits. And it hovered that way for a long time,” Miller says. Fast-forward to 2014, around the time of the Scottish Independence referendum, when Reuters/Ipsos polled Texans and found that 36 percent believed that Texas should secede. And that was during a period of relative political unity in hindsight.
The California separatist movement is much newer and so less established. But in January 2017, Reuters revealed that 32 percent of Californians supported California becoming its own independent state, a number roughly in line with several other polls at the time. Another 13 percent weren’t sure. The leader of the Calexit movement, Marcus Ruiz Evans, lives in Fresno, a city of half a million in the San Joaquin Valley. The election of Trump spiked interest in the movement, but, for Evans at least, the desire to escape American politics dated to the Iraq War, widely supported in the United States as a whole but not by California. Diverging politics has led to profound contempt for the federal government, which Evans calls “a horrible abusive relationship that’s gone on for thirty years.”
Unlike separatist movements in the rest of the world, neither the Texas Nationalist Movement nor the Calexit movement have formed their own parties. They don’t need to. California and Texas are single-party states. Democrats have not won a statewide election in Texas since 1994. The Republicans have taken Texas in every presidential election since 1976. They have controlled the state legislature since 2003. In California, only 25 percent of registered voters are Republicans. San Francisco has not had a Republican mayor since 1964. Democrats in California hold every statewide office. Because of their unusual ballot system, where the top two candidates face each other in Senate races, Democrats run against Democrats. America may be Democratic and Republican, but Texas and California are not. Both states have, in a sense, already separated from half the country.
Because both states are single-party states, Calexit and Texit advocates press their cases through the dominant party, whose partisan identity is already built on the rejection of the other side. At the Texas GOP convention in 2016, the Texas secessionists came two votes shy of having the matter reach the convention floor for a full vote. The number of GOP county conventions that passed independence resolutions remains in dispute, but it’s somewhere between 10 and 22 out of 270, which is more than the single county that passed such a resolution in 2012.
“We have got support of rank-and-file Republican voters,” Miller explains. “The challenge that we have run into is that when it comes to leadership in Texas, particularly the Republican leadership, they all have their eyes set on a federal office, and the paycheck and benefits that comes with it.” Republican leaders in Texas play a dangerous game. They flirt with separatism but won’t go all the way. They know the majority of their base loves the rhetoric of Texas independence but they also know it’s Utopian. Miller blames careerism more than cynicism. “The leadership talks out of both sides of their mouth. They love to tease supporters of independence to get their votes. They one hundred percent every time fail to deliver.” Former governor Rick Perry often mused about the possibilities of secession, but it never amounted to anything.
Miller recalls meeting with Rick Perry’s legislative director, a former state senator, who promised that Perry would never run for federal office, and within two weeks he had announced his candidacy. “You’ll hear them read these applause lines. The current governor, Greg Abbott, is the absolute worst at this,” Miller says. “He loves, when he gives his stump speeches, to the throw the line out there, ‘If Texas were its own nation,’ then he rattles off some wonderful economic statistic about how we measure up against all the nations of the world. Invariably it’s his largest applause line. It gives people this mistaken impression that Abbott is really a fan, maybe secretly, of Texas independence. But Abbott is one of the guys who works overtime behind the scenes to torpedo a lot of things we have done.” The politicians like Abbott who indulge in separatist rhetoric know they won’t be tested, so they can play games. When Scots or Catalans or Quebecois say they want to split, they mean it. Abbott is indulging in dreams. The rhetoric is allowed to expand, to float free of consequence, at least for him, at least for the moment.
Californian politicians indulge in separatist rhetoric less often than Texans do, although it is sometimes blurted out. Jerry Brown, on a visit to China, spoke of his state like it was its own country. “It is a little bold to talk about California-China partnership as if we were a separate nation, but we are a separate nation,” he said. “We’re a state of mind.” Even if he was joking, California under his leadership has resisted the federal government with far more than just talk. They have veered toward nullification. Sometimes they have more than veered. Attorney General Jeff Sessions came to California to speak against their policy of sanctuary cities because it was in violation of federal authority. “There is no secession,” the attorney general felt required to insist. “Federal law is the supreme law of the land. I would invite any doubters to go to Gettysburg, or to the tombstones of John C. Calhoun and Abraham Lincoln. This matter has been settled.” Well, has it? That’s the question. Maybe the matter was once settled. It is becoming unsettled again.