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It’s almost become Such as the histamine response: after a traumatic national event such as an assassination Charlie Kirkor Donald Trump’s deployment of the military to Los Angeles last June, mentions the term “civil war“Calls for secession are mounting online. This kind of talk flared up again in January, when two citizens were shot dead by immigration agents on the streets. MinneapolisGov. Tim Walz mobilized the Minnesota National Guard to be ready to support local law enforcement. “I mean, is this Fort Sumter?” Waltz said in interview With the Atlantic Ocean, recalling the battle that sparked the Civil War. In a more complicated record, former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura urged the state to secede from the United States and become part of Canada. “I think someone should seriously call Canada and ask them if they are open to this,” he said.
These two statements by men who held the same office nicely delineate the basic outlines of popular discourse about American fragmentation: escalating civil war is the nightmare, and arranged secession is the dream. But is it really possible to have one without the other? What would secession actually look like in the United States?
Since the 1990s, some Silicon Valley futurists have coldly predicted a collapse of the outdated American nation-state — without specifying any apocalyptic details. The old idea of jokingly dividing North America into the blue “United States of Canada” and the red “Jesus Land” has been around since the mid-2000s. But as red and blue America have become increasingly polarized on almost every issue in the years since, a growing number of people of all stripes have come to the conclusion that separatist secession is actually the best solution to America’s irreconcilable differences. “We need a national divorce. We need to separate red states and blue states,” then-Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia posted in 2023. “Everyone I talk to says this.” (This was the plot of the 2024 hit movie.) Civil war.)
Hoping to channel this concern, a small group of organized independence movements—such as the Calixist Movement in California and the Nationalist Movement in Texas, among others—have emerged in recent years and have seen growing support. Axios 2023 Poll Show 20% of Americans favor “national divorce.” In a YouGov poll, released days after Trump’s second inauguration, about 61% of Californians showed that Agreed While declaring that their country “would be better off if it seceded peacefully.”
But that’s the rub. The truth is that secession, the process by which part of a sovereign state separates to form a new state, is always tortured. Most separatist projects fail, and about half of them turn into violence. When secession ends peacefully, as in the Velvet Divorce in Czechoslovakia, this almost always occurs because of the presence of a nationally distinct and territorially concentrated population with internal borders and some special administrative status that can be used to justify their claim to independence. None of these characteristics are available in the contemporary United States.
In fact, red and blue America are inextricably intertwined. Political divisions are not limited to states, as blue California includes millions of Republicans; Red Texas, millions of Democrats – but also neighborhoods and even families. An ideologically driven secession scenario would inevitably impose a dangerous process of dismantling and re-sorting of Americans. Imagine trying to draw a new map that is coherent but still satisfies the largest number of people in a highly polarized environment; Then imagine a series of security dilemmas, stranded populations, and fleeing refugees. This happened when India and Pakistan were partitioned in 1947 and when Cyprus was partitioned in 1974; It will likely happen in America as well.