One of the relatively new hot topics in the ever-intensifying American culture war is the idea of a “national divorce”, which is a term used to describe a potential breakup of the United States into two or more sovereign states. “Relatively new” because the recent national conversation about a potential political breakup is mostly a product of the burgeoning culture wars and deep political and social divides in the US reaching levels that are unbearable for many, who turn to “unconventional” proposals as a potential remedy to this problem. Presidential and midterm elections increasingly seem like battles for the soul of the country with everything at stake. As a result, many Americans view being ruled by the opposing party in the government akin to being under foreign invasion. These seemingly irreconcilable differences in ideological and cultural splits between political factions in the country have raised questions whether all Americans have to live under a single, overarching federal government, or if they should go their separate ways with separate states and governmental structures. Widespread mainstream talk of secession popped up around 2 years ago when polls showed a surprising percentage of the population either outright supporting the idea of secession or showing a “willingness to secede”, especially Republicans and people in the South. “National Divorce” was even trending on twitter at the end of December of 2021. The topic was propelled to relevance again in late February this year when Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted about the necessity of national divorce to free Americans unwilling to put up with “woke culture issues shoved down their throats” and “the Democrat’s traitorous America Last policies”. There might be some semantic problems with the term “national divorce” in the first place, which frames the union of American states as a marriage that simply can’t be held together anymore and has to be tragically discontinued as a result. Republicans could arguably do better optics-wise than to portray themselves as battered and abused wives in an unhappy marriage with Democrats. At any rate, this framing was used by Jennifer Graham of The Deseret News to advocate ruling out secession as an option, much like some married couples rule out ever mentioning divorce as an option as a strategy for a healthy, long-lasting marriage. Some, like Richard Kreitner in his interview for The Atlantic, points out that the U.S. has always had a troubled marriage but persevered as a union anyways. Even though pundits like these would like to sweep this whole thing under the rug and have everyone simply forget about it, they can’t change the fact that ideas like this are getting more and more attention and are becoming more and more attractive to an increasing percentage of the American citizenry.

Most readers of the Springtime of Nations blog won’t need to be convinced of the benefits and morality of secession in this article. It’s a safe bet that most of you have already absorbed that material and those arguments, so arguing for the breakup of the US in this article would be superfluous, considering how many times it’s already been done. For those of you who are new to this particular topic and do need an overview of it, Ryan McMaken’s new book “Breaking Away: The Case for Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities” should do a great job at getting you up to speed. The point here isn’t to state our case on the matter or hanker for pan-secessionism like we usually do, but to analyze the political conversations and attitudes regarding the concept and prospects of a “national divorce” in the US (albeit with a clear secessionist bias, we never claimed to be impartial).

What one could call the “mainstream”, “establishment”, “respectable” position on the issue could be partly summarized by a passage in David French’s recent opinion piece in the New York Times:

“The very idea is absurd. It’s incompatible with the Constitution. It’s dangerous. It’s unworkable. It would destroy the economy, dislocate millions of Americans and destabilize the globe. Even in the absence of a civil war — it’s beyond unlikely that vast American armies would clash the way they did from 1861 to 1865 — national separation would almost certainly be a violent mess. There is only one way to describe an actual American divorce: an unmitigated disaster, for America and the world.”

The aforementioned column was also predictably riddled with imagery from the Civil War and modern Republicans waving confederate flags. This seems to be a recurring theme among articles and opinion pieces in mainstream journals. Take, for example, Ed Kilgore’s 2021 article for the New York Magazine’s Intelligencer, which greets you with a painting of Confederate troops firing on Fort Sumter. The article cites a poll from the University of Virginia Center for Politics which found that “52 percent of Trump voters said they now favored red states “seceding from the union to form their own separate country,” compared with 41 percent of Biden voters who said the same about blue states”. In light of these findings, Kilgore sternly warns in the title of the article that “No, We Can’t Get a National Divorce” and that there will be no secession for “red state rebels”. Despite the fact that there are plenty — not to mention historically very recent — examples of secession which were conducted neatly and painlessly, American pundits and common opinion can’t seem to shake the view that a territorial breakup would necessitate a long, bloody ideological civil war. Hence the constant invocations of the Confederacy whenever the topic of secession pops up. Some regard this apparent inevitability of a civil war in a hypothetical breakup of the U.S. as a dreadful consequence which in itself acts as a huge reason to avoid secession at all costs, while others go as far as to claim it would be a moral duty to fight against the dissolution of the “indivisible”, divinely ordained Union (if nothing else, at least to protect the rights of marginalized groups which would be invariably oppressed in the red areas of this New America, the argument goes). These attitudes stem from the fact that Americans have been used to being under a unitary federal government for a century and a half so they’ve practically come to see it as the default political system (not to downplay the role that propagandization played in shaping and solidifying these attitudes, of course). For most of their history after the civil war, they weren’t even sure why anyone would agitate for secession or breaking away from a larger polity in the first place. “Why couldn’t everyone just get along?” was basically the average American’s reaction to the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.

Setting aside the whole civil war issue, there are a plethora of other concerns which cause unease among Americans, both pundits and ordinary folk, with regards to the practical consequences of secession. According to them, the results would include, but not be limited to, a disastrous economic collapse and a likely civil war, isolation from the rest of the world both economically and geopolitically (which would give China license to steamroll and take over Taiwan and likewise with Russia with regards to Ukraine and the rest of the former Soviet Union), massive population transfers, troubles with determining which territory will belong to which polity (such as blue areas in red states and vice-versa) etc. These pessimistic attitudes can be exemplified by novelist and journalist Stephen Marche’s 2022 book “The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future”. His prognosis claims that America may very well be headed toward a civil war, unless disputes between the deeply divided populace be resolved peacefully.

Despite all the doom and gloom that surrounds your typical discussions of American secession, there are and were figures in the mainstream which stray from this established path. It’s well known that Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections caused vast amounts of shock and despair to America’s left-liberals of all stripes. They initially had a hard time accepting and understanding how their conservative countrymen could be so bigoted and hateful, and some of them had just about enough. Thus, an article from The New Republic proclaimed that “It’s Time For a Bluexit” back in march 2017. The “California Freedom Coalition”(CFC) was founded in the same year with the goal of winning independence for the state of California, among other things. More recently, a month and a half after the January 6th riot, The Nation made “The Case For Blue-State Secession”. Common themes and talking points can be quickly identified when reading center-left commentary which either gives credence to the idea of secession or tries to snarkily advise conservatives against it for their own good. The typical argument goes as follows: in the case of secession, the blue areas of the country would get all the cool stuff like Hollywood and all the good celebrities, vibrant diverse cities, a tolerant population with a relative lack of bigotry and prejudice, and economic prosperity. One of their favorite talking points is that red states are currently handsomely federally subsidized by blue-state taxpayers, and would financially fare much worse in a situation where they would have to strike out on their own, without getting bailed out by the more productive and prosperous parts of America. Whatever one might think about the validity of these arguments, the point is that the national divorce debate has a fair number of people on both sides of the issue from all segments of the political spectrum, which isn’t the case with most political topics.

This brings us to the “right wing” side of things. Just as we’ve seen that the left doesn’t have a consensus on this issue, the same is true of the right. Not only that, the same is true for different sections of the right wing as well. As such, you have the republican conservatives that are unwilling to keep sharing a country with “the insane woke democrats” who want to teach Critical Race Theory to their kids and have them subjected to drag queen story hour, but you also have conservatives who view this proposed solution with deep suspicion. According to them, right-wingers who clamor for secession are childish escapists looking for the easy way out. They want to hand-wave the issues that they face and pretend like they don’t exist by “surrendering half the country to the leftists” and isolating themselves to their ideologically pure safe-space, effectively giving up the cultural battle for the soul of the country. The people who criticize this approach believe that the right-wing should impose their values and vision of what America should be via government decree, instead of letting leftists be able to do whatever they want in their part of the country. Paleocon author Scott Greer, one of the biggest dissident right voices in opposition to the idea of a national breakup, found it contradictory that the same conservatives who mock the idea of “starting your own banking system/internet” as a solution to big-tech censorship regard the idea of “starting your own country” as brilliant and realistic.

Not even the libertarians are in full agreement on the topic. This divide could be neatly explained by examining two very different types of libertarians, their principles, political goals and values and how they overlap with the national divorce question. The libertarians whose ideological dispositions stem from a radical anti-state and anti-ruling elite tradition, those who advocate a complete overhaul of the current order, almost invariably throw their support behind secessionist efforts, both at home and abroad. In contrast, beltway libertarians and think-tank policy wonks, who are generally utilitarians and weak on ideological principles, tend to take a very skeptical view of the prospects and desirability of American secession. The differences in the attitudes these two groups take in regards to national divorce are exemplified by the debate between the chair of the Libertarian National Committee, Angela McCardle, and senior producer at Reason, Zach Weissmuller, which will come out in the May 2023 issue of Reason Magazine. McMardle’s arguments were supported by calls for increased political self-determination, peaceful co-existence with each political faction going their own way undisturbed, and increased cultural cohesion. Weissmuller, on the other hand, regarded the whole talk of national divorce as nothing but petty tribalism. In his view, proponents of a national breakup cherry-pick and exaggerate the differences in Americans’ political and cultural worldviews to be able to falsely paint them as irreconcilable. He claims secession would lead to “unrestrained state and local governments” and erect immigration barriers between the newly formed American countries, effectively crippling the ability to “vote with your feet”. He instead proposes “leveraging the federalism that the constitution guarantees” and civil disobedience “when necessary” and calls it a “national renegotiation”.

Finally, we must realize that there is tremendous value in topics like secession breaking themselves from the fringes and seeping into the mainstream, essentially forcing journalists, commentators and other pundits to think about and grapple with them. Any given political or cultural climate will have its taboos, which usually exist for the same reason. Since it can always only constitute a small ruling elite in every society, the state needs obedience and, at the very least, passive acceptance of its power and authority from its subjects. Brute force and physical repression usually don’t go over very well in the minds of the populace, so the ruling class must ensure their approval while still retaining the privileges of being able to do what they want unimpeded. They want to make their subjects believe that their rule is beneficial, even though this idea flies in the face of reality when logically examined. Not only do they wish to propagate ideas which paint their rule in a positive light, they also wish to extinguish or at least marginalize the ideas that might lead one to desire a meaningfully change of the status quo. But again, they generally can’t be too blatant about this, as it’ll have a similar effect as any other repressive measure, so they have to be more clever about achieving their wanted results. The state found a neat solution to this problem in utilizing what Rothbard called “the new, modern alliance between throne and altar”, referring to the alliance of the technocratic, managerial elite with the intelligentsia which began in the onset of the progressive era. The intellectuals, the opinion molders of society, provide an intellectual cover to the state and its acts, and the state in turn provides the intellectuals cushy and prestigious jobs in the state apparatus. The political-ideological climate created by court intellectuals invariably creates a “respectable political spectrum”, from which any deviation gets you labeled as a persona non grata by the journalists, pundits and academics. The existence of this spectrum is crucial for the maintenance of state authority and of the status quo, for if ideas which undermine said status quo were freely and inconsequentially discussed, this would eventually spell disaster for the ruling elite and its power. Let’s not forget that the state still doesn’t want to come off as repressive and unjust while engaging in all of these antics and wishes to keep its subjects thinking that they live in an open society with complete freedom of thought and inquiry (party thanks to the state itself). It tries to solve this apparent paradox by labeling all dissident heterodox viewpoints as “dangerous misinformation” disseminated by “hateful extremists, conspiracy theorists, anti-democratic bigots” etc. As Noam Chomsky put it: “the smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum”. Whatever the outcome of the national divorce debate may be, at least one benefit of it is that the powers that be aren’t happy with the fact that their subjects are dissatisfied with them enough to begin seriously considering it. May a thousand flowers bloom!