Don’t Listen to Anyone Who Thinks Secession Will Solve Anything
It has become almost as a histamine response: after a shocking national event like the assassination of Charlie Kirk or Donald Trump’s military deployment in Los Angeles last June, mentions of the term “civil war” and calls for secession multiply online. This kind of talk resumed in January, when two citizens were shot and killed by immigration agents on the streets of Minneapolis, and Gov. Tim Walz mobilized the Minnesota National Guard to be ready to support local law enforcement. “I mean, is this a Fort Sumter?” Walz said in an interview with The Atlantic, discussing the battle that started the Civil War. On a more nonsensical note, former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura urged the state to secede from the United States and become part of Canada. “I think someone should seriously contact Canada and ask if they are open to this,” he said.
These two statements from men who have held the same office sketch out quite well the broad outlines of the popular discourse on American fragmentation: a spiraling civil war is the nightmare, an orderly secession is the dream. But is it really possible to have one without the other? And what would secession in the United States actually look like?
Since the 1990s, some Silicon Valley futurists have coldly predicted the breakup of an obsolete American nation-state – without really specifying any grisly details. And the old meme that jokingly divides North America into blue “United States of Canada” and red “Jesus Country” has been around since the mid-2000s. But as red America and blue America have become more polarized on almost every issue over the years, a growing number of people on all sides have concluded that a secessionist breakup is indeed the best solution to America’s irreconcilable differences. “We need a national divorce. We need to split into red states and blue states,” said Marjorie Taylor Greene, then a Republican congresswoman from Georgia in 2023. “Everyone I talk to says that.” (This was more or less the plot of the 2024 hit film Civil war.)
Hoping to channel this angst, a handful of organized independence movements – such as California’s Calexit and the Texas Nationalist Movement, among others – have emerged in recent years and enjoyed growing support. A 2023 Axios poll showed that 20% of Americans favor a “national divorce.” And in a YouGov poll released days after Trump’s second inauguration, about 61 percent of Californians agreed with the statement that their state “would be better off if it seceded peacefully.”
But that’s the problem. The truth is that secession, the process by which part of a sovereign state breaks away to form a new one, is still tortured. Most secessionist projects fail and about half result in violence. When secession occurs peacefully, as in the case of the Velvet Divorce in Czechoslovakia, it is almost always because there is a nationally distinct and regionally concentrated population that has an internal border and a special administrative status that can be used to justify its claim to independence. None of these characteristics hold true in the contemporary United States.
In reality, red America and blue America are intimately mixed. Political divisions don’t just cross states: blue California has millions of Republicans; red Texas, millions of Democrats, but also neighborhoods and even households. A secession scenario motivated by ideological reasons would almost inevitably require a dangerous unmixing and re-sorting of Americans. Imagine trying to draw a new coherent map while satisfying as many people as possible in a hyper-polarized environment; then imagine a series of security dilemmas, stranded populations and fleeing refugees. This happened during the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 and the partition of Cyprus in 1974; it would probably happen in America too.
