The Case For (and Against) Blue and Red State America Going Their Separate Ways

The Washington Post is wrapping up 2021 with a look at why Blue and Red State America may need to part company and all the obstacles that stand in their way.  The article focuses on two quasi-nation states, Texas and California.

A survey published in September by the University of Virginia Center for Politics, for example, found that 41 percent of Biden voters and 52 percent of Trump voters at least “somewhat agree” that “the situation in America” makes them favor blue or red states “seceding from the union to form their own separate country.”

Secession as an actual political program “is being normalized in an unwinding and degrading country,” Richard Kreitner told Antonia Hitchens for her recent Atlantic article about the secessionist movement in Oregon that proposes to make a large rural swath of the state part of Idaho. Kreitner, whose book about secession, “Break It Up,” was published last year, said the Oregon proposal should be taken as “a peace proposal, or a way to avoid war.”

Talk of secession is still mostly just talk, but wouldn’t it be a civilized way to deal with the deep divisions in the country? Wouldn’t it beat, say, the civil war that a restive segment of the population hungers for? “When do we get to use the guns?” a young man asked Charlie Kirk at Kirk’s far-right Turning Point USA rally in Boise, Idaho, in October. “I mean, literally, where’s the line? How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” Secession, surely, is preferable to that alternative.

Ryan Griffiths, a professor at Syracuse University who focuses on the dynamics of secession and the study of sovereignty says “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.”

And the United States might well be better off as separate countries. It might be healthier, more rational, less prone to violence. Secession would not have to be seen as a failure, given the tensions tearing the country apart.

If Texas were a country, it would have a GDP of $1.59 trillion, tenth in the world, slightly below Brazil and slightly ahead of Canada. It would certainly look like a country, 47th in population, 40th in size. California is even larger. With a GDP of $2.88 trillion, it recently passed Britain to become the fifth largest economy in the world. It would rank 36th in population, with the world’s largest technology and entertainment sectors. A separate California would have the largest national median income in the world.

Without U.N. backing, a new country can’t do international exchange or use international post offices. An application to the United Nations goes to a working group, and if the group thinks the application is too trivial, they reject it. If they think an application is serious enough, which they do by asking other states, then it goes to the Security Council. The Security Council is the arbiter, but the council almost always agrees when the application has proceeded that far. So the United States, if it wanted too, could easily hold up any state asking for sovereignty. It would have the Security Council seat, and it would have the home state veto.

Yes, there are good reasons for breaking up the United States, beyond the nationalist aspirations of the secessionists. Barack Obama’s powerful 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention notwithstanding, there is a red America and a blue America. The political parties don’t merely reflect different ideologies, they also reflect different fundamental values, different ways of life. Important social differences correspond to which states voted Democratic and which states voted Republican in the 2016 election (even if this is geographically complicated by the fact that there are blue urban pockets in red rural states).

That political divide further corresponds to which states were free states and which states were slave states before the Civil War. But the biggest reason to separate is the most glaring and the most frightful to contemplate: The citizens of the United States are losing faith in the validity of their institutions and their founding myths. In the place of solidarity, a vast and powerful anger is building, a rage that increasingly expresses itself directly in violence like the riots we witnessed a year ago at the U.S. Capitol.

The Republic has failed to hold. Right and Left (whatever 'left' is) are heading in different directions. The damaged state of American democracy is likely irreparable, overtaken by dangerous tribalism.