It’s become almost like a histamine response: After a shocking national event like the assassination of Charlie Kirk, or Donald Trump’s deployment of the military to Los Angeles last June, mentions of the term “civil war” and calls for secession surge online. This kind of talk flared again in January, when two citizens were shot and killed by immigration agents on the streets of Minneapolis, and governor 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, invoking the battle that sparked the Civil War. In a loopier register, former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura urged the state to secede from the US and become part of Canada. “I think someone seriously should contact Canada and ask them if they’re open to this,” he said.
These two statements by men who’ve held the same office pretty well sketch the basic outlines of popular discourse about American fragmentation: Spiraling civil war is the nightmare, tidy secession is the dream. But is it really possible to have one without the other? And what would secession actually look like in the United States?
Ever since the 1990s, some Silicon Valley futurists have coolly forecast the crack-up of an obsolete American nation-state—without really specifying any grisly details. And the old meme that jokingly divides North America into a blue “United States of Canada” and a red “Jesusland” has been around since the mid-2000s. But as red and blue America have become more polarized on nearly every issue in the years since, a growing number of people across the spectrum have concluded that a secessionist breakup is indeed the best solution for America’s irreconcilable differences. “We need a national divorce. We need to separate by red states and blue states,” posted then Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia in 2023. “Everyone I talk to says this.” (This was the plot, more or less, of the 2024 hit film Civil War.)
Hoping to channel this angst, a smattering of organized independence movements—like California’s Calexit and the Texas Nationalist Movement, among others—have cropped up in recent years and have seen growing support. A 2023 Axios poll showed that 20 percent of Americans favor a “national divorce.” And in a YouGov poll released within days of Trump’s second inauguration, some 61 percent of Californians agreed with the statement that their state would “be better off if it peacefully seceded.”
But that’s the rub. The truth is that secession, the process by which part of a sovereign state breaks away to form a new one, is always tortured. Most secessionist projects flop, and about half erupt into violence. When secession does turn out peacefully, as in Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Divorce, it is almost always because there is a nationally distinct and regionally concentrated population that possesses an internal border and some special administrative status that can be used to justify their demand for independence. None of these characteristics hold in the contemporary United States.
In reality, red and blue America are intricately intermixed. Political divisions cut not just through states—blue California has millions of Republicans; red Texas, millions of Democrats—but also neighborhoods and even households. An ideologically driven secession scenario would almost inevitably force a dangerous unmixing and re-sorting of Americans. Imagine trying to draw a new map that is coherent yet still satisfies the greatest number of people in a hyper-polarized environment; then imagine a series of security dilemmas, stranded populations, and refugees on the run. This happened when India and Pakistan were partitioned in 1947 and when Cyprus was partitioned in 1974; it would probably happen in America too.
Many people want to draw an analogy between secession and marital divorce. But where the dissolution of a marriage is covered by civil law, there’s no decided-upon legal framework that governs secession—no procedure, let alone precedent, for dividing the estate. How should national debt be distributed? What about social security? What about military installations and naval vessels? Given the acrimony that would attend an American divorce, we should expect each side to attempt to grab what they can.
Moreover, which side in a “divorce” would retain America’s permanent seat on the UN Security Council? A breakaway California, say, would never be able to join the United Nations as a recognized sovereign state as long as the US sits on the council and could veto its membership application. Moreover, if Washington doesn’t officially recognize a breakaway republic, neither will third-party countries like Canada or Mexico, lest they incur the wrath of their powerful neighbor. Consider the enormous coercive power that Trump is already wielding internationally. Now imagine how painful he’d make it for other countries to recognize a breakaway American state.
Of course, that’s assuming the divorce is acrimonious. Secessionist groups like to imagine a mutual and amicable parting from the US. But this underestimates the practical, even existential, concerns of the US government. In its 1869 Texas v. White decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the union is “indissoluble” and that there is “no place for reconsideration or revocation, except through revolution or through consent of the States.” That consent would be hard-won. Since all 50 states are juridically equal, America’s federal structure creates a serious precedent-setting problem where secession is concerned. If California pushed for independence and the federal government gave its blessing, Texas could then demand the same right. One secession could unleash a domino effect that fractures the country into more parts, particularly as states gradually saw diminishing returns to remaining in a shrinking US. The fear of secessionist contagion is one of the reasons that many countries like Russia and Indonesia are quick to clamp down on any secessionist claim as a way to deter all potential movements.
Indeed, perhaps the only national authorities that do have a vested interest in supporting secessionist movements are those of the mother nation’s geopolitical rivals. From the perspective of Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, the disintegration of American power into multiple, smaller countries, all hostile to one another, would be a victory. Russia has a long track record of boosting American secessionist sentiment, including in Texas and California. One of the early leaders of CalExit, Louis Marinelli, actually moved to Russia in 2016 and helped run the organization from there, even establishing a California “embassy” in Moscow, before breaking ties with the movement under a cloud of negative press. “Calexit was not created by Russia,” wrote Calexit founder Marcus Ruiz Evans in 2019, “but made a series of mistakes in associating with Russia early on.” Even when secession movements are homegrown, rival powers are likely to encourage them.
ILLUSTRATION: JOAN WONG; GETTY IMAGESWalz was criticized for hyperbole after his remarks comparing Minneapolis to Fort Sumter. But what happens if tensions between state and federal forces do continue to increase, more protesters and ICE agents are injured and killed, and the security forces on each side clash directly with each other? A 2024 simulation run by the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania concluded that this is exactly how a civil conflict in America could start.
Any number of events could continue to escalate polarization, distrust, and political violence in America. But a full-blown secessionist crisis would require a leader or party to champion the cause of independence—someone to articulate an alternative future and rally a substantial portion of the population around that flag.
Thankfully, there are no prominent leaders, regional governments, or parties calling for secession today. Due in part to the centripetal pressures created by the American two-party system, there is no real opening for distinctly regional parties to arise—no equivalent to the Scottish National Party or the Parti Québécois. But there are potential secessionist tipping-point scenarios to watch for. Here are two that take off from the moment of a national election, neither of them pretty.
First, imagine a disputed presidential election in 2028 or 2032. American politics has continued to deteriorate, and each side has increasingly adopted a “win-by-any-means” approach, with prominent leaders warning of a stolen election since early in the campaign. Now, with all the votes counted, neither side is willing to follow the example of Al Gore and concede a painfully close contest. So both sides claim the presidency and denounce the other. For the first time in its history, the US is torn between two competing chief executives.
This bifurcation is accompanied by intense, cycling political violence. Amid growing clamor on the far right for a Red-State America and on the far left for a BlueExit, both presidents choose to declare martial law and demand that the military countermand the orders of their opponent. Months of deadlock finally drive both sides to attempt a brokered division of the country into two ideological main blocs—leading to further fractures and partition-like violence.
In the second scenario—a variation on the first—imagine that one of the 2028 presidential candidates is tied to a state or region that already has latent secessionist leanings, like Texas or California. Again, the election results are questionable, and the incumbent party refuses to relinquish the White House and turn over power.
This sense that democracy has failed has, in the past, served as a tipping point for prominent leaders in other countries to yield to local pressures and throw their weight behind a secessionist cause. A key moment for Catalonian independistas, for instance, came in 2012 when Artur Mas, the Catalan president, finally joined with secessionists over a constitutional crisis with Spain, galvanizing the movement from fringe to mainstream.
In an American scenario where, say, a disenchanted Gavin Newsom chooses secession and throws in with the California Independence Party after an ambiguous national election, the US government would face a crisis. It could permit a referendum for California independence, risking a likely cascade effect and potential dissolution. Or it could deny any attempts at secession and risk violence.
Abraham Lincoln called this the choice between dissolution and blood, and he chose blood. Still today, secessionist civil war is the chief cause of violence in contemporary international politics. Advocates for secession think it is a safety valve that will resolve and pacify American political violence. But it’s very much the opposite of that.
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