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“I actually think,” Rush Limbaugh told his many millions of listeners during the weeks between Donald Trump losing the 2020 election and his supporters’ assault on the Capitol, “that we’re trending toward secession. It can’t go on this way. There cannot be a peaceful coexistence of two completely different theories of life, theories of government, theories of how we manage our affairs.”
Twenty months later, on the day the F.B.I. seized thousands of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, The Times reported that “posts on Twitter that mentioned ‘civil war’ had soared nearly 3,000 percent in just a few hours” and “jumped again a few weeks later, after President Joe Biden branded Mr. Trump and ‘MAGA Republicans’ a threat to ‘the very foundations of our republic.’”
Days after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, then-Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene reiterated her push for legally splitting up the country: “I want a peaceful national divorce. Our country is too far gone and too far divided, and it’s no longer safe for any of us.” Polls since 2021 by universities, YouGov and others have consistently found that a third or more of Americans said they expected a civil war during the next decade or so.
A national divorce — let alone a civil war — is, for now, the stuff of fiction. But while loose talk from rabble-rousers has distracted us, the nation has sunk, almost unnoticed, into an unspectacular yet profoundly strange new arrangement. It’s not yet a divorce; it’s more like a bitter, loveless marriage in which the parties stay technically but less and less enthusiastically united because splitting up is too complicated or dreadful or expensive.
From its start, this country has been a tricky balancing act, the states acting in their own narrow interests but also together as a union. That delicate equilibrium is central to federalism, the Constitution’s mechanism for sharing authority and power between a national government and far-flung states.
But for the past dozen or so years, the more blue parts and the more red parts of this purple country have arrived at a variety of ad hoc governing arrangements, apparatuses and alliances with which to thwart each other or the federal government. The names for this dynamic are “uncooperative federalism” and, more recently, “soft secession.”
During the past two Democratic presidencies, many red states and counties declared themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries, prohibiting their police forces from enforcing some federal gun regulations. (The term was a trollish play on Democratic sanctuary cities, which did the same for federal immigration policies.) Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas took it upon himself to override federal immigration policy, deploying the National Guard to string the banks of the Rio Grande with coils of razor wire and ordering his troops to prevent federal border agents from helping migrants who got tangled in them. More than two dozen Republican governors endorsed the show of anti-federal strength.
Now that Mr. Trump is back in office, Democratic-led states and cities are getting almost as aggressive, overriding or ignoring federal and state policies they find objectionable. Local police departments aren’t cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Many states passed laws to shield residents from prosecution if they are charged elsewhere with facilitating abortions, and several have stockpiled abortifacients in case federal law or regulations make them hard to get.
Various combinations of blue states have banded together to perform functions the federal government has abandoned or degraded: forming a climate alliance that participates in international forums the Trump administration won’t attend, creating de facto regulatory agencies for cap-and-trade carbon markets, issuing medically legitimate childhood vaccination recommendations. A coalition of a couple dozen attorneys general has sued the administration over birthright citizenship, tariffs and denial of federal funds to Democratic-controlled states. In the group’s frequent online group meetings, it was reported last fall, “the same phrase keeps coming up, though nobody wants to say it publicly: soft secession.”
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Igor Bastidas
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