The Debate
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June 13, 2025
Sanford Levinson maintains {that a} peaceable breakup could be preferable to a divided polity, whereas Tarence Ray argues that the working class should stay united throughout state traces.
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President Donald Trump smirks on the Truman balcony of the White Home in Washington, DC, on June 4, 2025.(Eric Lee / Bloomberg through Getty Photographs)
Sure!
This text seems within the
July/August 2025 problem, with the headline “If an Authoritarian Trump Seizes Extra Energy, Ought to Blue States Secede?”
I’m a lawyer and a political scientist. Had been I to reply this query solely as a lawyer, I might simply say sure. The USA was (or have been?) born as a secessionist motion from the British Empire. It was not a “revolution” as we perceive the phrase as we speak. George Washington and his armies had no designs on London; these we name “patriots” merely needed to withdraw from the present framework of governance. Taking a cue from the founding of the US, blue states can legally secede from the Union.
Maybe probably the most audacious phrase within the Declaration of Independence happens within the first sentence, when it purports to talk within the title of “one individuals.” Any historian—and, one suspects, most of these in Philadelphia gathered on the Second Continental Congress—knew this was, at finest, tendentious if not preposterous. Suppose solely of the Indigenous nations, a lot of whom understandably supported the British, to not point out enslaved individuals (and peoples). Puritan sectarians in New England had little in widespread with Baptist sectarians in Virginiaand each have been antagonistic to the Catholics in Maryland. (Although initially settled by Catholics, Maryland banned them from holding workplace in its 1776 state structure.)
Everybody is aware of the declaration’s endorsement of “inalienable rights.” However simply as essential is the sentence emphasizing that the “individuals”—whose “consent” is the premise of any “simply powers” in authorities—retain the precise “every time any type of authorities turns into damaging of those ends…to change or to abolish it.” They continue to be free to “institute a brand new authorities…as to them shall appear almost definitely to impact their security and happiness.” This expresses the true radicalism of what most individuals name the American Revolution.
There has by no means been a singular American individuals. That is the actual that means of American federalism, which is sensible provided that one acknowledges the deep range inside the American populace. That pluralistic actuality units the stage for equally deep political conflicts, not all of them able to peaceable decision inside the present framework of presidency. Think about, most clearly, the American Civil Battle. I don’t help the Accomplice secessionists of 1861, however not as a result of they needed to go away the union. Slightly, my opposition is predicated on why they needed to separate: the dedication to a vicious and indefensible system of white supremacy and chattel slavery. Appomattox might have settled the difficulty of slavery; that isn’t the identical as settling the authorized problem of secession.
Nearly nobody opposes each secessionist motion, whether or not within the distant previous—starting with American secession from the British Empire—or in newer instances, such because the secession of members of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (as allowed by Article 72 of its 1977 Structure), of Nice Britain from the European Union, or of Slovenia from Yugoslavia. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes argued, normal rules don’t determine concrete circumstances. Context and complexity are all-important. In order a lawyer and a particularly involved citizen of the US in 2025, I’ve little hesitation in suggesting {that a} peaceable breakup of the present union could be preferable to a divided polity in which there’s neither fraternity nor sorority, however solely enmity at these perceived, usually precisely, as enemies.
However as a political scientist, I can’t conceive of an amicable separation. A principal motive is that the polarization that distinguishes the US as we speak just isn’t regional, as was the case in 1860. Take my very own state of Texas, which I describe as a particularly blue state—principally composed of 5 of the 20 largest cities within the nation—that’s embedded inside an equally dedicated purple state outdoors of those cities. Related tales of sharp divisions between city and exurban or rural areas may very well be advised about virtually all the states. Ought to Texas try to go away the union on the behest of the ultraconservatives who presently dominate the state’s politics, a right away response may effectively be secessionist actions by the thousands and thousands of Texans dwelling in Houston and Austin. Equally, ought to liberals spearhead secession in “Pacifica,” an imagined nation of West Coast states, one may count on the same counter-response from japanese Oregonians who’re already attempting to maneuver their counties to the extra convivial political ambiance they establish with Idaho.
Present Challenge
If we applaud Abraham Lincoln’s determination to go to battle—and settle for what turned virtually 700,000 deaths between 1861 and 1865—it needs to be as a result of that battle was vital to finish slavery. Had Lincoln merely preserved the union with slavery intact—which, to the disgust of Frederick Douglasshe pledged to do in his first inaugural handle—it could not have been value it. How transcendently essential is the preservation of the union as we speak? Any reply lies way more in our political commitments than within the summary arguments of attorneys.
Sanford Levinson
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No!
Blue-state secession is a enjoyable thought experiment—an entertaining type of escapism from the stagnation of US politics—however in apply, such a schism could be expensive, debilitating, and ideologically incoherent. Most of all, if the US is to face a probability within the face of local weather cataclysm and the rise of xenophobic nationalism, the nation’s working class should stay united throughout state traces. The Western Hemisphere wants fewer borders, no more.
By itself, a blue-state secession doesn’t advance a political imaginative and prescient past, maybe, disapproval of President Donald Trump’s authoritarianism. This can be a noble trigger, in fact, however it’s not a constructive articulation of rules, and as such, it wouldn’t be sufficient to carry a brand new nation collectively—and that’s assuming a geographically disconnected state might efficiently stave off a army siege by Trump’s federal authorities within the first place.
And who would, and even might, lead such a motion? In any case, many blue-state leaders need a number of the similar issues that red-state leaders need, simply in numerous measure. California Governor Gavin Newsom is urgent California’s cities to ban homeless encampments and has mentioned that it’s “deeply unfair” for transgender athletes to compete in ladies’s sports activities. New York Governor Kathy Hochul has rejected well-liked calls for to enhance taxes on her state’s wealthiest residents and has did not implement local weather mitigation legal guidelines and legal justice reforms.
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Different blue-state leaders, like Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, have outlined the beginnings of a political imaginative and prescient that’s distinct from red-state America’s however that additionally accounts for the expertise of dwelling in a purple state. They appear to know that one thing unusual and grotesque is going on within the purple states that has allowed for the elevation of a despotic chief like Trump. They will pinpoint deindustrialization, the opioid epidemic, and monetary austerity, and so they normally advocate for a return to New Deal–kind social-welfare progressivism to combat again. However such politicians sometimes come up brief on points like Palestinian and immigrant rights. And it’s because blue-state leaders have did not apprehend probably the most essential crises earlier than us.
The 2 defining problems with our time are Palestinian liberation and local weather disaster. Neither may be addressed by secession: Ecological crises acknowledge no state boundaries, and the Palestinian trigger is certain up with US imperialism. The biosphere, the neoliberal system, and the postwar world framework for human rights are all collapsing, ushering in an period of mass extermination and migration.
The worldwide nature of this upheaval is mirrored in how the Trump administration is attacking the US Structure: The White Home has launched assaults on free speech because it pertains to Israel and on due course of because it pertains to immigration standing. It’s no coincidence that the administration can also be utilizing these as precedents for difficult birthright citizenshipa proper secured within the 14th Modification and handed throughout Reconstruction.
Given the dimensions of injustices underneath the Trump administration, what is required now could be an abolitionism for the twenty first century—not a marketing campaign for secession. At the moment’s abolitionist motion would come with three causes: 1) The revival and growth of Reconstructionist beliefs to combat for immigrant personhood. 2) Full reparations and ecological rights for Indigenous populations like Native People and Palestinians. 3) A head-on confrontation with the fossil gasoline trade.
Blue-state secession wouldn’t provide any of this. At most, it could provide retribution in opposition to the purple states, that are on the entrance traces of the nation’s preeminent disaster: the fallout from an empire in decline. It’s value noting that the political economic system of purple states is essentially the results of the practices of Twentieth-century US imperialism—anti-communism, the financialization of the imperial economic system, and the following raiding of the World South’s labor and assets—returning residence.
These purple states even resemble the World South in some fascinating methods. As the US’ major supply of uncooked assets and low-cost home laborpurple states have seen their relationships with the land and with labor drastically disfigured. Their working class contains not solely undocumented migrants but additionally US residents pushed out of the formal economic system by deindustrialization and dependancy. These staff shouldn’t be punished for the sins of their states’ bourgeois and petty-bourgeois lessons, which have opted to tug these states again into the racist, misogynistic ideologies that consolidated the slavers’ energy 150 years in the past.
The easiest way to attempt for a greater future is to not cleave the nation’s working class in two and pit its members in opposition to one another; it’s to maintain working to unite them. Solely then will we be capable to grapple with the challenges forward of us.
Tarence Ray
Sanford Levinson
Sanford Levinson is professor of regulation on the College of Texas and the coauthor, with Cynthia Levinson, of Fault Traces within the Structure.
Tarence Ray
Tarence Ray is a journalist and a cohost of the podcast The Trillbillies. He lives in Lexington, Kentucky.
