The Appetite for Disunion: A Selection from Stephen Marche’s The Next Civil War (2022)

“The United States no longer functions as a nation. The ideas that motivated its system no longer convince. The symbols that once unified its people no longer hold up. The country no longer makes sense.

American tolerance for the idea of secession has been rapidly growing. In 2014, Reuters asked Americans, ‘Do you support or oppose the idea of your state peacefully withdrawing from the United States of America and the federal government?’ One in four supported leaving. That’s not one in four from states with active secessionist movements. That’s one in four from the Union as a whole. America’s taste for secessionism has never faded. Even in the country’s most unified periods, it has always remained a sometimes violent force in the United States’ history of overlapping and competing identities.

Since Trump’s election, intellectuals on both sides have started arguing, tentatively, for an American separation. The Federalist, from the right, has argued that ‘we both now agree that living under the other side’s value system is wholly unacceptable.’ The New Republic, from the left, shared the sentiment: ‘Let’s face it, guys: We’re done.’ American divorce, for the partisans, is a thought experiment, mostly just a chance to explain, in detail, how monstrous the other side is. . . . Disunion would be the death of one country but it would be the birth of four others. These countries would all be sizable and powerful.

The main difference between the American separatist movements and those in the rest of the world is that the countries that emerge from the separation could join the world quite comfortably as independent nations. 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, forty-seventh in population, fortieth in size. California is even larger. With a GDP of $2.88 trillion, it recently passed the UK to become the fifth-largest economy in the world. It would rank thirty-sixth in population, with the world’s largest technology and entertainment sectors. It would have the largest national median income in the world. Unlike many other regions searching for independence, California and Texas could work as independent countries. . . .

California and Texas are the new economy. Both states are donor states: they give more in federal taxes than they receive. Military infrastructure wouldn’t be a problem, either. California hosts the most active-duty personnel, followed closely by Texas. . . .

The North would not be a superpower anymore but it would continue to be a major power. The economy of the states between Pennsylvania and Maine is the size of Japan’s. The South would find itself much poorer and unhealthier and less developed than its neighbors. The federal government currently subsidizes the Southern states considerably. South Carolina alone receives $7.87 back for every dollar in taxes it pays. Life expectancy in the South is considerably shorter than in the rest of the country. Infant mortality rates are much higher. But Florida and Alabama have a combined economy as large as Mexico’s, and the twelve Midwestern states produce more than Germany. The citizens of a new Confederacy would find themselves in a much Blacker country than the United States: 55 percent of the African American population lives in the South.”—Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future (2022)