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.
