It’s often assumed if the United States were to break down, the 50 states would pick up the pieces. Most secession movements in America today are state-based: California, Alaska, Vermont, Texas. Given how relevant states remain in our system—equally represented in the Senate, factored as separate units into the Electoral College—this is perhaps not surprising. But if support does rise, as I expect it to, in the decades ahead, for some kind of devolution of power to more regional or local levels, it doesn’t seem obvious or desirable to me that the states as we know them should be accorded much respect as inherently sensible political units. What are the states? The older ones are the inheritance of thoughtless, often contradictory decrees by seventeenth-century kings. The boundaries of the newer ones, with their absurd right angles, the unsentimental creations of land-hungry railroad barons, have nothing to do with anything on the ground: not with watersheds, not with culture, not with history.
Though my book is about the idea of breaking up the country, I’ve kept one eye on the history of movements to break up individual states. (If you’re interested, Mark Stein wrote an amusing book, How the States Got Their Shapes, later adapted into a History Channel television series.) From the early 1940s movement to carve a more conservative state called Jefferson from northern California and southern Oregon to Norman Mailer’s famous 1969 campaign for New York mayor on a platform of making the metropolis America’s 51st state, separatist movements at the state level reflect many of the same divisions as at the national level—a suspicion that union under one government is serving some people rather than others. Though I couldn’t fit it in the book, I’ve saved my historical material on this subject and might turn it into an essay at some point.
I’ve been intrigued to find that many such proposals have come to the surface in recent weeks. The plethora of suggestions for redrawing state lines, for redividing the land, as it were, suggests that not only at the national level, but throughout American politics, long-accepted nostrums and unquestioned structures may be up for grabs. The proliferation of partition ideas evinces a boiling frustration, everywhere on the political spectrum, that politics-as-usual is no longer adequate. Instead of lurching from election to election, swinging now this way and now that, why not redraw the borders of the political community itself and thereby secure results more to the liking of the populace, newly redefined?
The first news item that caught my eye on this subject in recent weeks was the surprising return of a very old debate: Is the existence of West Virginia constitutional? I discuss this in my book, but for now recall that the state seceded from Virginia and the Confederacy during the Civil War. Lincoln recognized its legitimacy despite obvious irregularities in its formation—the US Constitution, which Lincoln claimed he was fighting the war to defend, explicitly bars the formation of a new state within the territory of old one without the latter’s consent. After the war, Virginia protested the admission of its western half as a separate state, but the Supreme Court declined the challenge. The issue came back to life last month when West Virginia’s corpulent governor, Jim Justice, a Democrat-turned-Republican, mused aloud about annexing some of Virginia’s western counties, which lean heavily red and resent how Democrats have successfully turned the state government blue. Making his case to the fed-up residents of Virginia’s western counties, Justice called West Virginia “an incredible state” with “four incredible seasons. Jerry Falwell Jr., appearing beside Justice, said he hoped his own city of Lynchburg, though 100 miles from West Virginia, would vote to join that state, in order to escape the “the barbaric, totalitarian and corrupt Democratic regime in Richmond.”
A constitutional lawyer the Washington Post interviewed said the plan couldn’t happen “in a million years,” but I don’t see why that’s the case. It was only 150 years ago that West Virginia was created in the first place. In this time of intense partisanship and political fracture, there’s no reason to think state lines are any more written in stone than they were back then. To switch states, western Virginia counties would need the assent of the legislatures in Richmond and Charleston (the capital of West Virginia), as well as Congress. Democrats are certainly on the ascent in Virginia, but that’s not irreversible. I can easily imagine a future scenario in which Republicans briefly seize control again of the Virginia legislature, lose it in an election, and in the transition period approve the application by western counties to switch sides. If that coincides with Republican majorities in Congress, it might just work out.
I was amused to read Matt Ford in The New Republic suggest that instead of letting the western counties go, Virginia Democrats should seize the opportunity raised by Justice’s proposal to “make Virginia whole”—that is, recontest the legitimacy of West Virginia’s original separation. Take it back. Ford offered an excellent precis of the overall question of West Virginia’s questionable legitimacy, and concluded that it would be “remarkable if an attempt to yank some counties out of Virginia instead brought about the state’s long-overdue reunification.”
It would indeed be remarkable, but it would also be bad news for Virginia Democrats, since rejoining with West Virginia’s deep-red voters would likely reverse the Old Dominion’s dramatic transformation into a fairly progressive state. Coupled with the fact that if conservative western Virginians joined West Virginia it would only make the state they left behind even more Democratic—a possible reason Virginia Republicans, even if they did control the statehouse, might never agree to let them go—we can begin to glimpse some of the ironies that always surround separatist movements. (By the same logic, if California ever left the Union, as some in the state now support, Democrats would never again be competitive in US federal elections.)
Two other manifestations of state or local partition proposals in recent weeks:
Similar to conservative Virginians who want to join West Virginia—though without all the historical baggage of the 1860s schism—a man in Weld County, Colorado, is trying to convince his rural, conservative neighbors to ditch the liberal-leaning government in Denver and instead join neighboring Wyoming. A few years ago, residents of several Northern Colorado counties, angry over differences about agricultural and oil policy, tried to secede from the state and form their own. That attempt didn’t work out, so now they are trying to join their neighbor, arguing that “Wyoming is What Colorado Was.” Two years ago a state representative endorsed the idea. They hope to get a secession measure on the ballot in 2021.
Staten Island has never felt completely at home in New York City, and every twenty years or so a movement arises to separate. In the early 1990s, the initiative seemed likely to succeed—two-thirds of Staten Island voters opted for secession in a non-binding referendum—until the election of a Republican mayor, future small-time mobster Rudy Giuliani, sapped its momentum. Now some Republicans in the only Trump-supporting borough want to give it another shot. “I think Staten Island is more akin to the rest of the country than the rest of the city,” councilman Joseph Borelli explains. He’s not wrong. It’s whiter, more suburban, more conservative, and more dependent on cars. The question is whether it would be economically viable, and on that the jury is still out. Now New York’s least populous borough, Staten Island would immediately become the second-largest city in the state.
Now, what does all this have to do with national politics, with what I think we should be calling the twenty-first century crisis of the Union—minority rule, congressional paralysis, an increasingly undemocratic Electoral College? A few days ago, The Atlantic ran an essay suggesting that splitting three blue states in half—New York, California, and Massachusetts—could solve some of the underlying problems bedeviling our political system. “Due to an advantageous distribution of voters in the right states, the Republican Party has repeatedly been able to control the federal government despite a lack of popular support,” writer Simon Barnacle noted. In the 2018 congressional elections, Democratic Senate candidates bested their Republican opponents by twenty percentage points, but the GOP actually strengthened its grip on the upper chamber.
Barnacle’s solution: Redraw state lines to make representation at the federal level more in line with the American population as a whole. A more reasonable version of the “pack the Union” proposal I wrote about a few weeks ago, Barnacle’s plan would add at least six Democratic senators, enough to prevent Republican retaliation barring a landslide election. As Barnacle puts it:
Unlike court packing or filibuster reform—which practically invite an escalating set of tit-for-tats—adding new states, if done aggressively enough, prevents an opposition party from doing the same by bolstering the Senate majority the opposition would need to add states of their own. When adding states, there is no back-and-forth. Whichever party strikes first wins.
I like the proposal, and certainly agree that something must be done, and that that something will have to take the form of what the legal scholar Mark Tushnet calls “constitutional hardball.” But I despair that the modern Democratic Party would ever be daring enough to try something of the kind—or any of the other reform proposals that Barnacle dismisses as “inadequate”: court-packing, for instance. The sense of inertia, of respect for “norms,” is just too great at this point, and the obstacles to electing a Democratic president with a Democratic senate, I fear, perhaps already insurmountable. I’m interested in what happens when these reform proposals do not pass. In that case, Barnacle concludes, “the American government will continue to distort the will of its people—and if current trends continue, risk losing their loyalty altogether.” That will be the moment, I believe, when a critical mass of Americans embraces the idea not merely of splitting up this or that state, but of breaking the country up. My book is intended to provide a history for that moment.
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