Protesters at the Capitol riots on January 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C. Image via Brett Davis/Flickr
President Donald Trump has repeatedly drawn on the Civil War to bolster his presidency, whether it’s supporting Confederate statues or using statutes from that era to prosecute protesters. Now the author of an upcoming novel about the U.S. ceasing to exist, “The Breakup,” is arguing that a literal Civil War could be in the offing, and that the country is currently stuck in "a bitter, loveless marriage."
“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,’” argued author Kurt Andersen for The New York Times on Sunday. “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.”
Andersen wrote, “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.”
Describing the status quo as “uncooperative federalism” and “soft secession,” Andersen pointed out that “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.)”
He added, “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.”
Andersen also pointed out that Democratic-led states and cities are similarly soft seceding in the Trump era, such as “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.”
He continued, “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.”
Ultimately, Andersen characterized this status quo as unsustainable.
“We can’t keep going this way,” Andersen wrote. “Escaping federal dysfunction and avoiding real hostilities over the long term will require some kind of radical shift. Perhaps states and regions could become much more independent. Like the regional autonomous communities in Spain, some of which collect nearly all the taxes their inhabitants pay and then forward a negotiated share to the national government. Or Switzerland, where cantons can divide or reconfigure and each one decides whether newcomers become Swiss citizens.”
He concluded, “Even that might not be enough. Someday down the line we may decide we have no choice but to call it quits. If so, I hope we could follow the lead of post-Soviet Czechoslovakia, whose 1993 breakup into two nations was so calm, it was called the Velvet Divorce, a kind of conscious national uncoupling. For our huge, heterogeneous country, it would be extremely difficult and painful. But in the long run, it might still be better for the kids.”
In July, renowned historian Timothy Snyder similarly argued that America may soon come to an end, in his case pointing to Trump’s authoritarian presidency.
“The fact that the U.S. exists and is celebrating 250 years doesn't mean that it'll exist in 5 years or 10 years or 15 years — states have a beginning and they have an end,” Snyder said. “I think that the Trump people are much more likely to wreck the U.S. as an entity than they are to succeed in generating some kind of homogeneous tyranny from the Pacific to the Atlantic.”