Don't Even Fantasize About Splitting Up the United States

We are all in this together, and even in a polarized world we have more in common than you think

One of the biproducts of the polarized world we live in, which has resulted in geographic polarization as well as political polarization (i.e., Red States/Blue States, Urban-Suburban/Exurban-Rural), is the revival of the notion of secession. You would think the Civil War would have put an end to this thinking, but no, it’s back, this time coming from the other side of the political spectrum. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could form our own union out of the blue states, without having to worry about the veto power and filibusters and electoral votes of those backwards red states? For both moral and pragmatic reasons, the answer is a clear “no”.

I’ll start with the moral reasons, because I think the pragmatic reasons are sort of obvious and can be dealt with at the end of this newsletter. Here’s the thing: God knows the framers of this country got all sorts of things wrong, but one thing they really got right was the importance and value of political union. Indeed, it was so important to them that when the first constitution they wrote (the Articles of Confederation) didn’t create a functional union, they tried again in 1787 with the U.S. Constitution.

Much is made in discussions of the colonial period about how the states thought of themselves as sovereign units. The shadows of this thinking still haunt us today, in the form of sovereign immunity doctrines that, among other things, make it hard to sue states when they violate the Constitution. But states’ rights arguments were always something of a bluff. It was always clear that whatever union was agreed to, everyone was going to sign on to. You weren’t going to have a situation where Massachusetts declared itself an independent country.

You can see this dynamic play out later in our history, when Texas, despite a ton of nationalist rhetoric, joined the union quickly even when it had a credible claim to independence, and you can even argue that one reason why Puerto Rico’s status remains in colonial limbo is precisely that its leaders know better than to declare independence and become a relatively poor Carribean island state, which leaves its only real option to demand statehood (which the island should get, but which US domestic politics seems to foreclose at least at this moment).

Essentially, being a part of a larger union confers enormous benefits on a small state. Most obviously, a single nation becomes a sort of a free trade zone- Washington can not only sell the relatively moderate number of apples that folks in Seattle and Spokane want to buy, but can sell a ton of apples to big city residents in New York, LA, Chicago, Miami, and across the country.

But more than that, being a part of a larger union saves you a ton of the costs of independent statehood. Delaware does not have to raise and train its own army and navy. Indiana does not have to have its own bankruptcy courts. South Dakota does not need to pay for its own patent office. And all of these savings and the benefits of free trade are passed on to state residents- people are more well off, with more money to spend and more resources at their disposal, because states are part of a broader union. That is a huge benefit, morally as well as economically.

Additionally, though, and admittedly this gets more gauzy, I think there’s enormous value in being in a country with people who are different than you are. Imagine, for instance, if New York City decided to become a city-state, like Singapore. That wouldn’t at all mean that New York City was not dependent on the rest of the country. Obviously, there’s no way to produce enough food and energy within the confines of the five boroughs to feed and power millions of residents. Staying together is a reminder to us that we are together, that our fortunes rise and fall together, and that we need each other. Staying together reminds New Yorkers that they should care about and feel obligations towards South Carolinians. And it works both ways, too: what would happen to South Carolina’s BMW factory if it lost the California market, and all the rich people here who buy BMW’s? Because we are all, in fact, in this together, it is important that we all are reminded that we are in this together.

Indeed, the notion of secessionism is something of an ethical error, and not just for the reasons specific to the Civil War. Obviously, committing treason in support of slavery, as the South did, was particularly evil. But consider something beyond that: the South’s argument as to why it supposedly needed slavery was because it powered their textile production, which was allegedly key to the vitality of the region. But what that narrative, even taken on its own terms, ignores, is that the reason the South was getting rich on textiles was they were selling them to the North! A bunch of white racist hotheads in the South got all wound up over the notion that they were really independent and they would never agreed to give up a part of that independence and join the union if they didn’t think they could get out, but if you think about it for ten seconds this whole logic unravels. Joining the union, for the South, wasn’t like going on a date: it was like a marriage, where the region’s financial, economic, military, and legal fortunes would be completely tied to the North. The whites in South thought they could keep all THOSE benefits without maintaining a union with the North and fulfilling their own reciprocal obligations. They wanted to have their cake and eat it too.

Indeed, an unremarked part of civil war history is that the Confederacy itself started to break up. Southern Governors started hoarding military uniforms and wouldn’t give them to other states’ armies, and complained about Jefferson Davis’ supposedly “dictatorial” leadership in Richmond. Davis himself said the Confederacy “died of a theory”, which I don’t think is quite right (it died for other reasons, such as its comparative military weakness and the weakness of the cause it was fighting for, as well as the difficulties white southerners had in fighting the war with one hand while they continued to enslave people with their other hand). But the “died of a theory” rhetoric has a grain of truth to it- because the unionists were unionists, they had far less problem with the basic notion of working together as one unit to fight a big war. The South, on the other hand, was led by people who had a stupid theory of states’ rights and secession in their heads, and that interfered with their ability to work together.

The point is, even beyond its slavery and racism, the Civil War South isn’t an example of anything good. It certainly isn’t an example of a successful state that could further the prosperity of its residents. There’s no good reason to emulate it, and very good reasons to emulate the Civil War North- New York and Illinois and Maryland had many differences, but the ability of leaders to work together to serve a cause bigger than any one state was admirable then and admirable now. And that desire is created by a political union that all are bound up in, where the mutual obligations between people of different regions are made explicit.

And while this may seem gauzy and incohate, it’s real. For example, look at what happened in Hurricane Katrina. George W. Bush delivered a poor response, but his party paid for it- not only in Louisiana but all over the country. Nobody in any blue state said “who cares about Louisiana, they are a Bible Belt, conservative state?”. They were outraged. And they also personally gave. Donations flooded relief groups like the Red Cross, from all over the country. Just like the people of Bedford Falls pooled their money to help George Bailey when he needed it, the American public stood in solidarity with the victims of a brutal hurricane in the South. This is what happens when we all understand we are in this together.

And I might add, liberals in blue states should feel a particular obligation to all the liberals and especially the minorities in red states. I don’t see how anyone who talks about “equity” all the time can seriously propose abandoning Black people in Mississippi or Hispanics in Texas and Florida to the whims of white-run conservative governments. For many people who live in the red states, the federal government, which has to answer to blue state liberals as well as red state conservatives, is the only thing standing between them and ruin. We should not want to pull that rug out from under them.

And then there are the pragmatic problems. How do you draw the boundaries? What do you do about conservative regions of liberal states, like the Central Valley of California or upstate New York? Will the new state be discontiguous (states with large population centers separated by other, rival states, such as Pakistan/Bangladesh, do not have a great track record)? Will it be willing to pay for enough defense spending to not later get swallowed up by the Red States, which will presumably maintain a large military? What rules will govern trade and movement between Red and Blue America- will there need to be border checkpoints and hard borders? Will either, or both states, maintain nuclear arsenals?

When you think about the headache that it would be to create two states, wouldn’t it just be easier to maintain one United States of America?

Behind all of this lies a fantasy, one that, ironically, was the same one held by the white Southerners who brought on the Civil War. The fantasy is that you don’t need those people who aren’t like you. They are too much trouble. They are trying to impose their values on you. You shouldn’t have to live with them.

But that is just a fantasy. The reality is that we are all in this together, and that no matter how polarized we become, we have to find a way to live with each other. In 2022 and for the foreseeable future. Happy New Year.