‘…In 2016, progressive activists in Portland, Oregon, submitted a petition calling for a statewide vote on secession; that same year, a poll showed that 26 percent of Texans supported state independence. In a 2018 survey, 31 percent of Americans believed a civil war was possible within the next five years. A cohort of national security experts put the chances of a civil war within the next 15 years at 35 percent. And who has not entertained the possibility that, if Trump loses the election this fall, he might resist leaving office? Strange turnout patterns during the pandemic would certainly give both candidates a pretext for contesting the results—and what institution these days has the legitimacy to settle the question decisively?
If the idea of the U.S. dissolving seems far-fetched, one reason is that we have been trained to think of secession and civil war as something long settled. The South tried it, they lost, and ever since disunion has seemed a practical impossibility. But in Richard Kreitner’s provocative 400-year history of America, Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union, he argues that the nation’s foundations have always been fragile. The threat of disunion has been raised or attempted in every region and by all political factions at some point in our nation’s past. If we ignore this “hidden thread” in our history and choose to believe in a mythic past when unity actually existed, we make disunion more likely, not less. To build a truly equal and lasting multiracial democracy, he argues, we must stop papering over the constant threat of disunion that haunts our past….’
— via The New Republic
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