Is America Edging Closer to a National Dissolution?
The unthinkable today is becoming more thinkable each passing year, thereby making a national dissolution ever more possible.
Roughly two years ago, I wrote a thought piece, How Long Can America Defy History By Remaining, Well, THE UNITED States?, posing the question of, given the West’s 1,000 year history, whether America would remain unified over the coming decades, or would it fragment into three-to-five new countries via an agreed upon national dissolution (i.e., NOT a bloody civil war). For newer subscribers, please take a minute to read the piece and watch the video included with it before continuing to read this one. In the piece, I noted:
that what I’m going to write will come across as far-fetched and unthinkable...Let me suggest to you that the odds of America remaining in the exact same geographic form that it is today seem to be declining each passing year. While I don’t believe the risk of change is high today, I do get the feeling that that risk will grow over the next twenty-five years. Again, I realize that statement seems outlandish, but let me explain why my alarm bells are ringing.
Though it still seems so today, less than two years later, the odds of a national dissolution have grown, not subsided.
The core of my argument for an eventual national dissolution centered around the increasing polarization between Red and Blue states. As I wrote:
We are down to about five or six states that are really in play during presidential elections. The rest are solidly Blue or Red. Should one side gain a firm lock on the Electoral Votes needed to win the presidency consistently, the other side will seek to escape being ruled by “them.” You hear it all of the time from both sides. Hollywood elites proclaim that if Trump wins in 2024, they are leaving America for good (“We mean it this time!!!”). Those on the Right seek similar safe harbors as far from the federal government’s reach as possible.
In the two years since I wrote that blurb, more evidence has surfaced of this hard Red-Blue divide. First, the redistricting battles in Texas and California over congressional seats has spread to Ohio, Missouri, and New York, as well as other states. Because Blue states have aggressively redistricted seats for years, those states have less to gain than Red states. Most analyses indicate that Republicans will win a zero sum redistricting battle.
Related to this issue is the controversy surrounding the last U.S. Census completed by the Biden Administration in which Blue states received more seats and Electoral Votes than warranted, which functionally “stole” seats and Electoral Votes from Red states. Florida is pushing hard to have the Trump Administration correct this error before the 2026 mid-term election. A correction would result in several Red states gaining seats and Electoral Votes, with Blue states losing what they never should have been given. Likewise, if Donald Trump is successful in excluding illegal immigrants from the 2030 U.S. Census for apportionment purposes, Blue states will lose even more congressional seats and Electoral Votes.
Should Blue states lose congressional seats and Electoral Votes, it would make retaking the U.S. House harder for the Democrats as more seats flipped from Blue to Red. It also would make winning the presidency more difficult for Democrats in our winner-take-all system. As I detailed two years ago in my Projected 2050 Population and Political Power Series, if population trends continue, Red states would grow their Electoral Vote advantage, thereby making it easier for Republicans to retain the White House in 2028 and beyond. This reality is why I wrote this blurb in the thought piece:
What if Republicans win again in 2028? 2032? As I’ve written about, based on population trends, the Electoral Votes in Red states will increase over the next twenty-five years, as Blue states depopulate or populate at a slower pace than Red states. This trend accelerated with the pandemic shutdowns. Knowing that the national popular vote gambit is dead in the water, will Blue state voters just accept that their lives will be controlled by Trump and Republicans, or might they start agitating for something more extreme?
For both the Left and the Right, if one side increasingly controls the federal government, wouldn’t it be natural to seek ways to escape that control?
We are seeing evidence of this movement to escape Republican MAGA control.
Specifically, California, Oregon, and Washington are moving to create a “vaccine alliance” that rejects the federal government’s position on vaccines. California Governor Gavin Newsom spends virtually all of his time, along with Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, fighting Trump and every move he makes (and grossly hoping every breath he takes ceases). It seems if Trump is for it, Democrats are against it, including Trump’s efforts to reduce crime in America’s big cities, which disproportionately impacts minorities. Should Trump continue his war on urban crime in Blue cities and the results echo what he has done in Washington, D.C., urban voters of all stripes will reward him and his party in coming years. Don’t be surprised if we see a greater coming together of the Bell Curve Electorate I predicted back in October 2021 in which Americans of all races without a college degree come together in support of Trump and the MAGA movement.
California under Newsom aims to be the headquarters of the “resistance." I previously warned about the power of California. I noted:
The tyranny of California regulations may accelerate the unraveling of America. Specifically, with its huge (but shrinking) market, California thinks it can force the rest of America to adhere to its zealous climate change beliefs. By banning the internal combustion engine by 2035, California wants to force automakers to dedicate an increasing amount of its production to electric vehicles (EV), resulting in the rest of America being forced into EVs whether they like or not. The same goes for other types of manufacturing that California wants to mandate be done according to its “environmentally friendly” dictates. As level-headed Americans flee the Blue states leaving a greater concentration of left-wing voters, politicians in those states like California will keep ratcheting up their virtue signaling with ever-more progressive policies.
The vaccine alliance and Newsom’s perpetual Trump opposition are just more far left power moves by California progressives. Each move they make, however, alienates them even more from Red America, which is why more and more people and businesses are fleeing California, Illinois, and New York. Should socialist fanatic Zohran Mamdani win the New York City mayoral race, the exodus from New York City will accelerate.
In my national dissolution piece, I wrote about the increasing push by local governments to become parts of other states. Greater Idaho in which the eastern counties in Oregon and Washington secede to Idaho has long been in progress. Recently, a California Assemblymember called for California to be split up into two states—a Blue state formed by coastal areas and a Red state formed by the interior parts of the state. The state would become New California. Indiana also invited several counties in Illinois to become part of Indiana given the short shrift those counties get from the supermajority Democrat control of Illinois. The Indiana legislature actually passed a bill to start this secession process. Interestingly, you don’t see the reverse happening—Blue counties trying to escape Red states.
Finally, as Joel Kotkin reported, pride in America is falling heavily among Democrats, hitting a low of just 36%, with Independents at 53% and Republicans at 92% in a Gallup poll. As the graphic shows, Republicans have always been fairly high in terms of their American pride, whereas Democrat pride plummeted with Trump’s election in 2016 with only a small recovery during Joe Biden’s term. I’ve previously hit at this division when I wrote:
Our Founding Fathers gave us a country, but that inheritance didn’t come with a lifetime guarantee. It seems implausible America would break-up at some point, but the Romans and British thought the collapse of their empires also was implausible. History doesn’t give a wit about what we think. It just grinds ever forward leaving empires, kingdoms, and countries on its dustbin. Will America as we know it end up on that dustbin, too? A house divided cannot stand forever.
America is more divided than at any point since the Civil War. If the division grows even more, will America survive as is? We will know more after the 2026 mid-term election and the 2028 presidential election. Should Republicans retain both chambers in Congress and the presidency, the Left and its ever fringey voters will collectively lose their minds. The unthinkable today is becoming more thinkable each passing year, thereby making a national dissolution ever more possible a couple of decades from now.
P.S. I got a laugh at this recent op-ed, “The Great BIPARTISAN Abdication," in the Wall Street Journal by former Congressman and White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta. Panetta has tried to brand himself as a bipartisan doer who can reach across the aisle. He wants us to conveniently forget that he was part of the Dirty 51 who signed the letter claiming Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation knowing full well it was not. I highlighted in the op-ed where Panetta’s mask slips showing him as the partisan hack he is. As he lists the sins of the Republicans, he couldn’t seem to find space in his lengthy op-ed to include ANY sins of the Democrats. What a jerk!
