Is Secession Safer Than Permanent Christo-Fascist Electoral Autocracy?

Go ahead and flinch. The word was designed for it. It carries immediate thoughts of idiots flying confederate flags from their pickup truck, six hundred thousand dead, and poor white men willing to die not to own slaves but to champion white supremacy. For a hundred and sixty years, the American political imagination has treated secession as the most illegitimate idea a citizen could entertain, a synonym for treason, for moral failure, for the worst thing a person could do to their country.

Things have changed.

So what would it take? At what point does the calculation shift? The United States was born in secession, thirteen colonies that decided a government taxing them without their consent, writing rules it exempted itself from, and offering them no voice in how their money was spent or their lives were governed had forfeited its claim to their loyalty. We called that moment the founding. Every generation since has inherited both the precedent and the obligation to ask the same question honestly. The people whose job it is to answer that question in public keep treating it as unspeakable, which means the threshold goes unnamed at every level where naming it would actually matter. A threshold nobody in power will commit to is no threshold at all. It is a permission structure for continued abuse.

So let’s ask the question seriously, the way political philosophers have always been willing to ask it, and the way the founders asked it when they wrote the document we keep invoking to justify the argument that we shouldn’t have to ask it at all.

John Locke, whose Second Treatise on Government the founders borrowed so extensively that large passages of the Declaration of Independence read like paraphrases, argued that government derives its authority from consent and that when a government systematically violates the terms of that consent, the obligation to obey it dissolves.¹ Thomas Jefferson said the same thing plainly in 1776: when a government becomes destructive of the ends for which it was established, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it. That position is canonical, mainstream, enshrined in the document every American schoolchild reads.²

Jefferson laid out specific criteria. A government loses its legitimacy not when its subjects feel aggrieved but when it structurally forfeits the purpose for which it was authorized. He was describing a specific condition: a government that had stopped serving the people who authorized its existence and had begun serving a ruling class instead.

We are inside that condition now. The Washington Post analyzed more than a hundred and sixty federal lawsuits with substantive rulings against the current administration and found defiance or circumvention of court orders in roughly one third of them.³ The Supreme Court ruled in June 2025 that lower federal courts may no longer issue nationwide injunctions, an uncontested power those courts had exercised for 249 years, now the Roberts court has more power than ever. Harms the administration inflicts can now only be remedied one plaintiff at a time while the conduct continues everywhere else, which is not a judicial ruling so much as a thumb on the scale toward single party rule.⁴ The federal funding apparatus has been converted into a loyalty mechanism, with billions frozen or terminated at universities, research institutions, and programs as a condition of political compliance.⁵ A federal judge in California described the administration’s conduct as “coercive and retaliatory,” a “playbook” aimed at bringing institutions “to their knees” to force ideological compliance.⁶

That’s where we are, with internment camps already holding nearly 70,000 people and more under construction,⁷ nearly two billion dollars a day spent on the Iran war and war crimes committed openly,⁸ food and medical care withheld from blue states as political punishment,⁹ a MAGA paramilitary invading cities to abduct people based on the color of their skin, and a government actively covering up the largest child sex trafficking operation in American history, one the president and much of his cabinet participated in.

Now project the trajectory forward.

Consider what governance looks like after a more stolen and contested elections, or a contested one where, for the second time this century, the Supreme Court decides the victor. Countries where elections become theater rather than decisions don’t drift back to accountability on their own. Ever. Not once. The people who benefit from rigged outcomes build more infrastructure to ensure those outcomes.

Years of economic mismanagement severe enough to hollow out a generation’s financial security compound in ways that don’t reverse quickly. Tariff wars cascade. Small businesses that can’t absorb cost increases close. Workers who lose those jobs feel the loss of a safety net that the same government has been systematically dismantling. We paid for SNAP and instead got PATRIOT missiles striking schools full of children.

The immigration detention apparatus, which legal observers have already begun comparing to internment in its scope and its indifference to due process, has shown every sign of expanding to include other categories of people whose presence is deemed inconvenient. The Alien Enemies Act was last used to intern Japanese Americans during World War II. The question of who comes next follows directly from the legal theory already deployed.

The psychologists who study authoritarian systems have a name for what happens to populations inside them: normalization drift. The people living through a deteriorating political situation lose their reference points because they adjust constantly to each new condition, and so the distance between where they started and where they are becomes invisible to them. Germans in 1933 thought things were bad. By 1938 they had accepted conditions that 1933 Germans would have found unthinkable. The point of naming the threshold in advance is to resist that drift, to say: here are the conditions under which a community is justified in treating central authority as having forfeited its claim to compliance. Vague assertions about protecting the sanctity of this union do not supersede war crimes and human rights abuses that are actively continuing and escalating.

Hoping the system still works sounds great if you’re a Democratic governor, because you stay in politics as long as you don’t actually stop the GOP from doing something catastrophic. Sue them, wait six months, win the funding back, send the donation email, post on social media celebrating the win, and the media covers it as humiliating Trump. What really happened was the bad guys won that fight. Residents of your state went without life or death services and food that they paid for, that is what happened for those six months.

The governor kept their seat and called it a victory. People get an excuse to believe the system still works, and for the people with enough privilege to survive the wait, maybe it does.

So what do we do about it?

Full secession is a legitimate endpoint. This piece isn’t arguing against it on principle. But it requires conditions we don’t fully have yet: geographic clarity, broad public consensus, and a population educated enough about what they’re choosing that the choice holds. None of those exist at scale right now.

There is another option, among many. Many of The Existentialist Republic readers are familiar with “Soft Secession,” which builds toward those conditions while reducing harm today, creates genuine resilience against whatever comes next, keeps the door open for reconciliation if the political climate shifts, and preserves the option to escalate if it doesn’t. The question this piece opened with deserves the most tactically sound answer available given where we actually are; this is it.

American federalism has never operated as a single unified relationship between states and the federal government. It operates as five distinct modes simultaneously, distributed across different states, cities, agencies, and issues at any given moment, a taxonomy I am introducing and submitting for peer review concurrent with this publication.²⁰

Cooperative Federalism is the baseline most Americans recognize: states and the federal government working in alignment on shared goals, dividing responsibilities, accepting funding, following the rules.

Uncooperative Federalism is where most blue states currently live on contested issues: not helping, not facilitating, declining to use state resources in service of federal priorities without directly confronting them.

Soft Secession goes further, building genuine parallel infrastructure, financial independence, and interstate coordination so that state and local governments reduce their exposure to federal leverage over time.

Oppositional Federalism is active legal warfare: state attorneys general prosecuting federal officials under state law, suing federal agencies, using every instrument of state sovereign power to restrain federal actors operating on state soil.

Constitutional Non-Compliance, the rarest and most serious mode, invokes the principle that no government entity has a legal or moral obligation to enforce a federal directive so plainly unconstitutional that compliance would itself be the violation, the doctrine that drove northern states to nullify the Fugitive Slave Act while the Supreme Court looked the other way.

None of these modes replace the others, and no state chooses just one. They coexist, they shift by issue and by month, and understanding which tool fits which fight is the difference between a strategy and a slogan.

This piece focuses on Soft Secession specifically, because it is the mode most underused, least understood, and most available to us right now. But before describing what it looks like in practice, one thing needs to be said plainly about who it’s for.

Soft Secession extends to every jurisdiction with the will to use it. The nurse living in Atlanta, the union organizer in rural Wisconsin, the teacher in a Texas suburb who has watched her curriculum get rewritten by people who’ve never set foot in her classroom: none of them are abandoned by this framework. They are its primary beneficiaries. When a blue city or state builds financial infrastructure that can’t be squeezed by the federal government, it removes a lever that would otherwise be used to hurt people who live nowhere near that state. When a city prosecutor charges a federal agent under state law for what happened on city streets, the accountability that produces doesn’t ask for the victim’s zip code. Taking power and cash away from bad actors reduces the harm those actors can inflict on everyone downstream of their decisions, not just the people lucky enough to live inside a protective jurisdiction. This is harm reduction as political strategy, and it is a more ambitious project than self-preservation.

The first objection from elected officials is always fear of escalation. But if we allowed fear of escalation to prevent us from opposing unnecessary suffering and harm, we would still be under the British crown. We would never have ended slavery. We would never have entered World War II. Stopping bad people from doing bad things has always carried the risk that they escalate. Threats of escalation are how bad people stay in power, and they work right up until someone says no. No, you will not fill internment camps. No, you will not kill people for speaking truth. No, you will not invade other countries and murder children by the schoolful. The threat only holds as long as nobody calls it.

The first leg is financial independence. States that depend on federal funding for large portions of their operating budgets are states that can be controlled through that funding. Build revenue streams and banking infrastructure that, with public accountability, funds the startup costs of public works and builds genuine resilience at the community level against federal corruption, economic disruption, or political unrest. North Dakota has operated a state-owned bank since 1919, funded entirely by public deposits rather than private investors, and it remained solvent through the 2008 financial crisis when virtually every other state was scrambling.¹⁰ They built it because early twentieth century farmers were being crushed by out-of-state banks holding their mortgages and grain elevator contracts. California’s economy is larger than most countries. New York, Illinois, and a dozen other blue states have the fiscal capacity to build financial institutions that don’t bend when the federal government threatens to cut the line. Cities can apply the same logic one layer down: municipal broadband networks and city-owned utilities fund the social safety nets and economic resilience actively being challenged by the GOP.

The second leg is coordination. States can enter into compacts with each other, share enforcement resources, align legal frameworks, and coordinate economic policy in ways that build collective leverage against federal pressure. When twenty states agree that they will not facilitate enforcement of a particular federal policy on their soil, the federal government faces a logistics problem that executive orders alone cannot solve. Cities in different states have been running informal coordination on climate and immigration policy for years under networks like the U.S. Climate Alliance and the Cities for Action coalition, doing quietly at the municipal level what states have been reluctant to formalize. Naming it, systematizing it, and scaling it is the only thing that’s new.

The third leg is nullification through neglect. A state that declines to dedicate its own law enforcement, courts, or administrative apparatus to enforcing a federal priority it finds abhorrent isn’t defying the federal government. It’s simply not helping. The federal government employs roughly 2.3 million civilian workers to administer a country of 335 million people.¹¹ It cannot enforce anything at scale without state and local cooperation, and state and local governments have no constitutional obligation to provide it. Sanctuary policies are decisions about how a city spends its police department’s time, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that the federal government cannot commandeer state and local officials to administer federal programs.¹² The principle scales upward.

In 1909, when the Industrial Workers of the World needed to fight bans on street speaking in Spokane, they didn’t draft a white paper. They sent members to stand on corners and get arrested, published a call in their newspaper: “Wanted: Men to Fill the Jails of Spokane.” Over four months, roughly 1,200 Wobblies were jailed. The city spent more than $250,000 trying to suppress them before capitulating entirely.¹³ They published a songbook setting labor doctrine to hymn melodies so workers who couldn’t read could carry the ideas home. They printed newspapers in nineteen languages.¹⁴ The eight-hour workday, collective bargaining, the end of child labor: none of those things happened because the people who wanted them posted about it to audiences who already agreed.

Political scientists Joshua Kalla and David Broockman synthesized 49 field experiments involving more than 150,000 subjects and found that traditional campaign contact produces a measurable persuasive effect of zero in general elections.¹⁵ Social media is worse. A 2018 Duke study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that Republicans who spent a month following a bot that retweeted liberal viewpoints became substantially more conservative, not less.¹⁶ The platforms reward outrage and punish nuance, which means the people already convinced are getting louder while the people who haven’t decided yet are watching from a distance.

A single ten-minute doorstep conversation using deep canvassing, asking a stranger to recall a time they were treated unfairly for being different and connecting that feeling to a political reality they hadn’t considered, produced attitude shifts greater than Americans’ average change on marriage equality across fourteen years of cultural exposure.¹⁷ The effect lasted months. It survived counterargument. The mechanism was shared narrative, not logic, which is exactly what Mother Jones was doing when she marched children with mangled hands through New Jersey towns in 1903 and let people see what they had been told did not exist.¹⁸

A state bank is a fact a legislature can pass. It becomes a force multiplier only when enough people understand why it was built, what it protects them from, and what they should do if it comes under threat. Interstate coordination is a powerful tool for nullifying federal attacks. They become durable political architecture only when constituents have been educated enough to reward the state representatives and governors who build them and punish the ones who don’t. That education doesn’t just happen on social media. It happens when someone who understands the argument gets off the internet and has the conversation with the stranger at the farmers market, the coworker who seems vaguely sympathetic but can’t quite say why things feel wrong, the neighbor who hasn’t thought about any of this because nothing in their immediate life has forced them to yet. Not recruitment for candidates. Education for ideas, delivered person to person, reaching the people who don’t already agree with us in our group chats and comment sections.

We are not short on passive sympathy. We are short on the organized, educated constituency that turns passive sympathy into active pressure on the officials who actually have the authority to build what we’re describing.

Soft Secession is the American constitutional order working exactly as designed. The federal structure was built with exactly this dynamic in mind. The founders understood that the central government might someday overreach, which is why they built states into the Constitution as a check on federal power just as they built the federal government into the Constitution as a check on state power. Federalism wasn’t an accident of compromise at the constitutional convention. It was a load-bearing feature of a system engineered to survive a captured government.

The infrastructure built through this framework doesn’t disappear when the crisis ends. The state bank built for financial independence becomes a community development institution once the threat recedes. The city broadband network built to replace unlawful withheld SNAP funding becomes a public utility that serves everyone regardless of income. The educated public that made both possible becomes the constituency for the next thing that needs defending. Nothing needs to be burned down. No one needs to die.

None of this requires winning a federal election first. Soft Secession operates at the level where we still have enough votes to govern: state legislatures, governors’ offices, city councils, and the neighborhoods where the people who elect them actually live. It doesn’t require persuading the median voter in a swing district before we begin. It requires beginning, teaching as we go, and trusting that a public that understands what is being built will fight for it with more energy than a public that was never told it existed.

The call to action today is simple.

Learn, share, and invite. Talk to someone about an idea they have never heard of that could change how we fight corruption, serve the community, create affordability, and take power away from the criminal organization that’s taken over the federal government.

Find any official in any state at openstates.org. Find your state attorney general at usa.gov/state-attorney-general. Find mutual aid near you at mutualaidhub.org.

Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism — physical copy / free download

Grab Them By The E.A.R.R.: How to Get Politicians to Do What You Want — physical copy / free download

Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder — physical copy / free download

Intro to Soft Secession — physical copy / free download

Oppositional Federalism and You — physical copy / free download

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Being Dangerous: Go From Activist to Operative

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Prosecution Memo: Jonathan RossWorks Cited

¹ Locke, J. (1689). Two treatises of government. Awnsham Churchill.

² Jefferson, T. (1776). Declaration of Independence. U.S. National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript

³ Washington Post. (2025, July 21). Trump accused of defying about a third of major court orders since taking office. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/07/21/trump-court-orders-defy-noncompliance-marshals-judges/

⁴ SCOTUSblog. (2026, January 7). Looking back at 2025: The Supreme Court and the Trump administration. https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/01/looking-back-at-2025-the-supreme-court-and-the-trump-administration/

⁵ Center for American Progress. (2025, July 23). Mapping federal funding cuts to U.S. colleges and universities. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/mapping-federal-funding-cuts-to-us-colleges-and-universities/

⁶ CalMatters. (2025, November 15). ‘Unlawful coercion’: Trump can’t withhold funds or demand payment from UC, federal judge rules. https://calmatters.org/education/higher-education/2025/11/uc/

⁷ Montoya-Galvez, C. (2026, January 16). ICE’s detainee population reaches new record high of 73,000, as crackdown widens. CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ices-detainee-population-record-high-of-73000/

⁸ NBC News. (2026, March 6). First 6 days of Iran war cost $11 billion, Pentagon tells senators. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/first-6-days-iran-war-cost-11-billion-pentagon-tells-senators-rcna263060

⁹ Minnesota Attorney General. (2026, March 3). Attorney General Ellison sues to protect Medicaid funding [Press release]. https://www.ag.state.mn.us/Office/Communications/2026/03/03_Medicaid-Funding.asp

¹⁰ Bank of North Dakota. (n.d.). About BND. https://bnd.nd.gov/about/

¹¹ U.S. Office of Personnel Management. (2024). Federal civilian workforce statistics. https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/data-analysis-documentation/federal-employment-reports/

¹² Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898 (1997).

¹³ Global Nonviolent Action Database. (n.d.). Industrial Workers of the World campaigns for free speech in Spokane, Washington, U.S.A., 1908–1910. Swarthmore College. https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/industrial-workers-world-campaigns-free-speech-spokane-washington-usa-1908-1910

¹⁴ University of Washington IWW History Project. (n.d.). The Industrial Worker. https://depts.washington.edu/iww/Industrial_Worker.shtml

¹⁵ Kalla, J., & Broockman, D. (2018). The minimal persuasive effects of campaign contact in general elections: Evidence from 49 field experiments. American Political Science Review, 112(1), 148–166.

¹⁶ Bail, C. A., Argyle, L. P., Brown, T. W., Bumpus, J. P., Chen, H., Hunzaker, M. B. F., Lee, J., Mann, M., Merhout, F., & Volfovsky, A. (2018). Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(37), 9216–9221. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1804840115

¹⁷ Broockman, D., & Kalla, J. (2016). Durably reducing transphobia: A field experiment on door-to-door canvassing. Science, 352(6282), 220–224. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aad9713

¹⁸ Global Nonviolent Action Database. (n.d.). Philadelphian mill children march against child labor exploitation, 1903. Swarthmore College. https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/philadelpian-mill-children-march-against-child-labor-exploitation-1903

¹⁹ Chenoweth, E., & Stephan, M. J. (2011). Why civil resistance works: The strategic logic of nonviolent conflict. Columbia University Press.

²⁰ Armitage, C. (2026, March 14). The constitutional architecture of state opposition: A taxonomy of sovereign posture under federal authoritarian capture [Working paper under review]. Social Science Research Network. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=6416178