In just his first year, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has wielded his mayoral powers effectively for the people of New York. Photo Credit...José A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York Times

A state does not need Congress or the White House to protect the people inside its borders, particularly when the threat comes from that same White House.

Pro-democracy cities and states have started to work out what red states figured out years ago, and the pattern already has a name that makes many Democrats wince: soft secession.

In March 2025, Washington’s attorney general sued one of the state’s own counties for helping federal immigration agents, because a state law forbids that help. In June 2026, Illinois passed a law barring the state’s health networks from handing a patient’s abortion records to any out-of-state authority that comes asking. Neither state asked the federal government first. Both built the wall and dared it to respond. This is what soft secession looks like, and it is not a proposal for some future crisis. It is the work states are already doing, one statute and one conflict at a time.

Soft secession moves one direction, towards refusal and non-cooperation. A state builds something on its own authority and its own revenue to make a self sufficient safety net, or maybe withholds its officers from federal tasks it disagrees with, and leaves the federal government to react.

What we frequently see, is states and cities suing the administration first, before non-compliance, which is ultimately inherently reactive, defensive, and usually involves significant damage being done by the regime in power without restitution, damages, or a return to what existed prior to the transgression in question.

You see, a lawsuit asks a federal court for help and accepts that court as the referee, and the referee increasingly shows themselves to be biased through decades of training by the Federalist Society. The GOP has been working on buying the referees for decades.

Democratic attorneys general have filed more than a hundred suits against the administration, which is worth celebrating, since it isn’t a total acquiescence to illegitimate actions.

But the fact is, states didn’t sue for the right to sell cannabis. States legalized it, licensed dispensaries, and federal prohibition became a dead letter, because the DEA has no state police to make the arrests. That is the posture that is proven to work: do the thing, in enough places, because it’s the right thing to do, and let the federal government be spread in 1,000x directions. It’s the principles of asymmetric warfare applied to governance.

Even cities can get in on this.

In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani is opening free childcare for two-year-olds, starting with 2,000 free seats this fall and 12,000 next year for an estimated 100,000 two-year-olds. New York State is covering the first two years, $73 million and then $425 million. A working parent enrolls a two-year-old and pays nothing.

In Seattle, when SNAP food benefits were cut off in the November 2025 government shutdown and the Trump administration refused to release the program’s contingency funds, Mayor Bruce Harrell declared a civil emergency and directed $8 million, up to $4 million a month, to the city’s food banks until the benefits returned. He said Seattle would fill the gap left by “the other Washington’s dysfunction”. Families cut off from federal benefits kept getting food, paid for by the city.

In Boston, Mayor Michelle Wu has kept the 23, 28, and 29 bus lines fare-free through the end of 2026. The buses now carry 16% more riders than before the pandemic and are faster because riders board through every door without paying. A commuter in Roxbury or Mattapan gets on and rides for free.

How some view soft secession is as a sort of federalism for anti-fascists, and the tools it carries are old and incredibly well defined in the doctrine of US Courts.

One example comes from Printz v. United States, where Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority that the federal government “may neither issue directives requiring the States to address particular problems, nor command the States’ officers ... to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program.” The Court reaffirmed the rule in Murphy v. NCAA in 2018. Legal scholars Jessica Bulman-Pozen and Heather Gerken gave the practice its name in 2009, “uncooperative federalism”: a state does not have to fight the federal government head-on, it can decline to help, and without state help most federal programs stall.

Across the United States over the last 18 months we have seen democratic leaders successfully applying this exact principle to refuse aid and support for illegal and unconstitutional activities by the federal government. Take the win, expect more of these fights over the coming years as Democratic leaders increasingly realize we cannot cooperate with mass criminality or we will bend the knee to a truly horrible and terrifying future.

This is not new. Before the Civil War, Northern states passed personal liberty laws that made the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 nearly impossible to enforce, and by 1860 only about 330 people had been returned to bondage under it. The federal statute stayed on the books and stopped mattering, because the states that hated it refused to carry it out. Did it incite conflict? Sure. Sometimes the moral thing to do is to accept that avoiding conflict will cause more damage than standing for what is moral and right.

The contrast shows plainly in the fight over congressional maps. When the president told anti-democracy GOP states to redraw their districts before the midterms, Texas passed a new map by statute and claimed five more Republican-leaning seats. California answered at the ballot box, where voters passed Proposition 50 and locked in five Democratic seats. Virginia’s Democrats took the careful, procedural route instead, a constitutional amendment, and after voters narrowly approved it in April, the Virginia Supreme Court threw it out and left the old map in place. Texas and California acted, and kept their seats. Virginia deferred to the process, and a court erased the result. They didn’t have to comply with a ruling so politically partisan that it illegitimizes the court. The people passed a damn state constitutional amendment, that’s the letter of the law. Shame on the people who made the order and a lesser but still legitimate shame on those who complied against the will of the people of the commonwealth.

The quietest version of soft secession is financial. Massachusetts sends $4,846 more per person to the federal government each year than it gets back, and over five years New York sent $142.6 billion more than it received, the most of any state. For every dollar the average state sends, about $1.24 returns as federal spending, and the return flows disproportionately to the states now cheering cuts to the ones that fund them.

A state that builds its own institutions on that money stops depending on the transfers. North Dakota has run a state bank profitable every year since 1919, which helped it ride out the 2008 crash and the pandemic. California has parked reserves that once topped $76 billion. A state that funds its own safety net is not so easily manipulated or threatened by an oppositional regime.

States are already refusing in the open. Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey said her state police would “absolutely not” help carry out unconstitutional mass internment and mass violence from federal agents. Oregon stockpiled the abortion drug mifepristone in public, enough to outlast a federal ban, and other states did the same. Refusal is cheap and it is legal, and it works precisely because the federal government cannot conscript a state trooper or a state pharmacy to do what the state has forbidden.

The federal government is not sitting still. In January 2026, the White House ordered every agency to track the federal dollars flowing to thirteen Democratic-led states, a roster built to find what could be cut. Across 2025 the administration sent the National Guard into Los Angeles and the nation’s capital, and pushed toward Chicago and Portland, over the objections of the governors and mayors who run those places. I’d like to mention that the total failure of the administration to effectively provoke mass violence with their invasions of democratic cities is something that gives me hope moving forward. It seems that just ignoring the soldiers was sufficient to deflate the efforts.

States are also building their own floor under the parts of democracy the federal government has let erode. Ten states now have voting-rights acts of their own that reach past the weakened federal statute, and Colorado counts paper ballots with risk-limiting audits on a system no federal agency touches.

On climate, states run their own program. The Climate Alliance’s twenty-four governors speak for about sixty percent of the national economy, and the eleven-state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative has cut power-plant emissions by more than half. Eighteen states and the District of Columbia have committed their electoral votes to the national popular-vote winner, 222 of the 270 the compact needs to take effect.

This is harm reduction. A state that builds its own capacity keeps the choice to leave it idle. While the federal government dismantles the safety net and turns its enforcement power on the places that did not vote for it, those states can stand up their own alternatives and keep their hands off the demolition.

Importantly, if federal power returns to its constitutional limits, the parallel systems can wind down and there’s an easy pivot to resumed cooperation. Nothing here requires leaving the union, and nothing here has to be permanent. The point is narrower: a state should never be forced to choose between its own residents and an order it knows to be unlawful.

The precedent is old, the money is real, and the tools belong to red states and blue states alike. Soft secession is already underway. What remains is the decision to do it more intentionally, as the deliberate and peaceful strategy of disempowering bad actors and protecting people from a government that has actively become an existential risk for all of humanity; all while leaving the door open to stitching the country back together when the danger passes.

Below you’ll find info on the Intro to Soft Secession booklet (available as a free pdf) and so much more.

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