Nov. 15, 2025 · Soft Secession
Are We Headed Towards American Balkinization
Can a federal republic survive when states and the central government operate in permanent legal warfare?
For a comprehensive guide to how blue states can build strategic autonomy through coordinated legal and fiscal action, protecting their populations while federal institutions undergo this degradation process, click on this text to find the “Introduction to Soft Secession” booklet.
The realistic outcomes for American democracy have narrowed to four plausible scenarios. Republicans could consolidate authoritarian control, creating something like Russia with a larger military budget. Democrats could win landslide elections, only to watch courts and Republican obstruction grind progress to a halt until the next Republican administration finishes the authoritarian project. Blue states could pursue soft secession, building financial independence and nullifying federal authority through coordinated legal strategies. Or the federal system could simply fragment through accumulated incompatibilities, creating balkanization not through dramatic secession but through the quiet breakdown of institutions that no longer function across state lines.
That fourth scenario deserves serious analysis because unlike the others, balkanization requires no conscious choice. It emerges from failures already underway.
Balkanization happens when the basic mechanisms of federal coordination stop working. The 43-day government shutdown from September to November 2025 became the longest in American history, furloughing 900,000 federal employees and threatening food assistance for 42 million people. Unlike previous shutdowns that promised eventual back pay, this one included reduction-in-force plans threatening permanent layoffs. By late October, half of major air traffic control facilities faced dangerous staffing shortages while political leadership argued over whether military reserves could fill gaps. The federal government demonstrated it could no longer perform basic operational functions.
The funding freeze crisis revealed something more fundamental. On January 27, 2025, the Office of Management and Budget froze an estimated 1.1 trillion dollars in federal grants, affecting more than one-third of total state revenue nationally. Within 24 hours, 22 states sued in federal court. Judges in Rhode Island and Washington DC issued temporary restraining orders demanding the administration release the funds. Judge John McConnell explicitly found the administration “continued to improperly freeze federal funds” despite his court orders. As of mid-2025, Congressional staff documented at least 425 billion dollars being withheld from states even though Congress had passed the spending bills and the president had signed them into law. The administration was simply refusing to send legally authorized money.
This created an unprecedented situation where states receiving federal money required emergency litigation to access funds Congress had already appropriated. California spent 5 million dollars on legal action to protect 168 billion dollars, achieving what Governor Gavin Newsom called a backstop “against tyrannical actions” but what also demonstrated that the largest state economy now operates in permanent legal warfare with the federal government over basic fiscal transfers. This represents deliberate Republican strategy, and blue states should learn the central lesson: simple refusal to cooperate works spectacularly well, especially when dealing with groups who have power and view you as both their enemies and an existential threat.
Robert Hamilton, former Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and expert on civil war dynamics, analyzed these patterns in his 2018 study comparing American political deterioration to Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union before their collapse.
Hamilton identifies the critical sequence that precedes state breakdown: constitutional crises over fundamental governance questions, nationalist demagoguery that makes compromise unworkable, systematic attacks on institutions creating partisan perception of bias, and declining public confidence that prevents political solutions from working. He emphasizes that civil wars in Yugoslavia and the USSR “did not come on suddenly” but emerged from this institutional degradation process.
America exhibits every stage Hamilton identified. The birthright citizenship executive order created a constitutional crisis when the administration attempted to rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment through presidential decree, prompting 22 states to sue and multiple federal judges to call the order “blatantly unconstitutional.” When federal authorities deported a Maryland resident under court protection to El Salvador despite Supreme Court orders for his return, federal judges found probable cause for criminal contempt. This represents a conflict over the most basic governance questions: who interprets the Constitution, whether court orders bind the executive, and what happens when branches openly defy each other.
At what point does it stop being a “Constitutional Crisis” and become “the Constitution is whatever Republicans want it to be”?
Nationalist demagoguery has moved from fringe rhetoric to mainstream Republican strategy. When the Justice Department published an official list of “sanctuary jurisdictions” and sued states for refusing immigration cooperation, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey responded that state police would not assist federal deportations. On July 25, 2025, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that states have Tenth Amendment protection to refuse participation in federal immigration enforcement. This created a direct confrontation where twelve states now maintain explicit policies of non-cooperation with federal authorities on core enforcement functions, and courts validated their constitutional authority to do so.
The systematic attack on institutions has reached a critical threshold. The administration has ignored court orders in case after case throughout 2025. The funding freeze exemplifies the pattern: deliberate coercion of states through withheld funds, followed by defiance of judicial orders to release them. The Supreme Court compounded the breakdown by transferring final interpretive authority from agencies to judges, opening decades-old regulations to new challenges, and requiring enforcement in federal courts. In a practical sense, this means Republican judges can now block any Democratic administration’s regulations simply by disagreeing with how the agency interprets the law.
On the more localized level, we can look at growing disparities in laws between states. In Idaho, a gram of cannabis gets you jail time. In Washington, you buy it at a store that looks like an Apple Store. In Texas, authorities arrest people for sharing abortion information online. People face arrest for posting Charlie Kirk memes. Tennessee wants to charge abortion as murder. How long can a nation function as a single entity with such wild disparities in views on how the law should be applied.
America lacks the ethnic federal structure that created clear boundaries for Yugoslavia’s successor states, but the institutional breakdown creates the same governance crisis. Constitutional interpretation has become partisan rather than legal. Court orders function as unenforceable suggestions. Citizens face brutally different legal regimes depending on state residence. The federal system has stopped functioning as a coordinated whole. This represents balkanization in its functional sense: the breakdown of institutions that maintain union.
Soft secession responds to institutional breakdown without disorganized organizational collapse or violent conflict. Rather than waiting for things to fall apart while still trying the tactics that have failed over and over again, blue states can build alternative structures: non-tax revenue streams to fund state-level social safety nets, aggressive anti-corruption prosecutions, and active non-cooperation with policies that harm state populations. These mechanisms achieve state autonomy within the constitutional system, protecting populations while maintaining legal union.
For a comprehensive guide to how blue states can build strategic autonomy through coordinated legal and fiscal action, protecting their populations while federal institutions undergo this degradation process, click on this text to find the “Introduction to Soft Secession” booklet.
References
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