E PLURIBUS UNUM OR EX UNO DUO?
The Founders Didn't Think the USA Would Last This Long, We Shouldn't Prolong the Agony
Two nations unalike in dignity,
In Fair America, Where we lay our scene
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny
Where civil blood, makes civil hands unclean
STOP THE INSANITY!!!
We don’t want blood — or at least most of us don’t want blood. Did that once before. But how can America continue to function as a society AND as a political entity when it is this divided?
January 6th was in some ways analogous to the attack on Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina on April 12-13, 1861. Both were violent assaults on federal government buildings and both were were a challenge to the legitimacy of a newly elected president: Joe Biden and Abraham Lincoln. The difference of course is that the assault on Ft. Sumter by a South Carolina militia led to its surrender and provoked a military response from the Federal government.
Lincoln, who had been sworn into office the previous month, called for 75,000 volunteers to retake Sumter and other forts that were under threat in states that had seceded from the Union. The Civil War had begun.
Lincoln was right, “A house divided against itself cannot stand”
But on one point Lincoln is wrong for today. For him the Union was the guarantor of the animating spirit of 1776: the idea of “liberty” for all, equal status as citizens of a republic, not subjects of a monarchy.
That noble idea does not exist for a significant minority of Americans today.
A solid, unswayable faction of 40-43% are committed to strong man, one-party rule delivered via performative democracy — elective dictatorship.
This minority faction has held America in a state of cold Civil War for decades, long before Donald Trump rebranded the Republican Party as MAGA.
This month’s FRDH newsletters have been about laying out a case for acknowledging that fact and looking at the historical precedents for a new geo-political configuration of the United States after 250 years of seeking to create a more perfect union where union is no longer possible. This third and final instalment is about a possible way of breaking up — consciously uncoupling — without bloodshed.
It is fanciful. It is unlikely. But it may well be necessary. Americans have always seen themselves as citizens of the most unique and blessed among nations so why not contemplate for a moment an act of sacrifice that would be sacred in nature: to depart from one another so we can follow our very different understandings of American nationhood?
I ask you to read this with an open and a playful mind. I’d like to know what you think when you’ve finished reading, so take out a paid subscription and join the conversation below. I promise to respond.
Of course there are enormous difficulties.
First and foremost, unlike at the time of the Civil War the divisions in the country are not regional. The Southern State of Mind: white superiority to people of color, not wishing to accept laws from the federal government — except those that are to one’s financial benefit — is to be found most everywhere in the United States today. It divides society at a granular level: neighborhood by neighborhood, street by street, house by house, deep within families.
US society is trapped by this split. One region cannot compel another region to its view by force of arms alone, as during the Civil War; or legislation enforced by the courts with the credible threat of force of arms as during the Civil Rights Era.
The current division also lacks a moral issue as its focus. Slavery was genuinely abhorred in much of the North even if Black people were not embraced. Abolitionist newspapers like William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator, and novels like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, helped create a popular sentiment in the North against the South’s “peculiar institution.”
When war came, as for a decade seemed inevitable as the country expanded westward taking the argument over slavery with it, the Northern states responded with alacrity to Lincoln’s call for troops following Ft. Sumter.
During the Civil War, 91,327 soldiers from Wisconsin served in the Union army. 12,000 plus died for the Union and the end of slavery.
A similar number from Michigan — a 1/4 of the state’s male population — fought for the North. A Cavalry brigade from Michigan took part in the Battle of Gettysburg under the command of George Armstrong Custer.
An astonishing 360,000 Pennsylvanians fought for the Union during the course of the war. An estimated 27,000 perished from this earth so that government of the people, by the people, for the people would continue.
But today? Those three states pretty much tipped the election to Trump in 2024. Although in only one of them — Pennsylvania — did he win more than 50% of the vote and then just barely: 50.4%.
Split down the middle.
But here’s another contemporary example of a major change in American society between the first Civil War and today.
A few months after the Civil War started, Harvard University raised a regiment, the 20th Massachusetts Infantry, and it fought all the way through the conflict from Antietam to Appomattox. (Among its officers was Paul Revere’s grandson who was mortally wounded at Gettysburg.)
It is impossible to imagine that a fight to preserve today’s Union from taking its final steps to a MAGA elective dictatorship could call on that kind of loyalty from Harvard’s undergrads. 58% of the Class of 2024’s graduates who entered the workforce went into finance, consulting and tech — not careers noted for resistance to America’s drift to corrupt, one-party oligarchy.
Then there are Harvard’s humanities’ graduates many of whom have been indoctrinated to think the Civil War had nothing to do with freeing slaves. It is fashionable in parts of the academy to say Lincoln’s goal in prosecuting the war was preserving the Union not ending slavery. This is based on taking out of context part of a sentence in a letter Lincoln wrote to prominent newspaper editor Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune. Greeley had published an open letter to the President on August 19, 1862, in which he accused him of foot dragging in fully emancipating the South’s slaves. Lincoln wrote:
If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it,
That’s the bit that people get taught. Then he wrote,
… and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.
Then he ends,
I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty, and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men, everywhere, could be free.
Sorry, for the digression but my point is that the leadership cadres for a fight to preserve America as a united republic of 50 states do not exist today. Combine that with the fact that the split in American society is not regional but everywhere — as in a dysfunctional family — and there are only two ways out of the mess.
First, continue to put your trust in an electoral system dominated by moneyed interests and which since 1994 has delivered: Congressional paralysis thanks to Republican>MAGA factional intransigence, two Republican presidents elected with a minority of the popular vote who in turn appointed the bulk of a Supreme Court that overturned Roe v Wade, gutted the Voting Rights Act and ruled Presidents have “absolute immunity” for official acts committed as president e.g. inciting a mob to storm the Capitol to stop the certification of their loss in an election.
The other choice is Divorce.
But how to do it. Some of you will have gone through divorce so you know you have to start by negotiating the Division of Property which in the US stretches from Sea to Shining Sea.
In any negotiation you do the easy stuff first, to build confidence in the process. Let’s begin with naming rights:
12 score and ten years ago our forefathers brought forth on this continent two nations. As this divorce acknowledges the reality that Lincoln tried valiantly to change, the Confederate States of America can be re-born or change their name to the Christian States of America. Their country, their choice. The rest of us will continue to use the USA.
We both get to use the Constitution. Much of the decline into cold civil war has been based in arguments over interpretations of this document. Once we each have our own country we can interpret, amend, update the Constitution as the citizens of each new entity see fit.
It’s easy to imagine the Christian States of America immediately redrafting the Constitution’s preamble, changing the words, “In order to form a more perfect union” to “in order to form a more Christian union”; finding places to insert the words “Savior” and “Jesus Christ” which somehow didn’t make it into the founding contract of the present United States. (Why those explicitly Christian words are not included in the founding document of a supposedly “Christian” country is something the blasphemous political Christians who have led America to this place have never asked themselves and have never been asked by those of us who have watched them take our country away from us.)
The USA would be a more heterodox assemblage. Old school Republicans, the American equivalent of One-Nation Tories could come out of hiding and reboot the Grand Old Party of Lincoln. The Democratic party, held together for the last thirty years not by ideology but by fear of being overrun by the Newt Gingrich and then MAGA faction could finally split. Centrists could either join the Republicans or reconstitute a New Deal Democratic party and leave the younger, wilder, identitarian, biological sex is not real shores of wokery to those who believe politics is about ideological purity rather than winning elections.
Hopefully the USA Constitutional convention would get down to the business of eliminating the electoral college and having direct elections for the office of President, taking a closer look at the First Amendment and make it clearer on the difference between free speech and commercial speech and what a free “press” actually is in an era of political propaganda purporting to be news and deep-fake AI tech. Also: term limits on federal judges including Supreme Court Justices.
(And maybe clarify birth-right citizenship to exclude any direct descendant of any Australian born in Melbourne on 11 March 1931.)
There will be a need for the CSA to start a judicial system from scratch, so on behalf of the USA I am gifting the CSA the SCOTUS Six: The six justices who ruled in Trump’s favor in Trump v USA — Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. They can go, along with every Trump appointee to the Federal bench. Vaya con dios.
Finally, money:
It is a cliche of our fraught political moment to talk about how much Blue states kick into the US treasury and how much Red states take out. It’s been going on forever, at least since the New Deal. Roads, electricity, all the infrastructure of the 20th century in places like Tennessee and Mississippi was paid for by Yankees. Today the situation remains unchanged.
Forget about it. I advocate debt forgiveness. Jubilee. Good luck to you. God bless.
That’s the easy stuff, for the harder bit redrawing the map, I must channel the spirit of the Versailles conference
This is how I would equitably divide the land mass of the 48 contiguous states into the Christian/Confederate States of America and the United States of America:
The core of the CSA will be the old Confederacy but I am going to make a few adjustments reflecting not just the changed demography of the region but also the changed economy. Working counter-clockwise from Virginia.
Everything to the west of my black line is CSA, to the east remains in the US. This fairly reflects the astonishing growth of Washington DC’s Virginia suburbs which extend west and south in subdivision after subdivision along the I-95 corridor. It takes into account the military-industrial complex’s naval division in and around Newport News and Norfolk and spares the enlightened denizens of Charlottesville from being packed into a majority Christian nationalist state.
The irony of the capitol of the first Confederacy, Richmond, remaining in the US is not lost on me but it is just one of many cities in the South to have been remade in the last half century by incomers from the North after the Civil Rights era put an end to segregation. The fact that I believe Appomattox should remain in the CSA gives its leaders, many of them believers in the Lost Cause, a chance to express their own sense of irony by making Appomattox, where Lee surrendered to Grant, the new capitol of the Confederate or Christian States — if they so choose.
(Aside: I would like to have taken a similarly Solomonic approach to North Carolina but the state is not so simply divided. Most of the incomers — several of them my oldest and dearest friends from childhood and the acting days in New York — who have strengthened the Democratic Party are in a belt in the centre of the state running from Charlotte to the university-industrial complex centred on the Research Triangle in Raleigh-Durham. Perhaps the people of NC could be offered a referendum on which entity they wish to join.)
The line dividing Virginia extends north to the Pennsylvania border, the old Mason-Dixon line and then goes west but I think it might make sense to extend it along I-70 through Ohio, Indiana and Illinois all the way to the Mississippi.
This is a very difficult piece of the puzzle. There is a natural border in this region: the Ohio River. But it is not one that reflects the social and demographic divisions of these states. South of I-70 is J. D. Vance country.
I went to college in Yellow Springs, Ohio, seven miles south of I-70 and have returned from time to time to southwestern Ohio for work. Yellow Springs was always a bit of an anomaly in the area. Founded by followers of the early 19th century utopian socialist Robert Owen it was a way station on the Underground railroad but the surrounding area was a little bit of Mississippi north of the Ohio river. That pretty much holds true today not just in Ohio but in all the lovely rolling woods and fields along the north bank of the big river as it rolls past Indiana and Illinois. This southern attitude needs to be reflected in the division of America.
But it is possible that a highway is not really a good place for a border. A river may be better and when we come to the question of population exchange it will be explored further.
To return to our darker purpose:
I-70 hits the Mississippi at St. Louis and now the border goes north along the river to Iowa west along the existing line between Missouri and Iowa to Nebraska.
The Kansas-Nebraska act of 1854 allowed the people of those two territories — which were about to join the Union — to choose whether to enter as free state or slave state. Pro-slave folks flooded into Kansas to sway the vote for Kansas to be a slave state. They were violent. An abolitionist named John Brown and his sons moved to Kansas to fight against them. “Bleeding Kansas” became a major step in convincing the nation that bloodshed might be the only way to end slavery.
Both Kansas and Nebraska entered the Union as free states but their historical evolution has been different. After the Civil War officially ended fighting continued in the state between militias made up of soldiers from both sides. I lived there for a time and that history is still felt. Kansas is a hard place and its political Christians use harsh rhetoric and occasional lethal violence against those they have deemed as offenders of God’s precepts. So Kansas is in the CSA, Nebraska in the US.
From the western boundary of Kansas where it bumps against Colorado we turn south until we come to the border of Oklahoma, continue west briefly to its border with New Mexico. This is the western extent of the CSA. Here the border turns south again to Texas and follows the existing border with New Mexico before turning east around Odessa/Midland
The reason for this division is obvious Trump and the Confederates fear of being overrun by migrants entering from Mexico. That fear is taken away by assigning the entire border region to the US of A. The CSA gets Dallas with its mega churches, the USA gets Houston and the Johnson Space Center.
Austin is a city that is rapidly changing. It is less and less a hill country equivalent to Berkeley with its university, alt-left politics and music scene, and more and more a place where Harvard/Stanford MBAs in favor of oligarchy settle down to make money and pay no taxes. Nevertheless for nostalgia and Willie Nelson’s sake I can’t leave it in the CSA so I am putting it in the USA.
New Orleans poses a very particular problem. It has a laissez-faire social culture unique to the South, a product of its history as the region’s open city: open for sin that is. I propose a Kaliningrad solution for NOLA and much of its surrounding region. It would become an enclave that is part of the USA even though not contiguous with it.
When I started thinking about the need for the US to divide itself during Trump’s first administration, Florida presented the greatest difficulty. Because of its unique geography and the history of its development in the 20th century it has a reverse North-South problem. The Northern part of the state — the panhandle across to the Atlantic at Jacksonville — is deeply Confederate in its mindset.
The Southern part of the state has Disney world and Cape Canaveral, and all the alte kockers in Miami and West Palm.
But it also has Mar a Lago, the Villages, and the Viejos Gusanos in Miami’s Little Havana.
There was a time I thought that dividing the state with everything north of Daytona Beach being in the CSA made sense but no more. Now I’m an alte kocker and my generation of American Jews is more likely to retire to Vermont or New Hampshire than Miami or West Palm. So I think the whole of Florida goes with the CSA (I hope my sister who lives in Fla forgives me)
That’s the division. I think it is fair. Both entities have access to the continent’s rich agricultural heartland and access to ports. The new South has large modern cities one of which could easily grow into a replacement for the national financial center of New York. Existing military facilities are evenly divided.
Now comes the difficulty and it’s not a small one:
Population exchange.
First, look at these maps:
This is a county by county map of the 2024 presidential election results. MAGA loves this map because it looks like a Trump landslide. But it wasn’t. Remember Trump did not even get a majority of the vote.
Much of that red space is devoid of people. The map below is the more important one for this discussion
The number inside each state represents number of people per square mile. When I first discussed breaking up the US at the Stoke Newington Festival in 2019, people rightly asked, What about all the Trump supporters in the upper plains, Montana and Idaho, how are you going to transfer them South? What it comes to is: there aren’t that many and their fate is not a priority.
Only 173,000 people voted for Kristi Noem to be South Dakota governor. That is a small number of people in what could turn into an exchange of millions. The militia movement along the northern tier of the country is deadly but small, maybe 20,000 people. Most are pledged to Trump and they might happily migrate to the CSA of their own accord to live in a white Christian country following what they consider to be Biblical and Constitutional precepts.
Earlier I mentioned the idea of I-70 as the border in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois basically dividing those states in half. If the two countries aspire for cordial relations it should be possible to set up crossings at major interchanges, similar to the US border with Canada. If not, that’s a lot of fence to build and perhaps the Ohio River must continue to be the border after all.
The biggest question is what it always has been in this country since the 17th century. The fate of African Americans who live in what would become the CSA.
Thirty years ago I traveled around Mississippi for the BBC World Service. It was a profound experience. The “New Great Migration” , the return of African Americans to the South 60/70 years after their grandparents had fled Jim Crow segregation in the original Great Migration, was in full swing. The South it was explained to me over and over is “home”. There was a sense of ownership of the region from the sweat and suffering of slave ancestors that cleared the land — this was around Clarksdale MS — planted and chopped the cotton, and created the blues culture that migrated and mutated into the dominant popular music of the last six decades.
In a reconstituted CSA what would happen? Could Black Civil Rights be guaranteed in the divorce negotiations? They would have to be. What would the enforcement mechanism be if the CSA reneged on the deal?
Beyond that, there has been mass immigration from non-European points of origin since the 60s: Latin America, Vietnam, South Asia, East Asia. How would these folks’ rights be guaranteed, would they feel comfortable in an explicitly white Christian domain?
The US would have to find room for them. Similarly the South would have to find room for the MAGA types in and around the cities who see the opportunity to go South to be among their own.
It may be as mentioned in the aside about North Carolina that some states hold a referendum on which entity they wish to join. But given the way elections are run today in a corrupt information system and the emotions this kind of referendum would set alight that could lead to violence. And violence is what this whole exercise hopes to avoid.
The solution: A period of time is included in the divorce agreement for citizens in both new entities to reflect on their situations as new constitutions are written. With each entity agreeing to accept citizens of the other for immediate full citizenship within this period, say, five years. This give people a chance to wait and see how the new constitutional order shakes out.
Let’s imagine a family in the USA deeply committed to the anti-abortion view and the new US constitution which takes a few years to write and ratify creates a right to abortion and at the same time the CSA writes a constitution saying life begins at conception and calls abortion murder. That family will be able to move South.
Similarly, imagine a research scientist at Vanderbilt or Georgia Tech or Duke doing cutting edge stem cell research using fetal tissues. The source material of their research is now illegal. So they could move north without any delays.
Fair and reasonable solution to the problem of population exchange, tie it to the ratification of new Constitutions.
Could it happen? Of course not. Do you think a place like Mississippi which gets three and a half times as much money from the federal government as it pays in would pull its snout away from the trough voluntarily, or allow itself to be forced away from the trough? Most of the states in the CSA as I’ve outlined are net recipients and would be similarly disinclined.
But something has to be done. As I wrote in the first essay in this series:
America is as divided as any of the societies whose civil wars I have covered: Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and Iraq. Those three conflicts were heralded and then sustained by the kind of rhetoric that has been a part of American life for decades. All of those places had polarized and then paralyzed politics before finally breaking into violence.
I cannot see the US avoiding that fate unless the majority knuckles under to the minority and goes along with the charade of democracy that our biennial trek to polling places represents.
And in the meantime we can only grow sicker as a society where something like this is tolerated: a fund-raising email from the President of the United States I received today
This can’t continue.
One final quote from Lincoln is right for this moment in history. It is taken from his address to Congress on Dec. 3rd, 1861. The war was going badly.
“The struggle of today, is not altogether for today — it is for a vast future also. With a reliance on Providence, all the more firm and earnest, let us proceed in the great task which events have devolved upon us.”
I would add let us proceed without delay.
More about my time in the South here:
And let me play you out with my favorite Civil War tune
I have another thought - states secede and apply to join Canada - the Western seaboard, North East seaboard and Great Lake states for starters. An echo of the creation of Canada.
We Brits tried something like this in Ireland. It hasn’t been particularly successful. And given the nature of the MAGA ideology, it seems unlikely, even if you could successfully separate the existing country into 2 political entities, that they could co-exist peacefully: since populism thrives on blaming the Other, the CSA government would find its new neighbour too easy a scapegoat for everything that went wrong economically or politically.