Where Do You Draw the Line?
Secessionist movements are on the rise in the U.S., but ignoring regional histories is a disaster waiting to happen
With Donald Trump in the White House and Congress at its most polarized since the Civil War, Americans are having a hard time ignoring the fact that our fundamental differences are geographic, even as they are partisan and ideological. As such, there has been increased public mumbling about addressing this either by breaking up divisive states or removing their state or region from the United States altogether.
The remarkable thing about many of these campaigns — from the various schemes to break up California to murmurs of secession from some in Texas or the Pacific Northwest — is how they ignore this federation’s historic fissures when laying out their plans and drawing their maps. Whether seeking to establish more states or a whole new country, secessionists’ maps set up their new entities for the very kinds of internal dissension, regional antagonism, and cultural warfare their projects are seeking to leave behind.
Let me say at the outset that I’m not a proponent of breaking up the federation. Having lived in the Balkans in the 1990s, covering ethnocultural tensions, violence, war, and genocide, I take a rather dim view of human nature. There’s no…
