OPINION: Secession talk always is en vogue when a Republican is in the White House
Over Independence Day weekend, the Daily Mail highlighted a professor emeritus’ pontifications about a second American Civil War.
The University of California-Santa Barbara’s Benjamin Cohen said California seceding from the Union could occur within a decade due to “growing friction with the federal government.”
In a “fictional news bulletin” Cohen wrote that “President [JD] Vance has threatened a military takeover of state government in Sacramento, backed by National Guard troops from nearby red states. Armed conflict looks increasingly possible.”
The professor theorizes in his new book “Dream States: A Lurking Nightmare for the World Order” that a second civil war would be more of an “urban [vs.] rural” affair than a “North vs. South or East vs. West” scenario.
“We tend to simplify geography by looking exclusively at the existing lines on a map that separate one sovereign state from another,” Cohen said. “But the reality is there are many people within those states that are very unhappy with the arrangement. They’d prefer to draw the lines in a different way. In some cases, they’re prepared to fight to redraw those lines.”
A “sense of identity — the impulse to rally behind the group you feel you belong to, and the insistence on its right to act independently” — would be the “primary driver” behind a modern secession.
Cohen is correct in my view; my home state of Delaware certainly is fragmented along urban and rural lines. The heavily populated (and liberal) New Castle County, which includes Wilmington and Newark (home to the University of Delaware) essentially sets the tone for the entire state, despite the southernmost county (Sussex) being heavily conservative. (The middle county, Kent, is more evenly split as it includes the capital of Dover.)
Other states face similar situations. Western (rural) California and Oregon, for example, are much more conservative than the other parts of those states. Same with Pennsylvania, the Maryland panhandle, and northern Colorado.
Unsurprisingly, talk of secession is more socially acceptable when a Republican occupies the White House, especially one as vocal and visceral as Donald Trump. The progressive Mother Jones claims Trump himself would be the one responsible for any breakup of the Union.
MORE: As secession calls grow, professors say petitioners ‘idiots,’ possibly racist
This fits a going trend. It used to be in the United States that a change in party governance was accepted and the public went about their lives. But now progressives — and the media — look upon any sort of backlash to their preferred policies as an apocalypse, most especially when it comes to the presidency.
Such explains why their increasingly violent protest methods are constantly downplayed and/or rationalized, while relatively benign actions like the Tea Party protests during Barack Obama’s first term and the January 6 Capitol riot were portrayed as racist and insurrectionist, respectively.
As writer Kurt Schlichter wrote recently on X, “Understand where we are at. Anything the people we elected try to do is illegitimate. The facts don’t matter. The law doesn’t matter. We can never govern ourselves.”
Ironically, progressives have only themselves to blame for Trump getting a second shot at the presidency. They way overplayed their hand legally and culturally during his first term and in Biden’s four years, and now they’re — again — throwing a literal tantrum. The delicious irony of it all is this time Trump is utilizing many of the tactics of his predecessor.
Instead of taking a few moments to ponder how the heck Trump managed to win again, progressives are doubling down on so-called “80-20” issues. They’re fighting to keep biological males competing against females in sports, fighting to keep pornography in school libraries and classrooms, and actively battling against the federal government on illegal immigration.
And why would parents in red areas want to continue to send their children to public schools? Have you seen some of the National Education Association’s (the country’s largest teachers union) latest resolutions from its annual conference?
The union “pledges to defend democracy against Trump’s embrace of fascism.” It will work to portray any effort to eliminate the federal Dept. of Education as “illegal, anti-democratic, and racist.” It will label individual state’s rights as “Jim Crow” and will “defend students’ rights” to protest the Trump administration, its “racism” and “attacks” on the LGBTQ+ community.
The NEA also makes use of blatant racial quotas, codified by its bylaws and constitution — like the mandatory “minimum of twenty (20) percent ethnic minority representation on each committee.”
Alas, any potential break-up of the Union in the near future certainly won’t be as geographically “neat” as 1861. It’ll be one messy ordeal. Though the history behind states’ right to secede is lengthy and varied, the question supposedly was resolved by the post-Civil War U.S. Supreme Court case Texas v. White, which declared secession illegal.
Of course, like other high court cases, this doesn’t mean it couldn’t be revisited …
MORE: Confederate crackdown: Colleges sanitize Civil War-era symbols from campus
IMAGE CAPTION & CREDIT: California Gov. Gavin Newsom throws his hands up; C3/X. INTERIOR IMAGE: Mary Katharine Ham/X