Scenes from a poorly arranged marriage
By 
Poster Bathawk is a controversial figure around here, but this Kurt Anderson NYT op-ed (gift link; Anderson wrote the great book Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire), could well have been written by him:
A national divorce — let alone a civil war — is, for now, the stuff of fiction. But while loose talk from rabble-rousers has distracted us, the nation has sunk, almost unnoticed, into an unspectacular yet profoundly strange new arrangement. It’s not yet a divorce; it’s more like a bitter, loveless marriage in which the parties stay technically but less and less enthusiastically united because splitting up is too complicated or dreadful or expensive. . . .
For the past dozen or so years, the more blue parts and the more red parts of this purple country have arrived at a variety of ad hoc governing arrangements, apparatuses and alliances with which to thwart each other or the federal government. The names for this dynamic are “uncooperative federalism” and, more recently, “soft secession.”
During the past two Democratic presidencies, many red states and counties declared themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries, prohibiting their police forces from enforcing some federal gun regulations. (The term was a trollish play on Democratic sanctuary cities, which did the same for federal immigration policies.) Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas took it upon himself to override federal immigration policy, deploying the National Guard to string the banks of the Rio Grande with coils of razor wire and ordering his troops to prevent federal border agents from helping migrants who got tangled in them. More than two dozen Republican governors endorsed the show of anti-federal strength.
Now that Mr. Trump is back in office, Democratic-led states and cities are getting almost as aggressive, overriding or ignoring federal and state policies they find objectionable. Local police departments aren’t cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Many states passed laws to shield residents from prosecution if they are charged elsewhere with facilitating abortions, and several have stockpiled abortifacients in case federal law or regulations make them hard to get.
Various combinations of blue states have banded together to perform functions the federal government has abandoned or degraded: forming a climate alliance that participates in international forums the Trump administration won’t attend, creating de facto regulatory agencies for cap-and-trade carbon markets, issuing medically legitimate childhood vaccination recommendations. A coalition of a couple dozen attorneys general has sued the administration over birthright citizenship, tariffs and denial of federal funds to Democratic-controlled states. In the group’s frequent online group meetings, it was reported last fall, “the same phrase keeps coming up, though nobody wants to say it publicly: soft secession.”
As far as our national union goes, the United States is definitely past the good-faith couples therapy stage and onto continuous mutual mistrust and contempt. Each side is engaging in what therapists call triangulation, enlisting friends and family members who take their sides. We have fully entered the judicial stage of marital hostility, with mediation, custody fights, restraining orders and all.
Still, the unhappiest couples can stagger on together for a long time, living together in one household with shared assets but separate calendars, friends, bedrooms and lives, occasionally engaging to scream at each other before returning to their default postures of silent, sullen loathing.
Although Anderson doesn’t come right out and scream it, the history of the United States has been an at the best of times fractious marriage between the enthusiastic proponents of white supremacy and Christianist ethno- nationalism, whether implicit or explicit, and the increasingly bitter resistance to those founding ideologies. Is this the kind of arrangement that can last?
A peaceful national consensus and more or less well-functioning democracy aren’t going to spontaneously revive. A generation ago, a little-known junior senator named Barack Obama bucked us up with his heartfelt insistence that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America,” only “the United States of America.” He encouraged us not to “slice and dice our country into red states and blue states,” because “we are one people.” Isn’t it pretty to think so? Since then we have sliced and diced ourselves thoroughly.
We can’t keep going this way. Escaping federal dysfunction and avoiding real hostilities over the long term will require some kind of radical shift. Perhaps states and regions could become much more independent. Like the regional autonomous communities in Spain, some of which collect nearly all the taxes their inhabitants pay and then forward a negotiated share to the national government. Or Switzerland, where cantons can divide or reconfigure and each one decides whether newcomers become Swiss citizens.
Even that might not be enough. Someday down the line we may decide we have no choice but to call it quits. If so, I hope we could follow the lead of post-Soviet Czechoslovakia, whose 1993 breakup into two nations was so calm, it was called the Velvet Divorce, a kind of conscious national uncoupling. For our huge, heterogeneous country, it would be extremely difficult and painful. But in the long run, it might still be better for the kids.
The Spanish example is an interesting one, as many Basques and Catalonians basically don’t really consider themselves Spanish, except perhaps to the extent they lend their football players to the national team. (I recently learned that Barcelona’s great 19-year-old defender Pau Cubarsi, who was named the outstanding young player at the 2026 World Cup, does not like to do interviews in Spanish because he isn’t comfortable speaking the language).
We shall see how this all goes, one way or another.