The United States is rapidly heading toward a future that will require a decision from political authorities and elites of all types. The choice will be between peaceful radical decentralization—possibly including secession—on the one hand. On the other hand will be a ratcheting up of coercion and enforced “unity” to ensure political centralization.
The speed with which American polities proceed toward this situation will depend on two factors, both of which are already at play and contribute to ongoing talk of “national divorce” in the United States. The two factors are:
1. A growing ideological and geographic bifurcation between populations.
2. Growing centralization of state power which raises the stakes for competing cultural and ideological groups.
The first factor has been illustrated by at least two different developments. The first is that described in Bill Bishop’s book, The Big Sort, in which Americans are increasingly moving to states and cities that reflect their own ideological and cultural views. This has apparently even accelerated in the wake of the Covid Panic. But this is also found in non-geographic factors, and recent polls, including this one from Gallup, which prompted Gallup’s researchers to conclude that Americans are increasingly polarized:
As partisans have become increasingly polarized ideologically, so too have the candidates elected to public office representing those parties. That leaves less room for across-the-aisle negotiation on key issues between the two parties in federal and state government. It also has led to intra-party disagreement between ideologically extreme and centrist officeholders of the same party, which has sometimes made it challenging for the controlling parties of institutions to pass legislation their parties favor or handle basic government functions.
This brings us to the second factor. While ideological division has increased, the size and scope of the central government has grown. This provides the central state with vast powers to engage in immense transfers of wealth that are likely to increase ideological discord. For example, defense spending—a transfer of wealth from current taxpayers to select war-related interests —is now at higher levels than old Cold War peaks. Overall, the central government now spends taxpayer money at unprecedented levels, racking up multi-trillion dollar deficits, even in peacetime. Wealth and income transfers can take on sizable cultural and demographic elements as well. For example, the central government now can subsidize immigration at unprecedented levels—thus increasing internal demographic conflict.
This spending of all types leads to more price inflation—which largely redistributes wealth upward—and more redistribution of taxpayer wealth and income in general. In a modern democracy, the scope of this redistribution reflects the extent of the important relationship between powerful political interest groups and their patrons within the central government. This vast power to redistribute wealth makes elections a high stakes event. While elections are exceptionally unlikely to lead to any meaningful declines in the size and scope of the state itself, elections nonetheless affect which interest groups benefit most from electoral outcomes. In other words, when the central state is larger and more centralized, the losing political coalitions—composed of specific demographic, ideological, and economic interests—have more to lose when failing to maintain an electoral majority. As competing groups becomes more polarized, the democratic losers will perceive their loss as more substantial that would be the case under a less polarized population.
The stakes having been raised, the real and perceived costs of being in the political minority will continue to grow. Moreover, once the political minority groups get to the point that they feel they are in a permanent minority within a specific state—or some other sort of permanent disadvantage—then the cost of political unity rises to a much higher level. When this occurs, full-blown separation —i.e., political secession—becomes desirable to the disadvantaged group.
In the long term, this process is very common for any large state with a diverse population, due to both internal and external factors. The Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and numerous other empires provide us with examples. The United States is likely to face similar phenomena.
Yet, there are also ways to slow down this process of disintegration, and to avoid it in the near and medium term. Specifically, granting self-government and autonomy to ideological and cultural factions within the polity lessen the relative advantages of secession and lower the costs of remaining united to the national state.
Unfortunately, within the United States, these strategies have largely been outlawed by courts and legislatures. The strategies of local autonomy and decentralization, which have historically been used by national states to avoid or ease intractable and divisive political conflict, are largely verboten to Americans and their political institutions. Thus, if the American central state seeks to ensure the political unity of the American polity moving forward, it has essentially one option left to it: to double down on the use of coercive violence to impose political unity on the population, even as conflict among internal interests increases.
This has effectively converted the US constitution into a suicide pact. Within current legal interpretations, and under politically acceptable political institutions, mandatory and coerced centralization is the go-to response to any efforts to significantly decentralize political power or to establish more localized political autonomy. This inflexibility on the part of the central state is likely to then encourage greater resistance from out-of-power political factions, and will raise the relative advantage of full political separation. Rather than compromise via the granting of local autonomy, the governing elites’ preference for greater centralization is more likely to lead to the pursuit of political dismemberment as the only option available to political minorities.
Concession or Coercion?
When faced with political factions and minorities that seek greater autonomy and self-governance, central states can respond in two ways. The state can offer concessions, such as allowing greater local self-government exempt from many of the central state’s mandates. Or, the state can respond by applying greater coercive power, thus forcing compliance and assimilation from unhappy political factions.
Those who control the regime and its means of coercion will have to decide if suppressing the dissidents’ drive for more autonomy will produce stability. Conversely, it may be the refusal to grant concessions will lead to even more enthusiasm, on the part of the aggrieved out-of-power interests, in advocating for full-blown secession. As international relations scholar Arman Grigoryan puts it, this “is a choice between two competing risks: confronting a minority motivated by fears and grievances, which will increase the probability of a violent rebellion, or making concessions to a separatist-driven minority...”1
In cases where the state is confident it can forcibly impose unity, without greatly raising the cost of maintaining that unity beyond the short term, the state will likely do so. Moreover, many out-of-power groups are small and can be ignored with relative ease. Yet, this outcome is hardly a given for all groups as exhibited by dozens of successful secessionist movements over the past century, which have added dozens of new sovereign states to the world since 1945.2
On the other hand, the easier course of action for the state may be to simply “buy” peace and compliance from aggrieved minorities through concessions.3 Grigoryan continues:
the state can grant minorities wide-ranging rights of self-governance; give them veto power over certain issues; or impose fixed quotas in legislatures, police forces, and the officer corps. ”The real puzzle, therefore, is why some states do not propose such measures.4
The American Context
What do these concessions look like in an American context? Potentially separatist groups could obtain greater self-governance through the creation of new member states and the redrawing of state boundaries. Another strategy is to give state and local governments a de facto veto on federal policies within their own jurisdictions. For example, member states could refuse to grant voting rights to migrants from other states. All of these strategies would count as “concessions” in the model described by Grigoryan, and would presumably alleviate, at least in part, the motivations to fully separate from the national polity via secession.
But there’s a problem. All of these concessions are either outright illegal under current constitutional interpretations, or they face so many legal obstacles as to be not feasible under current political realities.
This is why the US constitution has essentially become a suicide pact. The very concessions that could be employed to increase the chances for peace and unity are also placed off limits by the regime itself.
De Facto Secession (Establishing an Autonomous Region)
In the American mind, there are often only two choices when it comes to the relationship between a member state and the central government. There is either the supposedly “normal” situation, in which the residents of member states are governed from Washington witihn a framework dominated by the federal government. Or, there is total separation through secession. Globally and historically, however, there are certainly many more options than this. Throughout history, many regions of many polities have been governed by the national state indirectly, to varying degrees. These are what are now areas of polities often labeled as an “autonomous province.” The level of autonomy varies from place to place, and time to time. But in many cases, an “autonomous” province is essentially self-governing in a meaningful sense. That is, domestic policy of these regions is set by local legislators in ways that reflect local interests.
The exception to self-governance in this case is in the area of foreign policy. This is the bargain that is struck for autonomous regions: they are granted self-governance in exchange for agreeing to not diverge from the central government in matters of foreign policy. For example, by the early twentieth century, Canada had gained almost total control over its own domestic policy, even if the United Kingdom retained control over Canadian foreign policy until 1931. A more messy example is the Irish Free State, which gradually gained control over its own foreign policy—freeing itself from British control—during the 1920s. This this period, however, the Irish “republic” functioned largely as an autonomous province of the UK.5
In such cases, the main concern of the central government is strategic and geopolitical in nature. In the case of Canada, for instance, the British were understandably reluctant to give up military access to Canada as a strategic outpost for the British armed forces. A similar concern fueled British control in Egypt after 1914. The British maintained military control of Egypt during this period for ease of passage to India for the British Navy. There was essentially no concern with the internal politics of Egypt outside of the area of foreign policy.
This strategy has been used countless times historically to negotiate against secession for aggrieved minority political groups. The group seeking secession is granted local autonomy in exchange for handing over its foreign policy to the central government.
It is easy to imagine a similar situation for separatist regions and populations of the United States. For example, if, say, California sought to separate from the United States, Washington would clearly object to this on foreign-policy grounds—although Washington may pretend to be primarily concerned with “human rights” or some constitutional issue. Given the preeminence of strategic interests for modern state institutions, it is clear that the American central government’s real main concern with California would be maintaining access to the central state’s strategic assets—especially its naval facilities in San Diego and elsewhere. In a larger international context, however, this would not be a definitive obstacle to granting some sort of local autonomy to the California government and its population.
Moreover, we could certainly include this type of “de facto, partial secession” as among the types of concessions that Grigoryan notes as means of defusing conflicts between the regional governments and the central state. In a scenario in which Californians were dead set in favor of gaining independence from Washington, the central government could counter with an offer of local autonomy in exchange for the continuation of the foreign-policy status quo.
Specifically, a truly autonomous region would have control over all its domestic policies that involve the sorts of issues that tend to motivate groups and regions to seek secession. These include policies like taxation, education policy, abortion, environmental policy, and much more.
The United States constitution, however, provides no options for this type of political autonomy—and certainly not in a way that would free the local region from federal regulations or federal oversight, even on non-strategic matters. (The so-called US territories, for example, are not exempt from federal payroll taxes of from a host of federal regulations.)
Allowing States to Control Their Own Borders
An important aspect of achieving local autonomy is the ability to locally control citizenship and control movement across the autonomous province’s borders. Without this, the region or province is effectively unable to insulate its own policies and legal affairs from the neighboring majority-controlled polity. Without this, the drive for full separatism has not been truly addressed.
There are many such examples within the constitutional milieu of the United States. For example, we can suppose that Member State A is ostensibly granted “self-government” in setting its own qualifications for citizenship. Yet, if the central state’s constitution also dictates that all residents of Member States B and C can carry their citizenship status anywhere within the “union,” the Member State A does not, in fact, have self-government. We can see how this can work to erase local self-determination in the United States in various ways.
After all, without the ability to control who may achieve citizenship within the province—and thus control who may participate in the province’s politics—the province remains at the mercy of the central government. Many states within the US, of course, are already well aware that there is nothing they can do if a large number of out-of-state voters move in and essentially displace the local population in a small town. The issue of “Californication” is a frequent topic of concern among residents in such places where large numbers of Californians have relocated and sought to implement “California-inspired” policies.
In many cases, the problem stems less from the physical in-migration of new residents than it does from the fact that the new residents are quicky and automatically granted citizenship—i.e., voting rights—in their new location. In the US, this is mandated by the central government. If a region or member state were able to achieve any real autonomy, however, it would have the ability to control political participation in local governance. An exception to this can be found on Indian tribal lands where political participation in tribal governance is not simply granted to anyone who lives onto the reservation. Rather, tribal “citizenship” is limited to those who are considered to be members based on criteria separate from mere physical residency.
Additional complications accompany the movement of persons even beyond the issue of citizenship. For example, some legal jurisdictions are now notorious for being “easy on crime.” In some cases, local authorities practice cashless bail systems, extremely light sentencing, and early release from prison, even for violent criminals. This potentially enables violent criminals to easily move across the state lines upon release. But what if a neighboring jurisdiction wished to prevent violent criminals from entering or becoming residents, much as many national states do now through border controls? A province with true autonomy could do this, although this is presently prohibited by the central government.
It is easy to see, however, how a lack of control over citizenship for newly arrived out-of-state “foreigners,” as well as a lack of say over the movement of violent criminals from neighboring jurisdictions, could motivate some regions or states to seek secession. The concession that could be offered in lieu of secession, therefore, would be to allow control over the granting of citizenship and residency at the level of the supposedly autonomous jurisdiction.
In many cases, these concessions would indeed defuse efforts by those who seek secession by make it more attractive, and less costly, to simply remain within the current polity.
This would not work in all cases, of course. And historically, even local autonomy failed to prevent secession. Examples include Norway (1905), Iceland (1944), and Ukraine (1991). In the cases of Ireland and Canada, the periods of provincial autonomy were also followed by full secession. Yet, in many other cases, concessions granting greater local autonomy and “de facto secession” has been a means of addressing ideological and cultural conflicts between out-of-power groups and ruling majorities.
Yet, the American constitutional and legal system is hard wired against any significant moves in this direction. This is why the system is now effectively a suicide pact. The sorts of strategies that would historically be used to quell separatism are immediately dismissed as unconstitutional in the United States. Rather, those in power simply assume that any group dissatisfied with membership within the US must simply conform or face the coercive power of the central state. This, of course, is what President Biden meant in 2022 when he said that American secessionists would have to contend with the weaponry of the federal government were they to seek “independence.” According to Biden: “For those brave right-wing Americans who say it’s all about keeping Americans ‘independent and safe.’ If you want to fight against a country, you need an F-15 ... You need something a little more than a gun.” In 2021, Biden also said that domestic activists who wish to resist the US government need “maybe some nuclear weapons.” Presumably, the American state is willing to use weapons of mass destruction on residents of the United States.
Over time, this is an attitude that is more likely to enflame separatism rather than moderate it.
This article is adapted from a talk delivered at the 2026 San Diego Mises Circle.
- 1
Arman Grigoryan, “Concessions or Coercion? How Governments Respond to Restive Ethnic Minorities,” International Security 39, No. 4, (Spring 2015): 172. Grigoryan applies his theory here to out-of-power ethnic minorities, but the same analysis can be applied to political interests that not be as cohesive as ethnic groups.
- 2
In an influential essay, James D. Fearon notes that full secession and separation are often less motivated by a desire for national actualization, than by fears over domination by competing political groups. In these cases, if the minority group can attain a means of being insulated from these competing interests, it will not seek full political separation. See James D. Fearon, “Commitment Problems and the Spread of Ethnic Conflict,” in The International Spread of Ethnic Conflict: Fear, Diffusion, and Escalation (David Lake, Donald Rothchild, eds. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998) pp. 107-126.
- 3
Matthias Basedau frames this choice as one between “consociationalists” and “integrationists.” The integrationists being the side that offers fewer concessions and demands greater enforced political unity. In many cases, the integrationists outright deny that cultural differences are a legitimate criterion for demanding greater autonomy. See Matthias Basedau, “Managing Ethnic Conflict: The Menu of Institutional Engineering,” German Institute of Global and Area Studies, No. 171, June 2011.
- 4
Grigoryan, pg. 171.
- 5
In cases where foreign policy preferences are likely to greatly diverge from the central state, an autonomous region in a foreign-policy union may not be feasible. Grigoryan notes that the Soviet-Georgia split was partly due to a lack of common ground on foreign-policy interests. See Grigoryan p. 189-90.
