If At First You Don’t Secede

What if the South had won the Civil War? It’s the subject of many a historical parlor game, and almost got the HBO treatment in a series, eventually canceled, called “Confederate.” But it’s never discussed as anything that should have happened. Even neo-Confederates can’t bring themselves to say slavery needed to be preserved, preferring to argue that it would have died a natural death. But once slavery was vanquished by war, it was over. 

The secession of the Southern states that happened on its behalf was not something anyone dared propose to do again. Of course, there was institutionalized racism and Jim Crow that picked up in the South where slavery left off, but the union that hundreds of thousands had fought over and died for held. After 1865, the idea of America tolerating a breakaway nation defined by an anti-democratic way of life became untenable, and impossible. 

Or so we thought. When election denier Mike Johnson of Louisiana became speaker of the house last month, it hit me: history is repeating itself, or making good on itself. Republicans, the modern iteration of the Confederacy, are seceding from the union — but they are seceding in place. Like the Confederates of old, they are now officially championing an American reality that is nakedly, even proudly unequal, prioritizing their ‘way of life’ over justice, laws, decency and common sense. 

But unlike the old Confederates, they are not proposing to leave. The evolving strategy in 2023 is quite the opposite: By staying put, the right is focused on growing their philosophy and influence to the point where it will become the legitimate government — the union, if you will — and Democrats and others will be marginalized. 

This is much more ambitious, and more sinister, than breaking away and becoming a separate nation. The GOP wants to invert the picture that’s stood for 150 years and become the dominant force of the country, with everyone living by its rules. It’s a scenario in which the immoral will become acceptable, and the reasonable and humane will become fringe, even ridiculous. It’s the kind of complete victory the Confederates could have only dreamed of, but which the GOP, whose influence extends far beyond the South, has in its sights. 

Looking back over the last seven years, it’s clear the secession has been happening all along. It started with one wildly unfit man winning the presidency in 2016, something we all wanted to believe was a freak occurrence but that spoke to the ascension of a new confederacy that had always been waiting in the wings. Then came a steady GOP capitulation to the president and his brutishly racist, authoritarian rhetoric, in the process eliminating virtually all dissent (see the Mitt Romney book “A Reckoning”) even as the Trumpists sacked the Capitol in 2021 in an attempt to overthrow the government and the Union victory it always stood for. The coup failed, but the attempt has been legitimized by the GOP’s steadfast refusal to condemn it.

Indeed, since 2021, it’s been embraced as an expression of the people — the base — and their worldview, which the GOP leadership has decided to support at any cost. It’s an inverted power relationship that’s nonetheless more symbiotic than anyone could have predicted. To put a fine point on how secession has taken hold, we have Mike Johnson, a man who doesn’t believe the Democrats won the last presidential election and joined the legal fight against it, leading a (theoretically) bipartisan government he doesn’t believe in and is trying to bend to his will. And that’s the whole point of seceding in place — staying for the express purpose of wiping out the old order, from the top down. 

All of this has developed quickly, historically speaking, which is one reason why it’s very hard to accept. But the evidence is all around us, notably the way the GOP isn’t budging from stances that are not just undemocratic but unpopular. Last week, the Democrats swept state elections in the Midwest and South, with voters rejecting a slew of anti-abortion measures and GOP ideology overall. 

Yet the party doesn’t care. For years now it has not been thinking about how to shift course or respond to the concerns of many voters, including some Republicans, in their own states. Pundits say they can’t understand why the GOP keeps setting itself up to lose, but they miss the point — this is no longer about winning, or about losing elections. It’s about Republicans taking the country back — literally — by standing their ground no matter what. The original Confederates had conviction that slavery was their right, and nothing could convince them otherwise, not even the prospect of a calamitous war. They saw themselves, not the North, as the chosen Americans. So does the GOP. And they’re betting that there are enough Americans who either agree with them or who don’t seriously oppose them to make the country not a place of egalitarian dreams, but of dominance.

What about those other Americans? The Democratic leadership, while in fight mode, is still bewildered by the collapse of a bipartisan system that is all anybody has ever known. The party is tasked with holding the line, but can do almost nothing about the dysfunction the secessionists are intent on creating by destroying the Union government from the inside. 

Hakeem Jeffries has talked about ‘holding a blue line in the sand’ with MAGA, but where is that line? How many times has it been crossed now? Democrats and all of us are standing on sand that is shifting constantly under our feet. Democrats simply have no answer to the fact there is no more viable Congress, no more assumed “colleagues,” only a fight for geographical and existential territory that they are loath to acknowledge and the GOP is hellbent on winning. They’re acting like they’ve won already. Project 2025, a conservative map of what will happen in the event (eventuality?) of a Republican victory in 2024, envisions a transformation of the Justice Department into a hotbed of MAGA loyalists, while much of the federal workforce would be fired (and that’s just a start). 

Talk of secession in the 21^st century is not new, on both the right and the left. Long before Trump, a movement in liberal Vermont proposed separating from a country it saw as too big, too centralized and too militarized to legitimately represent the interests of the people. Californians appalled by red states and MAGA in general have proposed it — just cut them loose, we say.  It really is two countries, at least, with the Southern-ized country constantly, and wrongly, impugning the character and contributions of the other.  (The infamous, anonymously written ‘Fuck the South’ screed captures with bitter hilarity, and pinpoint accuracy, the parasitic and hypocritical relationship of red states to blue, with the former proclaiming ad nauseam their self-reliance and true grit while sucking at the tax teat of the latter.)    

But cutting the red states loose would be capitulation, like surrendering to the slave owners. We can’t do that. The Republican Party has — surrendered, that is, to Southern-ized states’ slave-owning past with nary a shot fired, metaphorically speaking. Sen. Joe Manchin, a nominal Democrat in a blood-red state, is retiring because he sees the writing on the wall. He talks about a future promoting centrism, a middle way, but that already seems ridiculous. The middle has vanished by design, just as it did in the run-up to the Civil War. It came down to: The country will have slaves, or it will not. The country will be a multiracial, inclusive democracy, or it will not. The secessionists in place are building, or restoring, the latter country. The irony is that GOP elected officials are using the full force and credit of the United States — the Union — to accomplish this goal. The government they so despise as liberal and ‘deep state’ and apocalyptic is also making their revolution possible — something else the Confederates could have only dreamed of.

Damon Linker wrote in The New York Times recently about an influential cadre of far-right ‘catastrophists’ (originating in California, of course) who believe that only a MAGA takeover will save the country from total collapse. Despite its intellectual framework, the catastrophists’ view is a religious, absolutist one that tracks with the GOP born-again evangelical Christian base and is impervious to debate or compromise. This is what makes the new secessionism so dangerous. The South would have loved to have imposed slavery in every state, but knew that was impossible, so it drew boundaries around the states they had. MAGAs are evangelical — in both a religious and secular sense — determined to impose their views everywhere, on everyone, to the greatest extent possible. Far from withdrawing, they’re expanding.

Secessionism is an inflection point, in an era with a growing number of inflection points. It parallels another one emerging now as Israel wages a war-cum-genocide against Palestinians. We’ve talked for decades about the situation in the Middle East, written a million op-eds. Now the great massacre is happening before our eyes and there is no more middle, no more luxury of thinking this is a freak occurrence and things will return to some sort of equilibrium that in fact never existed, not in Israel’s lifetime. It’s never existed in the U.S, either, though we think of stability as a birthright. Our expectation of stability makes us detached, dismissive, deluded: What a relief it would be if all this anti-democracy business really was just spectacle, another limited series on Netflix that will be ending soon. 

It won’t. But make no mistake, a new narrative is being developed, a storyline that we’re all being written into. If we’re not careful we will find ourselves permanent dissenters in a new country with new rules. The most dug-in Jewish settlers in Gaza have said unequivocally: this is our land, we will do anything to defend it because it’s God-given. The matter is closed. Public opinion means nothing. 

This is what we are up against here. That what-if of the South winning the war or successfully seceding is no longer conjecture, it’s being fulfilled. The only question is what staying put looks like for the other side.