Breaking up is hard to do

When Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., talks about a "National Divorce," she may be advancing the cause of secession or she may just be seeking attention. Either way, she knows what she's doing. She's reinforcing an idea of disunion that has taken hold in the outer reaches of the public imagination.

A survey published in September by the University of Virginia Center for Politics, for example, found that 41% of Biden voters and 52% of Trump voters say they at least "somewhat agree" that "the situation in America" makes them favor blue or red states "seceding from the union to form their own separate country."

Texas has such an active — if still marginal — secession movement that Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, breezily engaged a question about it at a recent conservative event at Texas A&M University, saying he was "not there yet," but if Democrats "fundamentally destroy the country," then "I think we take NASA, take the military, take the oil."

Secession as an actual political program "is being normalized in an unwinding and degrading country," Richard Kreitner told Antonia Hitchens for her recent Atlantic article about the secessionist movement in Oregon that proposes to make a large rural swath of the state part of Idaho. Kreitner, whose book about secession, "Break It Up," was published last year, said the Oregon proposal should be taken as "a way to avoid war."

Talk of secession is still mostly just talk, but wouldn't it be a civilized way to deal with the deep divisions in the country? Wouldn't it beat, say, the civil war that a restive segment of the population hungers for?

But in ways secession-curious Americans may not appreciate, it's also almost impossible.

It's not that secession can't work. The rest of the world is busily at it all the time. Separatism is a global trend. The number of nations in the world has tripled since 1945. And there will soon be more. "Right now, there are about 60 secessionist movements worldwide ... a pretty large number by historical standards," says Ryan Griffiths, a professor at Syracuse University who focuses on the study of sovereignty. "In the long run, there will be another secessionist movement in the United States ... . No country is permanent."

The main difference between the American separatist movements and those in the rest of the world is that the countries that emerge from an American breakup could join the world quite comfortably as independent nations.

If Texas were a country, it would have a GDP of $1.59 trillion, 10th in the world, slightly below Brazil and slightly ahead of Canada. It would be 47th in population, 40th in size.

California is even larger. With a GDP of $2.88 trillion, it recently passed Britain to become the fifth-largest economy in the world. It would rank 36th in population, with the world's premier technology and entertainment sectors. A separate California would have the highest national median income in the world.

But the legal process of separation is profoundly complicated under the laws of the United States. Both the Texas and California separatists have their arguments about why separation is constitutional, but generally there is consensus on the point.

"I cannot imagine that such a question could ever reach the Supreme Court," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in 2006. "If there was any constitutional issue resolved by the Civil War, it is that there is no right to secede."

International law also complicates secession. It's all very well to imagine a bunch of independence-minded Texans raising their rifles in the air, shouting "Don't mess with Texas" and defying the world in the name of their freedom. That's until nobody will land an airplane at a Texas airport, or the United States government in Washington shuts down the internet, as the Chinese government did with Xinjiang province in 2009. Romantic ideas of statehood, derived from the 18th and 19th centuries, have little purchase in the 21st.

"There's only one sovereignty game," Griffiths points out. Everybody needs to get into the same club, and that club is the United Nations, which would require the approval of whoever is still technically the government of the United States.

Without U.N. backing, a new country can't do international exchange or use international post offices. An application to the U.N. goes to a working group, and if the group thinks the application is too trivial, they reject it. If they think an application is serious enough, which they do by asking other states, then it goes to the Security Council. So the United States, if it wanted too, could easily hold up any state asking for sovereignty. It would have the Security Council seat, and it would have the home state veto.

A separate Texas wouldn't have the power of the current United States in global negotiations. It would just be another midsize country with no history and no connections. The rest of the world would give as much attention to an oppressed Texas as it gave to Xinjiang in 2009 — i.e., none.

Undoubtedly a national separation is a bureaucratic nightmare. Uncertainty over small questions of daily life, like pensions and passports, is a major reason Scotland and Quebec are not independent nations today.

Yes, there are good reasons for breaking up the United States, beyond the nationalist aspirations of the secessionists. Barack Obama's powerful 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention notwithstanding, there is a "red America" and a "blue America." The political parties don't merely reflect different ideologies but different fundamental values, different ways of life. Important social differences correspond to which states voted Democrat and which states voted Republican in the 2016 election (even if this is geographically complicated by the fact that there are blue urban pockets in red rural states).

That political divide further corresponds to which states were free states and which states were slave states before the Civil War. But the biggest reason to separate is the most glaring and the most frightful to contemplate: The citizens of the United States are losing faith in the validity of their institutions and their founding myths. In the place of solidarity, a vast and powerful anger is building, a rage we witnessed a year ago at the U.S. Capitol.

Secession may be a painful option to confront; it is far less painful than the alternative suggested by those who favor disunion. Given the hurdles, it also may be far less possible.