Blue States Need to Secede - and I Mean it This Time

Trump has launched a war on blue states and we should leave his MAGA white nationalist USA

Four years ago I wrote “The Case for Blue-State Secession” for The Nation where I laid out the case for why blue states should leave the US. Driven partly then by the residual fury of Trump leaving my neighbors in New York to die, denying ventilators and other support for the city in favor of sending help to other states.

I wrote the piece to be meant seriously, but with Biden’s election it was also an argument for using the threat of secession to demand a reordering of the illegitimate contours of our constitutional system like the Senate and the Electoral College that entrench rightwing policy in our nation.

The hope was that with Trump being voted out of office, a genuine threat of blue states leaving might force a new understanding of the toxic anti-democratic elements of our system that had incubated MAGA hate.

But with a near majority of voters having once again voted Trump into office, despite a jury finding him guilty of fraud and a separate jury finding him guilty of sexual assault, that hope looks ridiculous and naive.

A large portion of the US population is fine with misogynist rape, white nationalist hate, and the rule of plutocrats as long as that rule crushes those they perceive as enemies.

And I have no desire to share a nation with that population.

More importantly, that MAGA nation is a direct threat endangering the health and lives of our families and our neighbors. ICE agents have invaded our cities and grabbed immigrant adults and children who have committed no crimes; parents from my kids’ former elementary school were taken as they were waiting to at pickup for their children. Tens of millions of immigrant Americans now live in terror as ICE agents roam our cities and Trump threatens to punish any city that does not support these efforts, such as announcing the closure of Boston’s Small Business Administration office to punish the city for its immigrant sanctuary status. Or dropping charges against criminal mayors like NYC’s Eric Adams if they capitulate to Trump’s demands.

Trump’s regime wants to deny my transgender teen the health care they need and treats them and other trans kids as a political target in order to feed the hate of their Nazi voter base. FEMA and other basic federal support is being denied to blue states like California as political retribution. Trump has threatened to defund Maine’s public schools because the Governor won’t bend to his dictates, while Columbia University is being stripped of $400 million and other universities are facing similar stripping of federal grants as a tool to silence student protests and remake university policies to follow MAGA dictates. Trump has wielded threats of cutting off federal contracts and launching legal investigations to force both corporations and local governments to drop diversity programs and even wipe black and latino history from school curricula.

What’s most enraging about Trump’s illegal weaponization of federal funding is that the money he is withholding comes disproportionately from the very blue states that he is targeting. The most recent analysis by the Rockefeller Institute found that in 2022, residents of five blue states - California, Massachusetts New Jersey, New York and Washington State - paid $164 billion more in federal taxes than they received back in federal spending. Remove the temporary Covid payments and the core balance of payments by those five states is $271 billion more paid every year in taxes than they receive in ongoing federal spending. Aside from the small state of Utah, not a single state that voted for Trump paid more in federal taxes than they received back in spending - the sea of blue in the south on the map blow are states receiving more in federal spending than they pay in taxes.

Progressive Policies in Blue America are Repeatedly Blocked by MAGA Federal Actions

But it’s not just about the extraction of tax dollars from blue states or even just the imposition of a national agenda using those dollars. It’s also the ways the federal government restricts blue states from using their own dollars and their own regulations to pursue local policies.

Trump’s attempt to block New York City’s congestion pricing plan is just a continuation of conservative federal policies from Trump’s first term and earlier GOP President’s policies that have blocked states from raising fuel efficiency standards or enforcing tougher air or water quality standards beyond federal standards. Long before 2008, multiple states identified the danger of predatory lending by banks, but laws to stop subprime lending was preempted by the Bush administration and by federal courts. Tougher state-based food safety laws have been preempted as have a range of other state consumer safety laws. State laws to protect the freedom of unions to organize have been overturned by the federal govt, so much so that states are forced to allow companies with long histories of union busting to receive state government contracts.

Even in areas like state minimum wage laws and antidiscrimination statutes where some state discretion has been allowed, the federal courts have used federal arbitration law to preempt the ability of workers to access state courts to enforce those rights, instead forcing workers to seek redress in employer-selected arbitration panels where they have signed “mandatory arbitration” clauses.

Blue America Has a Too Different a Nationalism from MAGA America to Share a Flag

However, the ultimate reason for blue state secession is that we no longer can or should share a “nation” with MAGA states and voters whose fundamental values are so antithetical to our own and whose very idea of what a “nation” represents is so repugnant.

Nationalism and patriotism has always been complicated for progressives in a nation founded on the genocide of native Americans, built on the stolen bodies and stolen labor of black slaves, and whose boundaries were expanded with the theft of territory from Mexico and indigenous people under the banner of Manifest Destiny. And in the 20th century, US Cold War imperialism would support the overthrow of democratic governments from Iran in 1953 to Guatemala in 1954 to Brazil in 1965 to Chile in 1973.

Many people like abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison always saw pride in America as a fools errand, calling the US Constitution “a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell” and called for secession to break relationships with the slave power and ideology of the South that infected the nation’s soul with all the evils that would curse many of its actions for the next two centuries- and many people would echo Garrison’s views on the impossibility of patriotism in a country build on the foundations of slavery.

But others did see a path to progressive nationalism, starting with Frederick Douglass, Garrison’s one-time protege and later his antagonist on this very issue. While Douglass would argue that “not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States,” in the same speech he also said the core principles of the Declaration of Independence and the “tendencies of the age” would overthrow slavery and usher in a better age. The poet Walt Whitman would write an ode to the hard, terrible contradictions of loving America in his “Song of Myself” and explicitly admitted that to do so was to admit to embracing contradictions for, as he said of himself and America, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Or as Langston Hughes argued in “Let America Be America Again,” an ironic counterpoint to MAGA rhetoric, America needed to be the “dream the dreamers dreamed…[a] great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme.” This was an aspirational patriotism that looked to the hope for immigrants in the Statue of Liberty and the promise (still unfulfilled) of Emancipation and equality, of the idea as Martin Luther King Jr. would argue that the “arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Even the worst of Republican Presidents would nod to this aspirational idea of progressive nationalism, even if their actions might undermine it, as with Ronald Reagan talking of America as a “City on a Hill” as a beacon for justice or George W. Bush feeling the need to sell his Iraq War in terms of promoting democracy. But what is notable about Trump and MAGA today is that they feel comfortable completely dispensing with any nod to that aspirational nationalism and promote a purely regressive, racist version.

MAGA red state nationalism bases itself in a reverence for the worst aspects of our nation’s past. It idealizes the antebellum South, romanticizes the Confederacy under the guise of “heritage,” even restoring Confederate General’s names to army bases, and resists efforts to reckon honestly with the nation's legacy of slavery and segregation by wiping any mention of those dark moments from history books. It champions closed borders, Christian supremacy, and a return to “law and order”—a dog whistle with deep roots in opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. Instead of the Statue of Liberty, they champion the worst of no-nothing anti-immigrant sentiments, suspicion of diversity, and gender and racial equality are framed as essential elements of preserving a distinct “American way of life.” Trump’s proposal to censor discussion of race science and the history of racism at the National Museum of African American History and Culture symbolizes this irreconcilable divide on the meaning of our past.

At its best, Blue state nationalism embraces the aspirational view of America as a land of liberty, inclusion, and progress. Blue state patriotism lies not in celebrating a mythical past, but in extending the blessings of liberty to those long denied them, whether immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ+ communities, or the poor.

These visions are not two sides of the same coin but two competing nationalisms that are ultimately irreconcilable. When MAGA nationalism leads to plain clothes Gestapo agents “disappearing” blue state residents to slave labor camps in foreign countries, this is not a divide that allows for compromise any more. MAGA goals to control blue state universities, ban forbidden books, erase gender identities, demand loyalty tests of all institutions - all of this demands a national political divorce.

Secession by Blue America Would Strengthen Our Ability to Protect Rights in Red America and Around the World

Opponents of secession might warn that leaving the Union would abandon millions of vulnerable residents in red states who depend on federal safeguards. However, even the strongest sanctuary policies in Blue jurisdictions failed to prevent on‑the‑ground ICE gestapo-like arrests under the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation campaigns, demonstrating federal overreach and local impotence. Columbia University was forced to knuckle under to Trump threats while other leading Blue‑state universities—MIT, Princeton, and the University of California system—have had to resort to litigation to try to resist federal policy undermining research capacity and innovation. Transgender Americans have seen attacks on transgender health care even in blue states and just saw the Supreme Court permit enforcement of Trump’s ban on transgender military service, illustrating federal courts’ willingness to sanction executive assaults on civil‑rights protections If Blue States cannot even protect their own, they certainly cannot shield progressive‑leaning communities in Red States—while they would have far greater leverage if they wielded full sovereignty.

At the federal level, procedural roadblocks have repeatedly derailed living‑wage increases, labor‑law reforms, and environmental protections. The Senate has repeatedly filibustered raising the minimum‑wage for fifteen years. The Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, championed by Democrats and labor unions, passed the House only to wither under Republican‑threatened filibusters. Meanwhile, efforts to pass major climate‑change legislation - vital to red and blue state residents alike - have been blocked by the same minority‑rule tactic, thwarting essential environmental safeguards. A Blue State Republic, free from Senate gridlock and hostile courts, could instead impose sanctions on any corporation paying less than $15 per hour or violating civil‑rights or labor laws, whether in red or blue states, and deny government contracts to firms with records of racial discrimination anywhere—enforcing progressive standards across all states.

As an independent nation, a Blue State Republic could draw lessons from Canada’s pushback against Trump’s tariffs: Compare Trump’s belittling of blue state governors with the ability of Prime Minister Mark Carney to demand Trump’s respect and his ability to protect Canadian interests in high‑stakes trade talks. By reclaiming federal taxes paid by blue states currently—which amounts to almost $700 billion paid by California residents alone —a Blue Republic could bypass rightwing red states and send aid directly into progressive cities in Red States. And, looking to the vulnerable around the world, a Blue State republic could restore cuts to international aid programs, offsetting the Trump administration’s 86% reduction in USAID initiatives.

Stripped of the racist legacies of the Confederacy and unfettered by U.S. federal inertia, an independent Blue State Republic could also nurture constructive global partnerships to establish robust human‑rights standards—benefiting marginalized communities at home, abroad, and even in red states with a more united global community dedication to human rights.

What Can A Blue State Secession Movement Achieve?

Achieving actual secession is a tall order which would face resistance both by red states and within many blue states, but Trump himself may become the best catalyst for many people seeing the necessity. And as I described in more depth four years ago, there are ways blue states could organize for secession, such as through refusal to agree to raising the debt ceiling, that could provoke the level of crisis to make agreeing to secession a possibility.

But even in the absence of actual secession, a movement for Blue State secession would serve as a powerful rallying cry—much like Quebec’s “Vive le Québec libre!” galvanized sovereigntist sentiment within Canada in 1967. It would echo the mass pro‑independence turnout on Catalonia’s National Day—where an estimated 540,000 demonstrators pressed for self‑rule against Spain—and Scotland’s sustained nationalist campaign within the United Kingdom, which forced two devolution referendums and the establishment of a separate legislature in 1999 via the Scotland Act 1998. By invoking an independent republic, Blue State activists could compel governors and mayors to defy Trump’s racist attacks on immigrants and oppose other federal attacks on local rights, reinforcing local autonomy against federal overreach.

Such a movement would foster a deep, state‑level patriotism—which may be essential if Trump invokes the Insurrection Act to deploy active‑duty forces domestically and establishes dictatorial martial law. A robust Blue nationalism would remind MAGA-oriented state and local police and National Guard units of their primary allegiance to the rule of law and to local civilian leaders, not to federal authorities threatening coercion against protesters. It would also draw on historical precedents like Massachusetts’ 1855 Personal Liberty Act, which sought to countermand the Fugitive Slave Act by forbidding state officials from assisting federal slave catchers, with severe penalties for noncompliance, strengthening the notion of local duty over distant mandates when fundamental rights are threatened.

Abandoning the American Experiment for Something New

Much of the world now believes that a United States that could elect Trump President not once, but twice, is not a nation that can ever again be a leader in the world, cannot be a model however flawed of what other nations might aspire to be.

While it may be a hard road and even a long road to have blue states secede to create a Blue State Republic, that is the only route to truly reviving the ideals of the Declaration of the Independence, of Lincoln’s “New Birth of Freedom”, of “your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” of the Statue of Liberty, of FDR’s “Four Freedoms”, and of Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” ideals.

Thomas Jefferson early on argued a permanent American state would inevitably rot and undermine fundamental rights. He argued that the “tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants” and a revolution every 20 years was needed to sustain freedom and justice.

Trump’s election twice is a perfect embodiment of the rot of racism and authoritarianism rooted in the original constitutional compromises over slavery.

This is the right time for a fundamental assessment that the United State’s broken constitution, from the Electoral College to the undemocratic Senate to its overreaching rightwing Supreme Court, needs to be junked and a new constitution be established among the states willing to embrace actual democracy and equal rights for all.