One hundred and fifty-five years ago this week, Abraham Lincoln traveled to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to give a two-minute speech. He and other dignitaries gathered to honor at least 23,000 Union soldiers who gave their lives on the field of battle that summer. Those young men fought, Lincoln said, so that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” They died so that the Union and American democracy itself could live.
This week’s New York magazine offers a rebuttal of sorts. Journalist Sasha Issenberg published a lengthy meditation that asks whether the United States should be broken up. He readily admits that this is not a new idea. Contrarian writers revisit the idea every few years as they fret about the nation’s political divisions. Fringe secessionist movements in Alaska, California, and Vermont wield virtually no political influence. Presidential elections, where the nation’s red/blue divide is laid bare, often lead to an uptick in chatter on whether our politics can long endure.
Issenberg, to his credit, adds a new twist on the concept. Most of the article is framed around interstate compacts, a constitutional mechanism that allows the states to create binding legal agreements amongst themselves. Issenberg fleshes out the idea that Congress could effectively transfer its interstate policy-making powers to the states by giving them a blank check to write these compacts. (Currently, Congress has to sign off on any substantive agreement between the states.) Red states and blue states could then band together with like-minded neighbors to pass their own common laws on healthcare, organized labor, housing, the environment, and more.
This doesn’t sound like secessionism, of course. But Issenberg acknowledges that it may lead there. “It may be time to take the country apart and put it back together, into a shape that better aligns with the divergent, and increasingly irreconcilable, political preferences of its people—or at least to consider what such a future might look like, if for no other reason than to test our own resolve,” he wrote. “An imagined trial separation, if you will.”
Yet it’s hard to look at this hypothetical and not come away convinced that a truly united United States is vastly better than the alternative: Many of the problems Issenberg identifies can be tackled through existing mechanisms, albeit with some effort and organizing. Separating the states would instead entrench partisan divides into American political structures, giving permanence to what may be fleeting political moods. It would diminish the social and cultural influence of millions of Americans, particularly communities of color in the red states. And it would raise the specter of armed conflict on North American soil for the first time in a century.
In fact, individual states already have ample tools to act beyond the federal government if they wish it. In the last two years, for example, California passed a net-neutrality bill, raised emissions standards for cars, and declared itself a sanctuary state to resist federal immigration policies. (The Trump administration is waging a legal battle against all three measures.) I’ve written about how liberals can still use state courts and state constitutions to pursue their legal agenda even as the federal judiciary drifts further to the right.
Attempting to unravel the Union, on the other hand, would mark the beginning of the end for America’s experiment in self-government. It isn’t anti-democratic in the sense that it favors authoritarianism; what it rejects is the idea that American democracy can still work at all—that a vast, multicultural nation can resolve differences and tackle problems through compromise and consensus. The rough-and-tumble politics that characterize a democratic society under the dissolutionist view are seen not as a process to engage with, but a flaw to be corrected. The active goal of such a plan would be a patchwork system of stagnant, ultra-majoritarian governments where power could not be persuaded.
Americans have the right to alter their political structures as they see fit, of course. Dismantling the Union, however, would be a permanent solution to what is essentially a transitory political problem. Consider the “Jesusland” map. The 2004 viral illustration depicted a “United States of Canada” formed by the states that voted for John Kerry in that year’s election and their northern neighbor, while the states won by George W. Bush devoted themselves to cultural conservatism. The map seems almost quaint today. Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Virginia—all Jesusland states a decade and a half ago—are now solidly blue. Democrats even made strong showings in Georgia and Texas during this year’s midterms, while Florida remains as narrowly divided as elsewhere. Had Issenberg published his article after the 2004 election, his system would have sorted millions of Americans into an ideological group that they would soon abandon.
What’s more, many states’ politics can’t be easily reduced to their color on a map. New England will send a virtually all-Democratic delegation to Congress after this year’s midterms, leaving Maine Senator Susan Collins as the region’s last GOP lawmaker. At the same time, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont are all currently led by popular Republican governors. Voters in Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah simultaneously chose to expand their states’ Medicaid programs under the Affordable Care Act, while also sending a slate of Republican lawmakers back to Congress who largely support repealing the landmark healthcare law.
On many issues, Americans aren’t as sharply divided as the political rhetoric suggests. Polls often show widespread support for a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants in some form. Almost two-thirds of Americans think marijuana should be legalized. Few issues are as divisive as abortion rights, but a July poll found that 71 percent oppose overturning Roe v. Wade. A whopping 90 percent support universal background checks for gun ownership. There’s even a strong consensus in liberal and conservative policy circles that mass incarceration should be rolled back, though the two sides often disagree about the solutions.
So why doesn’t national policy reflect these views? Congress, for one, is a politically impotent institution. Former Speaker Newt Gingrich helped transform the House of Representatives into a hollow theater for partisan spectacle by waging permanent political campaigns and shredding bipartisan legislative norms. He also shut down nonpartisan sources of expertise like the Office of Technology Assessment, Congress’s in-house advisory body on tech issues. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had a similar impact in the upper chamber, where he nudged the once-collegial body into maximalist partisanship and constitutional hardball. Republicans shoulder most of the blame for Congress’s decline, but leaders from both parties have contributed by centralizing their power at the cost of traditional avenues for legislative work.
The average American also exercises less influence over their elected representatives than in years past. Republicans today enjoy a cascade of structural advantages that insulate them from the popular will. President Donald Trump captured the presidency despite losing the popular vote by almost three million ballots, then appointed two Supreme Court justices who will secure a conservative majority for at least a generation. A decade of partisan gerrymandering by the GOP forced Democratic candidates to win by overwhelming margins just to secure a majority in the House. The red states fare little better: Voter suppression in Georgia appears to have secured Governor-elect Brian Kemp’s razor-thin victory, while warped legislative maps in Wisconsin allowed Republicans to keep control of both houses while Democrats got more statewide vote.
Many of these problems are ultimately fixable. Redistricting reform at the state level, a new Voting Rights Act at the federal level, statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, and decentralizing power in Congress are all practical options in the near-to-medium future. Maine’s experiment in ranked-choice voting, if adopted more widely, could give voters more options beyond the two-party system. Abolishing the Electoral College would also be a worthy long-term fight. If nothing else, these solutions are at least less extreme than dissolving the Union.
In the end, any dissolution would still raise the question of how states would resolve conflict. Issenberg proposes a system based on an unwritten truce. “To kick off the Federation Era, the [governors of California and Texas] meet on the steps of the United States Supreme Court for a photo op,” he wrote. “Shaking hands, the men and their attorneys general pledge not to support any legal challenge to the other’s authority for two decades.”
Like any norm, this legal ceasefire would work until it doesn’t. Say, for example, that Nevada’s water problems get even worse over the next few decades. The state is already under siege by a steady influx of new residents that increases demand, and a persistent drought that’s reducing supply. Climate change will only make things even worse. Suppose that, ten years into this brave new world, the state were to pull out of the Colorado River Compact and start diverting even more water to keep Las Vegas afloat. What recourse would California and the blue states have to remedy the situation outside of the courts?
In the 1930s, Arizona and California waged a cold war for control of the Colorado River and a proposed dam that would divert more water to the Los Angeles area. The standoff peaked in 1934 when Arizona Governor Benjamin Moeur called up the state’s National Guard and deployed it to halt construction of the Parker Dam, defying the six states then belonging to the interstate compact and the federal government that was overseeing the project. The Roosevelt administration appealed to the courts to block Moeur from obstructing the work. The Supreme Court, however, ultimately sided with Arizona and vindicated the state’s use of military force.
Cooler heads ultimately prevailed, Arizona soon joined the compact, and the Parker Dam stands today. In a weaker system, however, it would be easy to imagine that conflict having gone further than it did, even without today’s hyper-partisan atmosphere. Testing that hypothesis hardly seems worth the risk. To borrow a line from former UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, the Union exists not to bring Americans from heaven but to save us from hell. It also gives form to an immutable truth about human politics: We are all, for better or worse, in this together.
On Monday, 16 conservative Democrats took their shot at Nancy Pelosi, who is expected to easily win the speakership when the 116th Congress convenes in January. It’s an odd, futile rebellion, one that underscores the incoherence of a lot of Pelosi’s critics, particularly in right-leaning districts.
One problem, among many: An alternative to Pelosi is never named. Ohio Democrat Marcia Fudge is considering a challenge, but she didn’t even sign the letter. The letter itself fails to mention specific criticisms of Pelosi’s past performance, or of the aims she has set for the next Congress. It does not say what the conservative antagonists, who are decidedly to the right of their fellow Democrats and more likely to vote with President Donald Trump, think a Democratic-controlled House should try to accomplish.
Instead, the letter falls back on a familiar gripe: that Democrats need younger leaders and that means replacing the 78-year-old Pelosi. “Our majority came on the backs of candidates who said that they would support new leadership because voters in hard-won districts, and across the country, want to see real change in Washington,” the letter reads. “We promised to change the status quo, and we intend to deliver on that promise.“
It’s true that Democrats should develop the next generation of leaders. Pelosi herself has acknowledged the need for “new blood,” saying, however believably, that she would have stepped aside if Hillary Clinton had won the White House in 2016. But the protest against Pelosi is more about the San Francisco liberal’s unpopularity, particularly in the purple rural and suburban districts represented by letter-signers like Ohio’s Tim Ryan (who challenged Pelosi for the role of minority leader two years ago) and incoming freshman Abigail Spanberger of Virginia. And it ultimately says less about the strength of Pelosi’s position than the weakness of conservative Democrats as we head into the 2020 presidential cycle.
The last time Pelosi was speaker, from 2007 to 2011, the conservative Blue Dog coalition was enormously influential. Today, even with gains in suburban districts, it’s a shadow of its former self. Pelosi’s previous tenure was defined, in part, by the split between liberals like herself and the Blue Dogs. In the 116th Congress, it will be defined by the tensions between Pelosi and her left flank.
During the last Democratic wave election, in 2006, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee claimed that it was focused on finding candidates who could win, regardless of ideology. “This is not a theoretical exercise,” Chris Van Hollen, a Pelosi lieutenant who has since moved to the Senate, said at the time. “The goal is to win this thing. In dealing with candidates, we don’t have an ideological purity test.” In practice, however, that meant that conservative-leaning Democrats were pushed in Republican-leaning districts. The move paid off, with Democrats winning control of Congress in a rout. By the time Barack Obama entered office in 2009, there were 54 Blue Dogs in the House.
That meant that they were in a position of power during the brief period in which President Obama commanded majorities in the Senate and the House. They used their clout to successfully scale back the ambitions of both Obama’s stimulus package and Obamacare. The former ended up being smaller than what was required to fully ameliorate the effects of the Great Recession, while the latter was deprived of a public option, among other flaws.
Ironically, the Blue Dogs’ hedging didn’t help them at all. In the disastrous 2010 midterms, they were practically wiped out—less than two dozen members kept their seats. The trouble with representing purple and red districts, it turns out, is that they are very vulnerable in wave elections.
The 16 rebels who are pushing for a new speaker belong to a mix of right-leaning Democratic caucuses, including the Blue Dogs, and overall are significantly more conservative than the rest of their conference. But while moderate and conservative Democrats could bend the party to their will in 2009 and 2010, they don’t have as much leverage now.
While there is significant overlap with the pro-business New Democrat Coalition, which saw significant gains during the midterms, that group is more aligned with Pelosi’s big-tent approach. The New Democrat Coalition has yet to endorse Pelosi, and are demanding “rules changes to ensure lawmakers have time to read bills and that operations in the House are more transparent,” according to The Washington Post. They also want the speaker to shield them from “politically perilous votes”—presumably on progressive policy issues.
If the group of rebels want to make a serious run at Pelosi, they’ll have to recruit her critics on the left. The Progressive Caucus will be the largest Democratic faction in next year’s Congress. Pelosi has seemingly recognized this, wooing its members and incoming stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Last week, the Progressive Caucus endorsed Pelosi’s run to reclaim the speakership—in exchange for more power.
According to Politico, “Pelosi agreed … to give the Progressive Caucus proportional representation on what lawmakers call the ‘A committees’: the Appropriations, Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce, Financial Services and Intelligence committees.” Members of the Progressive Caucus are also expected to take key positions in leadership as well.
Tellingly, Pelosi has thus far welcomed the challenge from her conference’s right flank. She flexed when asked about a potential challenge from Fudge last week, telling her would-be rivals: “Come on in, the water’s warm.” It is not only that Pelosi is unafraid of her conservative critics. She also rightly sees an early challenge as the best way to solidify her support and to gain the 218 votes she needs to become speaker—and there’s nothing like the threat of a more conservative leader to shore up her left flank.
The more interesting question is how Pelosi will balance these factions once elected speaker. While there are far fewer conservative Democrats today than there were eight years ago, the influx of Democrats representing suburban, purple districts means that there will be plenty of jumpy freshmen concerned about attack ads tying them to Pelosi two years down the line. On the other hand, progressives feel empowered after a strong election. Already, hackles are being raised about reports that Pelosi was considering a pledge to not raise taxes on the bottom 80 percent—a promise that would make a number of progressive policy proposals virtually impossible to enact.
Significant splits in the conference could emerge, especially if the House considers infrastructure, criminal justice reform, family leave, or other legislation where there is potential to work with Republicans. But the overarching dynamic is that Democrats in the House will have to contend with a Republican-controlled Senate and White House, which will bottle up much of their agenda. To pass anything of significance, Democrats will have to regain the presidency first, and at that point Pelosi really may have have retired.
Either way, as the 2020 presidential primary unfolds, the Democrats will have a new standard bearer. That person may come from the party’s left wing, or from Pelosi’s liberal wing. But it almost certainly won’t come from the faction currently challenging Pelosi’s leadership.
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