In the months after contested elections, a familiar fantasy surfaces: what if the United States simply split in two? The notion of a "national divorce" has cycled through American political discourse for decades, but it has grown sharper and more vocal in recent years. A 2023 Axios poll found that 20 percent of Americans favour a national divorce, with calls for secession spiking sharply after each presidential election won by the opposing party.
The appeal is intuitive. If Americans have grown so divided on fundamental values, the argument runs, would they not be happier governed separately? Secessionists typically make three arguments: that red and blue America hold irreconcilable differences, that states possess a constitutional right to secede, and that smaller political units deliver better governance. This diagnosis contains a grain of truth. The United States does face genuine polarisation, and reasonable citizens can ask whether cohabitation within an increasingly divided union makes practical sense.
Yet scholars who have studied secession movements globally offer a sobering counterpoint. Ryan Griffiths, a Syracuse University professor who has examined secessionist movements worldwide, argues that secession is "the wrong solution to the problem of polarisation" because red and blue Americans are not neatly sorted by geography. The fantasy assumes a clean partition: Texas and Florida on one side, California and New York on the other. Reality is far messier.
Throughout the United States, political divisions cut through neighbourhoods, families and workplaces rather than cleanly between states. Rural counties in California and Oregon lean heavily conservative while surrounded by progressive urban cores. Conversely, scattered blue cities dot Republican-dominated regions. As legal scholars have noted, polarisation does not take the neat geographical form that made secession viable in earlier times and places. Breaking the country apart would require forcibly separating citizens from their chosen homes and communities on the basis of their political beliefs.
This is where history becomes inconvenient. The American Civil War cost approximately 600,000 lives. Similar projections for modern conflict speak to the price of attempted partition. Political scientists studying secessionist conflict note that there is no way to disentangle red and blue America without tremendous violence, with recent trends showing that Americans increasingly call for separation following polarising political events. The secession movements that did succeed globally—South Sudan, Montenegro, Norway—benefited from geographic and ethnic concentration of populations that simply does not exist in America's mixed landscape.
Proponents counter that smaller units would create laboratories for different policy approaches and escape the gridlock that polarisation produces. This argument has intellectual roots: federalism does allow for experimentation. Yet separatism differs fundamentally from healthy federal competition. Partition requires not just different laws within shared institutions, but the dissolution of those institutions themselves. It trades one set of governance problems for another more severe: disputed borders, refugee flows, competing claims to shared resources, and the permanent security anxiety that accompanies living alongside a hostile former neighbour.
What these fantasies often elide is the deeper question: if Americans cannot cooperate within a shared continental democracy to manage disagreement, why assume they would cooperate better as neighbours after breaking apart? The mechanisms that drove them to secession—uncompromising zeal, inability to see legitimate points in opposing views, reduction of citizenship to tribal identity—would not vanish with a border. They would intensify. Partition movements historically correlate with the escalation of conflict, not its reduction.
The secession impulse, when examined honestly, reflects something real: the exhaustion of citizens who feel unheard and unrepresented. That exhaustion deserves to be addressed. But the diagnosis of irreconcilable differences is sharper than the American condition actually warrants. Polling consistently shows that on many policy questions, majorities often span party lines. Most Americans hold moderate views that don't fit neatly into tribal camps. The noise and polarisation are real, but they obscure the actual scope of shared ground.
The uncomfortable truth is that no imagined partition solves the core problem. If the goal is to reduce political friction and align government with citizen preferences, the work must happen within a single system: through reform of institutions that amplify division, through deliberate efforts to rebuild trust across lines, and through accepting that diverse democracies require compromise rather than escape. History offers no shortcut to that harder path.