My Forthcoming Publius Review of Christopher Zurn, "Splitsville, USA: A Democratic Argument for Breaking Up the United States"

The book argues democracy can be preserved and improved by breaking up the United States into two or more new nations.

(Routledge)

My forthcoming review of Christopher Zurn's book, Splitsville, USA: A Democratic Argument for Breaking Up the United States is now available on SSRN. It will be published in Publius: The Journal of Federalism. Here is the abstract:

The US political system has been suffering from multiple serious problems, most notably severe polarization and weakening of crucial political norms underpinning democracy. In Splitsville USA, political philosopher Christopher Zurn advocates a radical solution: national divorce. He contends that Americans will be better off if the United States were divided up into two or more new nations. The book is a useful thought experiment and will surely help stimulate debate. But ultimately, Zurn's proposed remedy is unconvincing. The author overstates the feasibility and effectiveness of peaceful dissolution, while undervaluing those of some potential alternatives, most notably decentralization and limitation of government power. Splitsville also fails to convincingly address a number of potential negative effects of dissolution, particularly the threat to dissenting minorities within the new nations, and the impact on the international system.

As noted in the review, the fact this book was written by a serious scholar and is getting respectful attention is a notable sign of the times. A decade or two ago, calls for breaking up the United States were far more unthinkable than is the case today. It is also notable that, while arguments for breakup and secession are often associated with the political right, Zurn is a progressive.

In my own writings on these issues, I have argued that secession should be a more easily available option than is the case in most political systems today, but also that the flaws in American democracy are better addressed by other means, including by limiting and decentralizing government power, and otherwise empowering people to "vote with their feet."

Comments

[JasonT20]

Too much of the divide in the U.S. surrounds cultural issues. That is why there is such strong urban-rural polarization. There are no geographic lines to divide the U.S. that would make any sense due to this fact.

I don't go along with Prof. Somin's "foot voting" prescription, but I would say solving the political warfare problem will likely require finding ways to allow political minorities greater participation. Being a Republican in a blue district in a blue state is undoubtedly going to be frustrating, just as living in an urban blue island in a deep red state is.

Truthfully, though, I wonder if the problem is solvable at all as long as people see politics as warfare. If the opposition is an enemy that can't be allowed power, then suppressing their voice and vote becomes justified to people that think that way.

[Dr. Ed 2]

If we didn't have so damn many immigrants, we wouldn't be having this problem. We don't even all speak the same language anymore, and NO nation has ever survived without a common language*.

The urban/rural split is a unique factor of 20th Century technology and the economy of scale that doesn't exist anymore -- both in terms of the physical necessity of having people in the same location and ever-cheaper transportation.

We're not going to see automated trucks, and as truckers are making less money now than they were 40 years ago, freight rates are going to go up. Even without environmental regs that triple fuel consumption, and safety regulations that double labor costs.

But the biggest problem is that we no longer have a unified culture.

*Switzerland is an exception because the country itself is an exception -- an agreement between three European powers that none of them will have the mountain passes. Hence each country has its area of influence and its language spoken there.

We may self-segregate -- something like 1,200 people leave Massachusetts a week -- the population replaced by immigrants.

[Sarcastr0]

This comment brought to you by the year 1890.

Racist wankers never really change over the centuries.

[Rossami]

We've had greater and faster immigration at many points in the country's history, including far more diversity in languages. (Look in the early days at the prevalence of German over English.) There are interesting hypotheses about the cause(s) of the current political divisiveness but immigration is not one of them. It just does not line up with the evidence.

The urban/rural split of priorities and values, on the other hand, goes back far beyond the 20th century and is not an artifact of technology. You can see the same arguments in early Industrial-era England, dynastic China and even ancient Rome.

[Brett Bellmore]

From about 1860-1920, we did have a fairly large foreign born population, about 13.2-14.8% of the population. Then we slammed the door shut, and it declined to a low of about 5% by 1970, when we re-adopted pro-immigration policy, and enforcement of immigration laws declined.

By October of this year, it had hit 15%, which, yes, IS a record high, And rising fast; Immigration as a percentage of existing population is also at a record high.

Here's some stats. I'm sure you'll discount them due to the source, but they agree with other sources I've found.

So, no, you can't dismiss this as business as usual. We're now outside historical experience, and rocketing into uncharted territory.

[Brett Bellmore]

I think it's worth noting that a graph of income inequality in the US over the same period mirrors the percentage of foreign born population. Unsurprisingly, so does wealth inequality.

The period in US history where we had the lowest income inequality, (Termed "the great compression" by economic historians.) was exactly the period when we had the lowest foreign born population.

This is no accident: Immigrants tend to be in the lower income earning groups, and having a lot of them present tends to drive down wages in the lower income groups, exacerbating income inequality. Indeed, isn't this why business favors high levels of immigration? Because it drives down wages?

So, yes, it actually does line up with the evidence.

[SMP0328]

An Article V Convention is a better solution than national divorce. Such a convention could propose amendments adding new checks on federal authority and/or strengthen existing ones. Currently, the federal government is so powerful that the Left and the Right are terrified of the other side having complete federal control. If the federal government was better controlled by the People/States, that fear and the resulting Left-Right tension would be greatly lessened.

[Brett Bellmore]

Yes. I think Somin dramatically exaggerates the difficulty of amendment. It isn't Article V that is broken, it is Congress.

The last two amendments Congress sent to the states, the ERA and DC voting amendments, failed. And Congress gave up on originating amendments. The states didn't give up on ratifying them, see the 27th amendment for proof of that.

The basic issue is that our federal political class are no longer ideologically representative of state level opinion. On the big constitutional issues, a balanced budget, term limits, you name it, Congress has radically different desires than the states.

In '95, Republicans came into power promising a couple of amendments. They deliberately stage managed the process to make sure they failed... This divergence between state and federal opinion crosses party lines.

No amendment Congress would like could be ratified, no amendment that could be ratified would be acceptable to Congress.

An article V convention, as you suggest, would break this impasse: Both origination and ratification would happen at the same level, bypassing this divide in opinion. Probably the first amendment needed would be one cutting Congress out of the amendment originating loop, by having regular constitutional conventions whether or not Congress wants them, as is the practice in many states.

[y81]

Democracy would not survive globally without the United States (as a single powerful country). Indeed, democracy would not exist today, at least not outside the Anglosphere, without the United States' past actions.

[Krayt]

This more than anything else. The world does not need to test if, sans a giant US big brotherly hand on the shoulder of all smaller, free nations, can they stand alone?

Some wish the US had not formed. Well, what would the world be like if North America were a clone of broken down South America, with nothing but dictatorships and struggling democracies so lousy with corruption they are closer to third world status?

Europe would hold out for a while today, fortress Britain the last to go down, protected by a sudden interest in many more nukes. South Korea, not historically that long from dictatorship, might follow Turkey’s lead with an opportunist “pivoting” to Putin and China.

This is the end game whe your domestic rhetoric is that this or that administration is, gawrsh, the worstest thing evah. When you run that experiment and realize your stupidities, it's too late.

The US should be expanding, inviting small nations to join. Empirical expansion voluntarily.

[Krayt]

1. China, Russia, other dictatorships drool at this prospect.

2. Financial centers on the coasts will quickly learn their local governments are not the cause of their success, but are a parasitic moss growing up around the success, driven by happening to be the giant port cities selling to the nation and the world. Denied unfettered access to a good chunk of that, unlike as demanded by the current constitution of the current continental nation…

3. Hack politicians always want new governments and new government levels because there’s a land rush for new power centers to abuse and be corrupt in! Yee haaaaaaa! EU anyone? Montreal anyone? Scottland anyone? You think you all have your famed local cultures, but the politicians are all cowboys in cowboy hats yearning to breathe “Yeeeeeeeee hawwwwwwwww!”

[Brett Bellmore]

I would agree with JasonT20: The dividing lines aren't neat enough for Zurn's envisioned "breakup into two or more relatively ideologically homogeneous states"; The big dividing line in the US is urban centers vs suburban/rural areas. It would be like the aggregate seceding from the cement in a block of concrete!

You might think that population redistribution, such as happened between the US and Canada after the revolutionary war, would solve that. It would not.

Urban areas don't incidentally have ideological disagreements with rural areas. The disagreements stem from fundamental differences in how we live, people who move from rural to urban areas become urban dwellers, and tend to adopt local attitudes, their children much more so. Likewise in the reverse direction: Urbanites who move to rural areas start morphing into conservatives, and their children complete the process if the area doesn't become urbanized from the influx.

So even if you did spacially sort people according to ideologies, the divides would recreate themselves in a generation!

Devolution of power would appear to be an answer, but a new problem presents itself: Whether devolution of power is considered a good idea is one of the central ideological conflicts! Devolution would be seen by one side as a victory, and the other side as a defeat.

To make a split work, you WOULD have to divide the gravel from the cement. Maybe the cities could get some kind of home rule on steroids, in return for losing all say in what went on outside them.

The alternative is spacial sorting followed by both sides radically restructuring; The right deurbanizing, the left relentlessly centralizing, so that each view would be stable in its own territory.

[Sarcastr0]

Statistical truth isn't actual truth.

Plenty of tendencies, but many are a Dem in a rural area or a Republican in the city. Some change when they move; some do not.

Remember in your cute story that humans and humanity are complicated.

[Brett Bellmore]

So? When you're discussing populations, statistical truth IS actual truth.

Splitting the nation between areas that are heterogeneous in terms of population density will result in those areas remaining heterogeneous in terms of ideology, because on average, population density IS ideology.

There's a clear "flipping point" at about 800-1000 people per square mile, where you go from moderately Republican to wildly Democratic.

Here's another presentation of the same sort of data.

It's very clear: Democrats dominate high population density areas, and do so utterly. Republicans dominate low population density areas, but do so moderately. This is why in our first past the post system Republicans have an advantage: They waste fewer votes winning by huge margins.

At 1-2 people per square mile, the Republican advantage maxes out at about 70% Republican. At 10-20K per square mile, Democrats max out at over 80%.

So, returning to the topic: If you split the country, the countryside will remain conservative, on average, and the cities will remain 'liberal', on average, so any gross split will preserve the conflict.

You'd have to split the country by population density to resolve things. Make "blue" America a bunch of cities with complete home rule and guaranteed transit corridors, and "red" America the 95% of the territory that isn't cities.

[Brett Bellmore]

I'd add that his sort of thing is no secret, and hasn't been for a very long time, which is why Democrats tend to support policies that promote urbanization, and Republicans oppose them.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

.

Urbanites who move to rural areas start morphing into conservatives, and their children complete the process if the area doesn’t become urbanized from the influx.

What element(s) of rural life would incline modern people from advanced communities to embrace gay-bashing, superstition, racism, disdain of education, hatred of immigrants, antisemitism, misogyny, Islamophobia, transphobia, and the other attributes of modern conservatism?

[The Margrave of Azilia]

Civil War II - this time with nukes!

[Dan Schiavetta]

As a blue state citizen I say: let the red states secede. In 20 years they'll come crawling back.

[Sarcastr0]

I hate this attitude.
Red states have blue folks and vice versa. We're not actually divided specially like a dumb map says.
And we'd both be worse for the separation.

And I want to be able to visit Jackson Hole or Mammoth Cave and have good vinegar-based barbeque.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

Visiting the can't-keep-up, drawling, deplorable backwaters is entirely unnecessary for those who wish to enjoy magnificent barbeque. One of the benefits of modernity and progress is that most of the few good attributes of our lesser regions can be enjoyed without subjecting ourselves to those communities or populations.

[Dan Schiavetta]

Seriously, though, it's impossible for the reasons given.

Unfortunately Democrats are screwed in two ways. First, Republicans can more easily control Congress and the Presidency (and therefore the Supreme Court) while still being a minority party.

Secondly, this situation is repeated in miniature in the states. Democrats live mostly in cities, which are usually at the mercy of their (Republican-dominated) state governments.

New York City is probably the worst example. As has often been noted, compared to the world's other great cities its infrastructure is shamefully crumbling. As one columnist put it, when flying from Tokyo to New York he felt like he was going backward in time, from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. But NYC is at the mercy of the state government, which is often in the hands of anti-City forces. (NYC itself has less than half the state's population, and the suburbs are typically not sympathetic to City concerns.) And New York State itself is at the mercy of the federal government, often in minoritarian Republican hands. Other great cities have a front seat in the affairs of their nation, but NYC is doubly walled off from power and influence.

[Sarcastr0]

Dems have a headwind based on the way our electoral system works. Luckily they're right and not as insane, which are both pretty good tailwinds.

We'll see what happens!

I grew up in NY. NYS's government isn't particularly conservative, it's just one of the most corrupt old boy's clubs you'll be likely to find.

NYC seems to be doing fine though, I would note. Maybe it's just coasting on momentum.

[Brett Bellmore]

The only headwind Dems face here is political asymmetry: Republican areas tend to only be moderately Republican, so Republican votes aren't much wasted in a first past the post system. The median Republican area is only 55% Republican. While Democratic areas tend to become VERY Democratic, (The median Democratic area is more like 65% Democratic, and areas that are 90% or more Democratic are not unknown.) and so you waste a lot of votes 'bouncing the rubble' in a first past the post system.

That's not gerrymandering, it would actually take gerrymandering to negate it. That's why Democrats keep trying to redefine "gerrymandering" to mean not reproducing the outcome of proportional representation, (Efficiency gap) rather than just drawing non-compact districts to achieve political results.

[JasonT20]

While gerrymandering has often took the form of wild, ridiculous shaped districts, the tactics employed don't need to result in that. (The word itself is a portmanteau of Gerry and salamander after Mass. Gov. Elbridge Gerry with a famous political cartoon from 1812.) With the level of detail available and computers to try out different maps quickly, I'm sure clever enough people could make maps that distort electoral outcomes without districts that look egregiously contorted.

The purpose of gerrymandering is to manipulate district boundaries to increase one party's share of a legislature's seats beyond that party's share of the voters. As you point out, it is much easier for a party that doesn't have its voters concentrated in small areas to do this

It would seem that a smaller majority would be more vulnerable to flipping, but we don't see that in practice, do we? You'd think that an area that was ~55% Republican could get a strong enough Democrat running to challenge for the seat, but such cases are exceeding rare for many reasons. First, candidates need support from local institutions to raise the money to even get started. They need name recognition both in the early stages and to take off from there. They need their party to have sufficient apparatus in the area in order to find the volunteers and paid staffers to actually work in the campaign. And they need the local press to pay attention to them. Having all of that come together for an underdog is a tall order.

So that 55% Republican district ends up being just as safe a seat as the 80% Democratic city.

This is the main reason why I don't like first past the post, single member districts for legislative bodies. There aren't nearly enough seats that are competitive between the parties. That results in the party machines being the real power, not the voters. Proportional representation of some kind seems much more desirable to me. Of course, convincing any partisan Republican voters of that when they benefit from the status quo is highly unlikely.

[Brett Bellmore]

What's going on here is that it's been a good long while since the Democratic party was willing to tolerate office holders in rural areas taking the rural side on issues like gun control. They force them to publicly commit political suicide by backing the party against their own voters.

Back in '94, the Democratic party forced a lot of rural Democratic Congressmen to vote for the AWB, for instance, and they ended up losing their seats. Clinton in a speech at the Democratic convention afterwards literally thanked them for sacrificing their seats to get it passed...

The result is that everybody in rural areas knows that if you vote for a conservative Democrat, you get a liberal one as soon as being conservative would matter.

[JasonT20]

You really think gun control is a big part of the urban/rural divide? Significant, probably, but it is still minor compared to culture-war topics like abortion, LGBTQ rights, race, "War on Christianity" and the like. It was the recognition by conservative Republicans in the late 60s and 70s that Democrats were giving up ground among social conservatives in favor of liberal intellectual goals on civil rights that turned rural areas red. They saw how they could capitalize on that by telling people in those places that the liberal elite looked down on them and wouldn't represent their values. (That is when every conservative became a "family values" conservative.) It was the project of the last couple of decades to try and extend that to the white working class, breaking the "blue wall" of industrial states in the Midwest.

And that last part worked, because Republicans had spent the 80s and 90s weakening private sector labor unions anywhere they could. Between that, automation and globalization, there simply weren't any politicians able to help them anymore, even when they wanted to. So why not vote based on cultural identity?

[JasonT20]

The result is that everybody in rural areas knows that if you vote for a conservative Democrat, you get a liberal one as soon as being conservative would matter.

The same could be said of moderate Republicans. They don't exist anymore. Supposedly moderate Republicans like Murkowski and Collins either voted to confirm Kavanaugh and Gorsuch (or didn't oppose them, in one of the votes by Murkowski) and then acted surprised that they voted to overturn Roe. Chris Sununu recently said that he cared only about Republicans winning when asked if he would vote for and support Trump if he is nominated.

This is all what I am talking about. Single member districts and first past the post create the circumstances where ~90% of seats are essentially determined entirely by the party that dominates the district (or state for U.S. Senate). It is the primary in those places that is the real election and that is a recipe for electing candidates that really only worry about the base of their party. A district with 50-60% registration in one party will really be competitive for the half of those highly partisan and more extreme voters that reliably vote in primaries. That is how you end up with so many solid left and solid right legislators in office that the moderates are left out to dry by their parties. You really only need to appeal to ~30% of your district, since that is who shows up for the primary. Then you get the rest of the way to a plurality because of the voters that skip the primary but will show up to vote reliably (R) or (D) in a general even though they are more moderate. Anything more than appealing to that core 30% of your district is gravy.

[JasonT20]

That’s why Democrats keep trying to redefine “gerrymandering” to mean not reproducing the outcome of proportional representation, (Efficiency gap) rather than just drawing non-compact districts to achieve political results.

I try to address this with the first two paragraphs, but to expand and clarify on this somewhat about the purpose of gerrymandering:

Whether districts are drawn with contorted shapes or not, it is the effect on representation that matters. If the party in control of a legislature when the maps are drawn does so in order to increase its share of the seats of the legislature well beyond its share of the electorate, does it really matter whether the districts resemble mythical beasts like the famous cartoon from 1812? The point is whether the voters are choosing their representatives rather than the other way around.

At the risk of echoing Stephen Lathrop, the point is for our government to represent all of us. If government can manipulate how it is chosen so that it only has to worry about pleasing a highly partisan minority of the whole population rather than trying to win an actual majority, then that fails this test. "We the People" gets used and abused by faux patriots that have an exclusive idea of just who is a member of that "We." The point of that phrase was to ensure that it was viewed as always consisting of all citizens. Collective decisions by all of the people can only be made by a majority. The separation of powers, checks and balances, and constitutional guarantees of rights restrain the majority and make it hard to obtain a durable majority. That is all as it should be. But a minority can never represent the will of all of the people.

[Brett Bellmore]

You can make a case for why districts should be drawn to achieve this aim or that, but the fact is that "gerrymandering" doesn't mean "any map that doesn't negate Democrats' political geography problem. It means drawing maps, normally in a manner that violates compactness, in order to dictate political outcomes.

Yes, you can do that a bit, at the margins, by moving compact districts around. But as long as you're limited to compact districts, the degree to which you can accomplish that is fairly limited. Which is exactly why 'majority minority' districts are usually so contorted! They simply couldn't be achieved with compact lines.

The recreation of PR results actually does require non-compact districts; There just isn't enough play in the maps to do it otherwise.

[JasonT20]

Yes, you can do that a bit, at the margins, by moving compact districts around. But as long as you’re limited to compact districts, the degree to which you can accomplish that is fairly limited.

Except for the built in bias for Republicans you admitted to as we started this. Republicans don't need to do much manipulating to increase the advantage they already have because of urban concentration of Democratic Party voters. The egregious cases of Democrat gerrymandering I see in the news are in states they already have large statewide advantages in. (NY, CA, for instance) Republicans, on the other hand, seem to push this in states where they have smaller advantages or even in purple states. Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin, for instance.

Which is exactly why ‘majority minority’ districts are usually so contorted! They simply couldn’t be achieved with compact lines.

Probably not, admittedly. I would love to see such 'majority minority' districts become a thing of the past. But only after the legacy of past discrimination at the ballot box is no longer present. John Roberts may have been happy to pretend that voter discrimination was a thing of the past in Shelby County, but the day we no longer need to consider race in elections is when all political parties seek the support of voters of all races equally.

[Commenter_XY]

Go to NC = good vinegar-based barbeque.

[Daddyhill]

I remember predicting, in 1978, the eventual breakup of the US into maybe 4 sections. I was drunk at the time, and I was trying to get into the pants of the young woman I was with. She was drunk too and went on and on about the Laffer curve. She saw her hypothesis tested soon after. The fantasies of supply-side economics could not replace the status quo: the "horse and sparrow" reality of ancient origin. I never really expected serious discussion of my prediction, but here we are.

[Social Justice is neither]

WYF does splitting a country up even mean for an open border zealot? Anytime things look bad you pack up and move, taking your politics with you and soon you're back to whining about how terrible things have gotten just like the last place with absolutely no introspection or awareness.

[Sarcastr0]

He can change his focus, looks like.

You can't, looks like.

And you call him a zealot?!

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

I can understand why the culture war's casualties would wish to try to preserve a safe space for their bigotry, superstition, ignorance, and other stale, ugly thinking . . . but why would or should the culture war's victors -- the liberal-libertarian modern American mainstream -- have any interest in relinquishing territory in which people would be afflicted by right-wing preferences?

[Stephen Lathrop]

If there were consensus that splitting the nation would enable better-liked political choices among reformed political groupings, neither present state boundaries, nor urban/rural distinctions would provide the best guidance about where to draw boundaries. Instead, the best choices would look to original patterns of settlement, and the political and cultural conditions which characterized different regions historically, and which largely continue to do so today.

From their points of beginning, each of several quite different national cultures spread influences into areas of out-migration across the continent. The most enduringly influential of those early settlement cultures proved to be those of the authoritarian Deep South, the anarchic or tribalistic Appalachian Region, the communitarian-oriented area of New England influence, and the commerce-first priority of the New York–Philadelphia region.

With the exception of the last, which still resides pretty nearly within its earliest bounds, the others expanded and spread westward characteristic patterns of political, cultural, and social organization. In the far southwest those others lapped against a yet-earlier Indigenous–Hispanic culture which retains its own style of influence into the present.

Those original cultures began as rivals. They and their out-migration areas largely continue as rivals today. The resulting cultural and political regions do not, however always closely match state boundaries. For instance, in each of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, the northern part of each state continues under political influence characteristic of the New England migrants who settled there, and the southern part of each state is more strongly inflected with Appalachian political and cultural values.

The picture is of course not as cleanly drawn as a few paragraphs can describe. Areas of mixed influence abound. Urban–rural divides are not without influence. But anyone with serious interest to consider political reorganization for the United States would be wise to look into and continue the considerable effort already begun to understand regional history and politics in terms of initial settlement cultures and their descendants.