It’s Time for Americans to Start Talking About “Soft Secession”
28th August 2025
The Existential Republic, a Voice of the Crust.
Behind closed doors, blue state leaders are planning. They’re war-gaming scenarios where federal agents show up and continue to transgress further and further past what is “legal.” Daily the courts are showing that that something is legal when Trump wants it to happen, and illegal when he doesn’t. How does a government function under these circumstance?
For many state Attorney Generals and Governors, the legal briefs are already drafted. The strategy sessions have been running since December. “We saw this coming, even though we hoped it wouldn’t,” former Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum told The 19th days after Trump’s inauguration.
This is what American federalism looks like in 2025: Democratic governors holding emergency sessions on encrypted apps, attorneys general filing lawsuits within hours of executive orders, and state legislatures quietly passing laws that amount to nullification of federal mandates. Oregon is stockpiling abortion medication in secret warehouses. Illinois is exploring digital sovereignty. California has $76 billion in reserves and is deciding how to deploy it. Three sources on those daily Zoom calls between Democratic AGs say the same phrase keeps coming up, though nobody wants to say it publicly: soft secession.
Not the violent rupture of 1861, but something else entirely. Blue states building parallel systems, withholding cooperation, and creating facts on the ground that render federal authority meaningless within their borders.
Gee, right-wingers used to talk about such a system and the Wokerati (a) trash-talked it as being unAmerican and (b) made sure to come down like a ton of bricks (using their control of the levers of power) on anybody who tried it.
Sauce for the goose….