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The federal center is entering the kind of decay that has ended other unions. The more autocratic the country becomes, the weaker Lincoln's case for staying, and the stronger the case for going.
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In 1994, at the request of Vice President Al Gore, the Central Intelligence Agency assembled a task force of academics and gave them one job, to work out which governments around the world were headed for civil war or collapse and whether it could be predicted years in advance. Ted Robert Gurr, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, built the first version. Jack Goldstone of George Mason University led the modeling that followed, and in 2010 he and seven colleagues published the result in the American Journal of Political Science.
Tested against every country of more than half a million people from 1955 to 2003, the model was right more than eighty percent of the time, two years in advance, about which states would break down and which would stabilize. By law, the CIA is barred from studying the United States itself, so Barbara Walter, a political scientist who served on the task force, scored the country on her own. I did the same, working from her research, the CIA’s methodology, and using data covering the time since Walter’s exploration of the subject.
Four things accurately predicted national and sub-governmental breakdown, out of dozens of categories the researchers tested: the type of political regime, the infant mortality rate, whether four or more neighboring countries were at war, and whether the government practiced discrimination against a defined group.
Regime type predicted breakdown far more accurately than the other three. Of the regime types the model scores, the one with the highest odds of breakdown, a partial democracy with deep factionalism, had more than thirty times the odds of instability compared to a plain dictatorship.
The odds run that way because the regimes at both ends of the scale last and the ones in the middle break.
Håvard Hegre and three colleagues at the Peace Research Institute Oslo found, across 152 countries from 1816 to 1992, that “coherent democracies and harshly authoritarian states have few civil wars” and that the regimes in between have the most, even after they have had time to settle from a regime change. A full dictatorship can repress and a full democracy can accommodate, and a regime in the middle does neither well enough to be anything but fragile and tenuous. This can be good or bad news depending on which side of the autocratic takeover you happen to be on, though I take it as a sign for optimism that the GOP regime may be lacking in traits defining a more robust capture of the United States.
Regime type in the model comes from the Polity data, which rates every country from positive ten for a full democracy to negative ten for a full dictatorship. The middle range, positive five down to negative five, is anocracy, a mix of democratic and authoritarian rule. Polity’s last reading, in 2020, scored the United States a positive five, below the cutoff for a democracy, after the executive refused congressional oversight and worked to discredit the vote count. Polity stopped scoring that year, and the V-Dem Institute’s 2026 report, which now does the same work, downgraded the United States from a liberal democracy to an electoral one. Both readings fall short of a full democracy.
The major independent measures of democracy all show the United States declining, and one of them shows the fastest decline it has ever recorded. On V-Dem’s index, maintained by the University of Gothenburg, the United States fell from twentieth to fifty-first in the world in a single year, its sharpest one-year fall in a record reaching back more than two centuries. On Freedom House’s hundred-point scale the United States fell from 93 to 81 over the past two decades, the steepest decline of any country it still rates as free. The Economist’s index rates the country a flawed democracy at its lowest score since the measure began in 2006. The Century Foundation’s new democracy meter scored it 57 out of 100 for 2025, down from 79 the year before.
Polity had already recoded American political competition from competitive to factional in 2016, the condition the task force found to be the strongest single predictor of national split, collapse, coup, or balkanization. That recoding cut the score from positive ten to positive eight. Polity dated the switch to the presidential election and named the two factions as Trump’s supporters and the opposition. The Center for Systemic Peace, which maintains Polity, rated the United States at high risk of political instability when it recorded the 2020 drop, and it called the executive’s effort to overturn that election an attempted presidential coup. The people responsible for that coup were pardoned and placed back in power, they’ve been systematically removing Democratic safeguards for nearly two years since returning to power.
Factionalism in the model is politics split into hostile camps that treat power as winner-take-all instead of a contest between inherently collaborative stakeholders. V-Dem’s 2026 report describes the Republican Party as far-right and anti-pluralist. V-Dem’s party index had scored it that way years earlier, rating parties from zero to one on four behaviors: weak commitment to pluralism, demonizing opponents, contempt for minority rights, and encouraging political violence.
By the 2016 election the Republican Party had crossed the 0.43 line for an anti-pluralist party, and in V-Dem’s last coding, before the 2018 election, only 15 percent of governing parties in democracies this millennium scored more illiberal than it did, closer to Turkey’s ruling AKP at 1.0 and Hungary’s ruling Fidesz at 0.88 than to the British Conservatives at 0.35 or the German Christian Democrats at 0.05. The Democratic Party stayed in the mainstream range. That 2018 reading is the last one V-Party took. The index has scored nothing since: the January 6 attack, the pardons of the people who carried it out, the mass internment camps, the ICE agents screaming “Make America Great Again, bitch” as they beat and abduct Americans, or the Republican midterm convention in Dallas on September 10, 2026, where an attendee shouted “He should be shot!” each time Senator Ted Cruz named a Democratic candidate, and Cruz did not react and later posted the clip of his speech with the shouts audible. One of the country’s two governing parties behaved like the ruling parties of the world’s elected autocracies in 2018, and the eight years since are the ones no index has scored.
Combine the two and the United States falls into the model’s most dangerous category, a partial democracy with factionalism. Polity’s last coding is six years old, and the test of whether it still applies is whether that party holds enough of the state to act on its anti-pluralism, because an anti-pluralist party in opposition is a problem and an anti-pluralist party in power is a regime. A party that controls the White House and the courts and no longer accepts the elections it loses, as it showed after 2020 and on January 6, 2021, when its supporters stormed the Capitol to stop the count, passes that test.
It should be noted that the eighty percent is the CIA model’s track record, and its accuracy has fallen in the last decade. Still, what it predicts is instability, meaning civil war and the violent or unconstitutional replacement of a government. That is all I take from the model, a factional partial democracy with high odds of breakdown, and everything after this point is my argument about what that breakdown makes possible, resting on the evidence I give for it rather than on the model itself.
The model predicts instability, and the words people reach for are civil war and coup. Secession is the one that many treat as unthinkable or shocking. Support for it exists, and it has flipped by party. About a fifth of Americans told YouGov in 2026 they would back their own state leaving. The national figure is down from a quarter in 2024, but only because Republican support collapsed once the party took power, from 29 percent to 14. Democratic support stayed flat while it climbed in blue states, and Democrats are now likelier than Republicans to want out of the union. The flat Democratic number hides something. When a Democrat thinks about secession, the word that comes to mind first is Confederacy. Many read the word secession through the lens of slavery, hate, oppression, and the Lost Cause, the postwar myth that recast the Confederacy as noble, so the instinct is revulsion before analysis. The Confederacy captured the idea of leaving in 1861, and that association has lasted 165 years since.
It is odd that we associate moral good with the binding of a tumultuous union rather than good with good. The founding American document does not. The Declaration of Independence grounds government in the consent of the governed and says that when a government becomes destructive of rights, the people may alter or abolish it. The United States was born from a secession against an abusive authority. The reflex that treats staying together as the moral default has the logic backwards, and it survives mostly because Abraham Lincoln won and the South was morally wrong.
Now let’s ask the question that subconscious reflex forbids, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement now serving as the MAGA movement’s iron fist. Is being the United States of America more inherently moral than an EU-style union, or than some states joining Canada, or a coalition of blue states that don’t want to see their resources used for oppression, worldwide death dealing, and existential dangers at an accelerating rate, so that their people are not abducted by that army or held in internment camps? Unity is worth what it protects. When it protects the people doing the abducting, it is worth less every day.
Of course, the country does not sort into clean red and blue territory, and every red state contains blue cities while every blue state contains rural red counties, so where would the border go? That defeats a tidy two-nation partition. It says nothing about one state leaving. California already has a border. It is the state line, and the red counties inside it weigh no more than the Tories weigh in an independent Scotland or the Anglophones in Quebec. Every country contains people who voted the other way, and that has never been a reason a country cannot exist. A state with a Democratic trifecta supermajority, one party holding the governorship and a supermajority in both legislative chambers, could leave, red patches and all, and it might objectively benefit from it: it would stop funding a government aiming ICE and the military at its own residents, and it would keep its own tax base, which by the California Budget and Policy Center’s count sends more than eighty billion dollars a year to the federal government beyond what comes back. Maybe more and more Californians will start asking when it’s worth being on their own.
Worth discussing is that exit saves the population it takes and abandons those it leaves behind. That is the second objection, and a serious one. A New York departure does nothing for the immigrant detained in Texas or the Democratic voter in Alabama, and the union has previously been the machinery that forced rights onto states that refused them, from Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That objection assumes the machinery still works, that staying protects the person in Texas. When the federal government is the one doing the detaining, staying adds California’s residents to the list without lifting a single Texan off it. The real choice is between losing with him and building a place he can reach.
The third objection is the law. In Texas v. White, in 1869, the Supreme Court held that a state cannot leave the union unilaterally. That is the law under the Constitution as it stands, and the opinion itself names the two ways out which it still leaves open, revolution and the consent of the states. My argument rests on the first, the Declaration of Independence’s ground: consent can be withdrawn from a government that has become its people’s enemy, and that claim sits outside the Constitution rather than beneath it. The objection only loses its force once you say plainly that the argument is not for leaving the Constitution itself, but for leaving the federal government that has abandoned that founding document.
Lincoln made the fourth objection, and it is structural. He claimed that if any faction can leave when it loses an election, no democracy can survive, so accepting the loss and staying to win next time is what makes self-government work. That argument is powerful, but the years since have shown it to be an inaccurate projection. It assumes the system is still a democracy the loser can win in, and Lincoln said as much in the same speech: “If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might in a moral point of view justify revolution; certainly would if such right were a vital one.” Of course in our situation it is the majority that is kept out of power, and more often each cycle. The South’s problem was that no such right had been denied it. A government holding people in camps without the due process the Fifth Amendment writes out for every person is denying a clearly written right. Scored on the CIA’s model, the United States has already left the category where the loser can truly create substantive change at the federal level, Obama and Biden being critical examples of that. When the Democratic party wins nationally, successes are incrementally and easily undone; when the GOP wins federally, often with a minority of votes, the regression is rapid and dramatic. The more autocratic the country becomes, the weaker Lincoln’s case for staying, and the stronger the case for going.
That leaves the objection that decides it, force. The scholars who study breakup conclude that an American secession would fail. Ryan Griffiths of Syracuse University put it in the title of his 2025 book, The Disunited States: Threats of Secession in Red and Blue America and Why They Won’t Work. Their reason is the one that has decided every case. Secession succeeds when the center cannot stop it, whatever the merits of the cause. Fifteen republics left the Soviet Union in 1991 because the Soviet government had lost the capacity and the will to keep them. Czechoslovakia split because the government in Prague agreed. Secession fails against a strong center that refuses, and the United States has been a strong center for its entire history. That is the objection the consensus view rests on, the consensus among the scholars who study secession that is.
There is an objection to the comparison itself, and it is the sharpest one. The Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia were unions of nations, each with its own language and its own memory of sovereignty from before the union existed. California is not a captive nation. Its people speak the fed’s language and live under the fed’s law. Until recently they thought of the federal government as their own. So why would a state with no separate national identity ever act like a Soviet republic? Because the founding secession was made by exactly such people. The colonists of 1776 spoke the controlling government’s language, and they left anyway, the moment the government in London became their enemy.
Secession has two requirements, a central government that has become an enemy and a periphery with the means to refuse it, these are not static states of being in a nation as unstable as the United States of 2026. The Soviet republics had the centralized stability first and lacked the will to leave until 1991. Many blue states have had the means for fruitful independence all along and are acquiring the will as things get worse.
The strong center is collapsing, and at an accelerating pace. Every day the federal government gets weaker and more abusive, and the weaker it gets the more desperate it is to keep power. The consensus view treats the army as a permanent fact, when the army is the first thing a broke, hated government loses. Every new administration replaces officials, so the question is how to tell a coercive apparatus in decay from an ordinary turnover. The coercive apparatus is the military and the police, the force a government uses to compel obedience. The test has two parts. A government in decay selects its commanders for loyalty over competence, and it loses the capacity to pay and supply the force it is selecting.
An army depends on being paid and being willing, and either can fail. In August 1991 the Soviet coup collapsed because the units ordered into Moscow would not fire on their own people, and Soviet capacity looked intact right up until the order was given and ignored. The signs that American capacity is eroding are already on the record. In February 2025, in a single night, the president fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the chief of the Navy, the vice chief of the Air Force, and the services’ top lawyers, after the defense secretary had circulated a list of officers to be removed to Republican members of Congress. More than a dozen senior generals and admirals were gone by that summer. The director of the Defense Intelligence Agency was fired after his agency reported that the strikes on Iran had set its program back only months, contradicting the president. In April 2026 the Army chief of staff was removed after 38 years of service and replaced by an officer who had served as the defense secretary’s personal military assistant, and the Navy secretary was fired in the middle of an active blockade with no reason given. None of them was charged with wrongdoing. That is a chain of command being rebuilt for loyalty, and loyalty is what you screen for when you have stopped assuming it. Every purge of that kind trades competence for obedience, and a coercive apparatus does not function on obedience alone. You get a force that looks enormous on paper and cracks the first time it is tested. That is the first part of the test. The second is on the record too. The same month the purge began, the Pentagon was preparing to shed up to 76,000 civilian workers and cut eight percent of its budget. In October 2025 the troops were paid through the government shutdown only after the president ordered the Pentagon to move eight billion dollars of leftover research money onto the payroll, and the Pentagon accepted an anonymous donation of 130 million dollars toward their salaries.
And the troops are not sealed off from the country. They live in states, and in reality, and when the government cannot pay them and their families are getting hammered by the same budget cuts and price rises hitting everyone else, the reliability of the force changes. The firings are not confined to generals. They reach down through the ranks for culture-war loyalty, and they come with a widening circle of ordinary suffering that reaches inside the barracks because the barracks are inside the country.
The midterms in November 2026 and the presidential election in 2028 will show where reality stands. But suppose a Democrat wins in 2028. That president takes office facing a Supreme Court with a six-to-three majority whose youngest members are in their fifties and keep their seats for life. That majority was built through the Federalist Society, the organization that credentialed and installed the judges who delivered it, and in Trump v. United States in 2024 it ruled that presidents are immune from prosecution for their official acts, an immunity no clause of the Constitution grants and one the Declaration of Independence listed among the king’s offenses, shielding his officers from punishment for killings of the people they governed. Alexander Hamilton, author of most of the Federalist essays arguing for the Constitution’s ratification, wrote in Federalist 69 that the president “would afterwards be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.” Every reform that president signs has to survive that bench, which has refereed for the president on immunity and on control of the executive branch, and against him once, narrowly, on the tariffs.
Behind the Court sits a Senate where Wyoming’s 580,000 people get the same two votes as California’s 39 million, and where the twenty-six smallest states, holding under a fifth of the population, elect a majority. Add the filibuster, the Senate rule that requires sixty votes to end debate on most legislation, and nothing that matters passes. The House is drawn by the parties that control it, and the presidency itself went to the candidate who lost the popular vote in 2000 and again in 2016. Those are the rules that produce minoritarian rule, government by the side with fewer votes, from the rural and Confederate states, and no single election changes them.
So the Democratic government is Biden 2.0, and the record says what that means. Obama declined to prosecute the architects of torture and told the country to look forward rather than back. Biden’s attorney general took more than two years to indict the man who tried to overturn an election, and the case died in the immunity ruling and the 2024 result. Democrats do not arrest the people who committed the last administration’s crimes, and there is no reason to expect the next one to arrest the people running the camps.
Then Republicans spend a few years in opposition and take back control, because that is the other half of the pattern. They took the House in 1994, two years after Clinton, and again in 2010, two years after Obama. They took the presidency in 2016 and again in 2024. Every Democratic president since Clinton has lost the House within two years and handed the presidency to a Republican within eight, and each return started from wherever the last Republican left off. Bush handed over the wars and the surveillance state, and Trump is handing over the camps and a purged military. The next one inherits all of it and adds what he wants.
Extend everything I have described ten years: more elections with disputed counts, Republican legislatures passing whatever the White House sends them, federal courts staffed down to the district level with Federalist Society judges, and a regime that pushes ten steps forward and gives back one so the billionaire-owned press has something to celebrate. Legitimacy craters. Capacity hollows out underneath it at the same time, because a government that is broke and purging its own ranks for loyalty is a government that increasingly cannot pay its people and cannot count on the ones with the guns.
That is where the calculation changes for states like California and New York. By year ten, a California exit looks less like a blue state defying a mighty federal government and more like a solvent, functional state becoming less involved and moving away from an insolvent, incompetent one that spent its capacity on spectacle and repression. The demand for it rises and the cost of it falls. The consensus view assumes a permanent strong center that can always crush an exit. What I have described is the process by which a center becomes less able to maintain power by force, while incentivizing those most able to leave.
One thing keeps this from being a comfortable forecast. Brittle centers do not go quietly. They lash out hardest right before they fail, because spectacle and force are the only tools they have left, and the 1991 coup was exactly that, the hardliners’ last attempt to keep the union by force, which broke the union instead. The public has little appetite for violence. PRRI found in December 2025 that a fifth of Americans agreed patriots may have to resort to it to save the country, with Republican support down to 19 percent from 35 percent under Biden. The pressure comes from the center instead. So the likeliest path is a confrontation rather than a clean divorce, and the exit comes through it or after it, the way it usually does. A rotting center makes secession achievable and makes the road there often violent.
Everything in this piece represents my reasoning for the value of something called Soft Secession. Soft secession, the non-confrontational path to quiet quitting and disempowering the bad guys. This means states using their own constitutional authority to refuse federal authoritarianism and build functioning governments, and it is already underway, as I have documented since 2025. The federal center is entering the kind of decay that has ended other unions. It will grow more violent as it weakens. And the states with the means will start doing the math the consensus view says they never will. My view cuts against that consensus. The consensus rests on a hideously corrupted federal government that can pay and command its army, and the last two years are the record of that movement starting to lose both.
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