Latest SCOTUS Ruling Has People Asking "Are We Headed Toward Balkanizing and Becoming the States of the Former USA?

The Supreme Court just gutted what remained of the Voting Rights Act. If the federal government no longer guarantees that a Black voter in Alabama and a Black voter in Minnesota have the same rights at the ballot box, what country are we actually living in?

Turmoil is coming either way. The only question is what shape we give it.

There are five paths from here. Four are real. The fifth is a fantasy. And the first three are already happening in pieces, in different states, at different intensities, right now. The choice in front of us is how much of paths one and two we let in by default, and how hard we build toward path three before paths one and two close the door on us.

The first path is Balkanization. The Yugoslavia ending. The term usually describes fragmentation along ethnic and religious lines, but the dynamic does not require those lines, only fault lines deep enough that people on either side stop recognizing each other as countrymen. The collapse of the United States will be remembered similarly to the fall of the USSR. And it does not require a strongman pushing the country apart. The Soviet Union dissolved under a reformer who was trying to save it. Gorbachev wanted to modernize the system; he ended up presiding over its collapse because the centrifugal forces had been building for decades and his reforms loosened the seal. Path one can play out over five years or thirty. Drift gets us there as surely as malice does. Federal authority collapses, the Court keeps stripping protections out from under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and the country fractures into warring blocs that no longer recognize a common federal authority. If you feel relief at the end of constantly being under threat of Christian nationalism and kleptocracy, you may be among the millions ready to go separate ways rather than fighting over fundamentally different values.

The second path is the Troubles. Fascism lite holds the federal apparatus, corporate power consolidates behind it, and blue states mount sustained opposition without ever quite breaking away. The federal government does not collapse; it weaponizes. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in Minneapolis, federalized National Guard deployments in Portland, prosecutors charged with sedition for doing their jobs. Blue state officials respond with civil suits and public portals as the public feels less and less represented, people start lashing out. Thirty-five hundred people died in a place the size of Connecticut, and nobody who lived through it would call it peace.

The third path is soft secession.¹ Blue states quit pointing at Congress and the courts and the next election and start expanding the powers they already have. Parallel financial infrastructure independent of federal banking authority. Interstate compacts on healthcare, climate, labor, and reproductive care that function as treaties in everything but name. State-level prosecution of federal officials who break state laws.² This is the move that keeps every door open. It pushes back on federal overreach and shields the people inside blue states from the damage the federal government is already doing while the pushback takes hold. If it works, we restore the union we have. If it does not hold, we already have the architecture in place to handle whatever comes next. The Brookings Institution called the framework provocative. I will be less polite. It is the only path that gives us a real chance at preserving the country we live in, while leaving the door open for a more peaceful departure if soft power fails to result in meaningful reform.

The fourth path is what soft secession might become if path three cannot restore order. Call it the European Union (EU) model. A thin federal layer handling defense, currency, and interstate commerce, while most governance happens at the state and regional level. The Pacific states coordinate on climate and labor. New England pools healthcare. The Great Lakes states negotiate water as a bloc. Eventually somebody calls a constitutional convention and we write down what we have already become. This is not a failure state. It is a deliberate restructuring, and it is the fallback we want if the union itself stops being salvageable.

And then there is the fifth path. The zero path. The path where things simply work themselves out. We have a free and fair enough election, the country swings hard against the regime, a new president takes office with a working congressional majority, the courts get rebalanced, the fired civil servants come back, and we settle into something resembling Hungary's current trajectory rather than collapse or permanent GOP rule.

Look at the polling. Trump's approval rating sits at thirty-four percent in the latest Pew survey, right at his baseline. His floor has never budged.³ The FiftyPlusOne polling average has him at thirty-seven percent approve against fifty-nine percent disapprove.⁴ A landslide rejection is not looking likely with the current numbers.

A third of the country approves of all this. A third of the country is sealed off from reality by the autocrats who built the seal. Half the states are run by the people who would have to certify their own removal. The institutional machinery required for a Hungarian-scale correction, impeachment of the entire cabinet, conviction of Supreme Court justices, override of a presidential veto, amendment of the Constitution itself, demands supermajorities that do not exist on any timeline that matters, inside a judiciary doing everything it can to keep elections tilted kn favor of Republicans.

If we are betting on path zero, we are unwitting controlled opposition. Truly. That is the state-approved plan, gang. That is the kind of opposition Trump and the GOP and the oligarchs approve and allow.

What that gets us is not democratic recovery. It is steady-state fascism with a permanent opposition party that exists to lose most elections respectably, son some here and there, and reassure its donors that next time will be different. Hungary has had that arrangement for fifteen years, they also arguably had a more robust democracy since they were never a duopoly. The regime does not need to crush us if we are willing to crush ourselves on a four-year cycle, dust off, and try again with the same playbook.

It is going to be ugly no matter what. Four years of Biden. The justice system. Republicans who criticize the regime chased out of Congress for fear of violence. Two impeachments. Thirty-four criminal convictions. Jack Smith. So much more. And Trump is still here. The GOP too.

“This time will be different,” says the man repeatedly running into a brick wall hoping to get to Hogwarts.

This is what happens when you take capitalism to its greatest extremes. The most selfish narcissist among us ends up in charge. Everything including the Supreme Court is for sale. Truth is determined by profit loss statements. The opposition is paid to deliver weak half measures. The government lives to take our money and hand it to the politicians' financiers, and foreign governments can pay our politicians directly to send our young adults to fight in foreign wars for corporate profit. The Dow hit fifty thousand the same week the Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. The market is not broken. It is doing exactly what it was built to do.

The Callais ruling did not create the fork in the road. It just turned the sign so we can finally read it. Pieces of paths one and two are already showing up in different states at different intensities. The choice is whether we let those pieces grow into the whole picture, or whether governors and attorneys general and state legislators build path three fast enough to reduce the overall suffering that we face. Lessons in history books will see this moment as the failed experiment in unmitigated capitalism that the United States has deformed into, the same way they see Soviet collapse as the failed experiment in state communism. The federal cavalry is not coming. We are the cavalry, and we have some building to do.

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References

¹ Armitage, C. (2026). The Constitutional Architecture of State Opposition: A Taxonomy of Sovereign Posture Under Federal Authoritarian Capture and Electoral Autocracy. SSRN Working Paper No. 6416178. https://ssrn.com/abstract=6416178

² Gamble v. United States, 587 U.S. 678 (2019). https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/17-646

³ Pew Research Center. (2026, May 1). Trump Loses Ground on Several Personal Traits as Approval Rating Slips. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/05/01/trump-loses-ground-on-several-personal-traits-as-approval-rating-slips/

⁴ FiftyPlusOne. (2026, May 1). Presidential Approval Rating Average. https://fiftyplusone.news/polls/approval/president