The Four Paths in Front of America

We decide how it shakes out.

Wassmuth Center for Human Rights via AP

The federal government no longer functions as a neutral arbiter between states. It has been captured by a coalition that represents a minority of Americans, a minority of economic output, and a minority of the population, but wields majority power through the Senate, the Electoral College, and a judiciary stacked over decades. Democratic states fund a federal system that has been turned against their residents. They send tax dollars to the federal government and watch them flow to states that suppress voters, gut healthcare, and gerrymander maps so aggressively that public preferences cannot translate into electoral outcomes.

This is not sustainable. Something breaks. The only question is what.

Right now we are in a patchwork. Soft secession is happening in pieces. Losing is happening in pieces. Nobody has arrested a federal officer yet, but the pressure is building. States are talking shit and filing injunctions, which is not oppositional federalism but it is not nothing either. It is the space before oppositional federalism, where everyone is waiting to see who goes first. These are the four paths that patchwork becomes when it stops being a patchwork.

The first is soft secession. The quiet quitting of governance. Nobody announces anything. A Supreme Court ruling comes down and state agencies just do not enforce it. No press conference, no declaration, just a policy memo that never gets written and funding that never gets allocated. Data stops flowing to federal databases. When federal agents show up, state employees shrug and say they cannot help. States start building their own versions of Medicaid and Social Security, knowing the federal programs are being gutted and their residents need something to catch them. The federal government issues orders and democratic states ignore them. Nobody signs a declaration. Nobody fires a shot. The union just stops functioning in practice while everyone pretends it still exists on paper. If this works, if democratic states coordinate their resistance and the federal government cannot force compliance, what emerges over time looks less like the United States and more like the European Union. Shared currency. Shared defense. Everything else negotiated between blocs that no longer pretend to be one country.

The second is oppositional federalism. Soft secession might not be enough when the federal government is already invading cities and disappearing people. This is the escalation: states stop quietly ignoring and start actively fighting back. State attorneys general bring criminal charges under state law against federal officials who violate it. Governors use state resources to obstruct federal enforcement rather than just failing to help. When federal agents come for residents, the state makes it as difficult as possible and dares the federal government to do something about it. This is not quiet quitting. This is standing in the doorway. It risks confrontation, but it also forces the federal government to either back down or escalate in ways that expose what they have become.

The third is a governor going on television and saying the words out loud. We are done. State flags fly alone. Borders go up. New currencies get printed. The map everyone pretended was hypothetical becomes the map everyone has to live with. This does not require permission from the federal government. It requires only enough states deciding at the same time that the thing we called a country no longer exists in any meaningful way. If it happens without war, the successor nations become neighbors who trade and negotiate like any other countries. If it happens with war, we become the Balkans.

The fourth is losing. Your vote never matters again. The courts stay captured. The GOP's private army keeps disappearing anyone they want, and it only escalates from here. The same minority rules permanently, and your children grow up in it, and their children after them, and nobody remembers what it was like when elections could change things.

These are the four paths in front of us. We are already walking toward one of them. The only question is whether we choose or let someone else choose for us.

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Free resources at BuyMeACoffee.com/TheER: the Introduction to Soft Secession explains the framework. The Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare shows how states can use fiscal policy as leverage. Policies That Pass covers soft secession policies that have already succeeded at the state and local level. The Educate Activate Recruit Repeat Method lays out how movements grow. Being Dangerous: How to Go from Activist to Operative is for people ready to stop performing resistance and start practicing it. There is a printable trifold pamphlet you can hand out as a primer on soft secession. Conservatism: America's Personality Disorder is the full-length book I co-authored with Dr. D. Carl Brown on the psychology driving all of this. And model legislation you can send directly to your state representatives: the Bribe Is A Bribe Act lets state attorneys general prosecute federal corruption under state law where presidential pardons cannot reach. The State Fiscal Sovereignty Act creates a tax escrow trigger for election protection so states can hold federal revenue if the federal government crosses constitutional red lines. The Corporate Welfare Accountability Act means-tests corporate tax breaks and subsidies because if a corporation has money for campaign contributions and PACs, it does not need our tax dollars.

Some of that is available TheExistentialistRepublic.com along with merch and physical copies. The YouTube channel has video versions of this work. The Discord is where we organize.