New England Must Secede
But there’s a moral obligation attached to becoming “North America’s Netherlands”
My personal daily musings on the dire, collapsing state of the United States aren’t terribly original: An ungovernable country beset by creeping fascism, Gilded Age levels of inequality, reinvigorated bigotry, rising attacks on women’s and LGBTQ rights, painful inflation, mass shootings, and a forgotten-but-toxic pandemic all vie for pretty much everyone’s attention.
Twitter — as the dictum goes, “not real life” — is awash with conversations about the breakup of the United States, which might be inevitable in the future. But recently, there’s a sense that things are getting more acutely dangerous even in blue states. That the blue states will no longer be able to protect their citizens from the onslaught of theocratic madness being perpetrated by an increasingly reactionary GOP. To take one example, the impending end of Roe v. Wade led Mitch McConnell to quickly acknowledge that Republicans would pursue a national abortion ban should they seize power. It’s one thing to overturn Roe; it’s a far more aggressively authoritarian move to ban abortion in blue states.
The Urgency Of The Moment Requires Radical Solutions
While conversations around a potential blue state/red state divorce are entering the consciousness, the details of such a breakup would be incredibly messy. For starters, the blue/red divide isn’t a neat one. As I wrote in another Medium piece:
Secession and dissolution would be a messy affair. Most of America’s cultural schism doesn’t exist on a red state, blue state basis — the cleavage is really urban/rural. Texas and Tennessee might be secessionary states, but Houston, Dallas, and Nashville are blue cities in oceans of red. Those blue economic engines won’t leave happily.
Enter New England, a relatively geographically, historically, and culturally coherent region. And a prime candidate for secession.
Source: CC BY-SA 4.0, Uwe Dedering
New England Stands Out As A Candidate For Secession
Let’s start with the obvious: Aside from California (34% Trump vote in 2020) and Hawaii (34% and previously an independent, colonized nation), no region is as obviously blue and primed for secession as New England. By state, the percent of voters choosing Trump in 2020:
— Vermont: 31%
— Massachusetts: 32%
— Rhode Island: 39%
— Connecticut: 39%
— Maine: 44%
— New Hampshire: 45%
There’s certainly some diversity here among the states; New Hampshire continues to regularly be considered a swing state. Maine reelected the execrable Senator Susan Collins, whom mainstream media love to describe as a “moderate” but who helped cement the anti-Roe Supreme Court majority by voting for Brett Kavanaugh.
That said, other parts of New England aren’t a progressive utopia, either. Reliably blue Massachusetts elected Republican Governor Charlie Baker — and Mitt Romney some years prior. But Massachusetts also elected Senator Elizabeth Warren, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, previous Governor Deval Patrick, and Boston Mayor Michelle Wu. It was the first state to legalize same-sex marriage in 2004. It passed an Obamacare-like program long before the ACA.
New England stands out in the following fashion, too: Every state is more white than the average U.S. percentage. For example, African-Americans make up 14.6% of the U.S. population but only 12.6% of Connecticut’s — and less than 10% of every other New England state. This tells us that white voters are less reactionary on average in New England, since Trump overwhelmingly won the national white vote in 2020. This, in itself, suggests New England would be a moderate, independent force by comparison to other U.S. regions. There are simply fewer MAGA white folks running around, for now, at least.
New England Could Be North America’s Netherlands
The Netherlands — not without its own problems, but largely seen as a stable, prosperous country, albeit one with simmering and sometimes serious Islamophobia — offers something of a model of what New England could look like.
Population: Netherlands 17.5 million, New England 15.5 million
GDP: Netherlands $912 billion, New England $1.1 trillion
Area: Netherlands 16,040 mi², New England 71,988 mi²
New England’s physical size is more on par with Ireland (70,273 mi²), but its population, liberalism, and economic might resemble the Netherlands. With world-class universities, a booming biotech/pharmaceutical sector, and the most educated populace in the U.S., New England could thrive on its own outside the U.S.
New England Owes A Moral Debt To Marginalized Americans
Any left-wing discussion of secession faces a moral dilemma, however: New England might have outlawed slavery early by American standards — 1783 in Massachusetts — but that leaves over 150 years in which enslaved people were exploited economically and morally. In southern New England, the exploitation lasted over 200 years. Connecticut and Rhode Island didn’t free their last enslaved people until the 1840s.
And that enslaved labor benefitted New England greatly. Harvard has admitted as much: As the Harvard Gazette put it, “Harvard’s ties to slavery were transformative in the University’s rise to global prominence.” The New England shipping industry played a key role in the slave trade, much as it did in other maritime industries.
African-Americans, a majority of whom live in red, Southern states, have never seen reparations from these exploitations, which cascaded down the generations to leave their descendants poor. And not just in the South: The net worth of Black Bostonians was found to be just $8 — not a typo — in 2015. Boston itself has long been viewed with racial suspicion, as nasty battles over busing and school desegregation rocked the city in the 1970s.
All of this means that New England owes marginalized people, and specifically African-Americans, a significant debt. Secession and abandonment would set any independent New England on an immoral, ultimately broken path. The solution? Structured in-migration at independence.
Remember our Netherlands comparison? How the Netherlands has 2 million more inhabitants but lower GDP? A massive program of migration — 2 million people from around the U.S., with at least 75% going to African-Americans through a lottery system and the rest to Latinx, LGBTQ, Asian, and populations with disabilities — would help rectify this moral debt while also building a stronger nation. It would require a massive housing boom and direct assistance to these migrants; the New England cost of living, specifically for housing, is prohibitively high.
There’s no easy path here. Secession would, at minimum, require a Constitutional convention. It’s unclear that Republicans — ascendant on the national stage and gaining power daily — would allow New England to go. It’s unclear if New Englanders would be ready to make the moves necessary to secede. But it’s certainly all worth pondering in this age of decline.
