Despite this dubious assertion, Twenties post-Kaiser Germany remains a solid analogy for 2020s post-liberal America — just not in the way conservatives often claim. Though moderate by interwar standards, the Weimar regime paved the way for Nazi terror by normalizing state violence and repression. The Weimar’s SPD leaders did so by unleashing law enforcement, often in alliance with Right-wing paramilitaries, to crush and kill Leftist radicals. This brand of state violence occurred not only during the 1919 Berlin Revolution, when the Freikorps murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, but for over a decade afterwards.

Of course, the comparison between Good and Luxemburg only goes so far. Yet one can see in the Minneapolis killing the same kind of insecure, panicky overreaction that often took place under the Weimar government’s violent suppression of radical protest movements and wannabe revolutionaries. Particularly relevant here is the social media bloodlust surrounding Good’s death, and the desire of so many in government and the commentariat to justify Good’s death, grimly echoing Weimar-era targeting of radical women by Right-wing paramilitaries acting with state approval.

After violently suppressing Luxemburg’s Spartacists in 1919, after all, many army officers went out of their way to declare that any women who happened to stray into their gunfire were fair game. Radical women were, in their view, essential obstacles to restoring order. The Weimar military’s overt and unapologetic contempt for women, especially those of a radical Left persuasion, derived not merely from their association with the fiery Luxemburg, but from General Arnold Lequis’s attempt to excuse a failed military operation.

In a battle to retake the Hohenzollern palace from radicals, Lequis gave an order to attack, but was thwarted by rebel gunfire from the roof. In excusing his failure, Lequis gave the following response to a Berlin newspaper: “My soldiers don’t fire on women and children. That was where the mistake was made. A rank of my troops was driven back, they laid down their arms, and the rest went back to the university.” The message — that the government’s effort to free the palace had been derailed by women’s resistance — spread swiftly among military circles. From that point on, there would be no hesitation, as Weimar troops were instructed to fire at any hostile mob: including if women and children were involved or even just nearby.

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America’s philosophical civil war

By Mary Harrington

In Trump’s America, a similar sentiment seems to have spread among ICE agents, now with a decade of cultural war baggage behind them. Yet their contempt for female activists, especially in the LGBT community, also has far deeper roots. Jonathan Ross, the ICE officer who shot Good, was dragged over 100 yards by another anti-ICE protestor in a vehicle last June. Ross, likely still traumatized by that event, may have made the same psychological leap General Lequis did in 1919: next time, there will be no hesitation, women or children be damned.

Securing stability through uncompromising state violence carried long-term consequences for the German psyche. The Weimar officials’ embrace of violence in pursuit of order normalized it, particularly against Leftist opponents. When the Nazis employed street violence and the assassination of political enemies — not only while in government but also during their ascent to power — it was far harder for ordinary citizens to recognize these acts as uniquely dangerous. For a while, at least, the suppression looked rather familiar.

Put the specifics of Renee Good’s case — or even ICE generally — aside for a moment. Normalizing state violence, and even violence between warring political factions, is the greatest danger of our current American moment. Certainly, it’s far more serious than a putative slide into “fascism”, whatever that means in the America of 2025, so different from the fragile democracies of interwar Europe. What is unfolding in the United States is clearly something different. It is an authoritarian movement, yes, but one that’s deeply American in character, shaped by frontier mythology and market absolutism. Projecting 20th-century fascism onto American politics therefore does little to help us understand what we are actually facing, or how to resist it.

The Social Democrats charged with governing Weimar Germany faced obscene challenges, many outside their control. Their menu of viable choices was extremely narrow, and under those conditions it is not surprising that the decisions they made were deeply flawed. After all, the Treaty of Versailles saddled them with unpayable debts for a war launched by a previous regime, one many Social Democrats had opposed. They also faced relentless risings from both Left and Right, each attempting to establish breakaway republics or overthrow the fragile national government altogether.

Which brings us to the actual solution to America’s accelerating descent toward an illiberal future — and it is not the election of a president with the “right” ideology. There is only one plausible way out of America’s Groundhog Day cycle of dysfunction, and it is the same structural change that might have prevented the Nazi seizure of power in Germany: accepting that our governing institutions are too large, too centralized, and too culturally incoherent to sustain democratic legitimacy.

There was far more ideological fluidity in Twenties German politics than is generally acknowledged. Across the decade, there were several radical uprisings, each attempting to create local worker-led governments. But whether in Hamburg, Saxony, or Halle, each of these experiments was brutally repressed by the Weimar regime. Had the Berlin government perhaps allowed more experimentation, echoed their Bismarckian predecessor in giving into some demands to weaken radicalism generally, things might have turned out differently. There’s a chance, of course, that the German far Left would have been further emboldened, but based on the experiences of the pre-1914 period, it’s more likely that they’d have lost purchase with everyday citizens. The same, incidentally, might be said of the Right — with a more flexible approach to governance potentially encouraging alternatives to Hitlerism, notably among economically radical nationalists like Otto Strasser.

Relitigating Hitler’s rise to power isn’t the point. In general, local democratic experimentation is something people in power detest, but it might also be the only way to free ourselves from the zero-sum politics poisoning American life. There is a fundamental urge, deep in the human psyche, to have control over our own localities without the oversight of distant governing bodies. Massive representative structures — of the sort now governing the 350 million Americans — no longer scratches our democratic itch. Much of what we’re arguing about online is a distraction from addressing that fundamental urge.

The down side of an intensely localist approach is, of course, the possibility of chaos ensuing. But given the reckless self-interest of those currently in charge of the United States, chaos increasingly seems to appear anyway. More fundamentally, recall that the republic wasn’t founded under the assumption that a powerful federal government should decide, over the objections of local populations, who counts as a citizen. It was fought in defense of small‑r republicanism — of local control, regional autonomy, and minimal centralized interference. The Constitution of 1789 represented a significant retreat from those principles, not their fulfillment. To avoid descending into outright dysfunction, and the normalization of political violence that follows, the United States must return to its original localist instincts. Breaking the United States into an “American Union” of six or seven regional political units, where state governments are framed by robust constitutions, executives, and greater autonomy — somewhat similar to how the European Union operates today — may be the only remaining solution to our culture-war deadlock.

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America was never inclusive

By B. Duncan Moench

Germany required total war, genocide and foreign occupation before being divided — and even then it lost nearly a third of its territory and has never recovered its pre-1939 standing. If America continues on its present trajectory, it’s hard to see why a similar outcome couldn’t happen here. Yes, Wall Street and national corporate entities would fiercely oppose such decentralization, since it would place meaningful limits on their power. But why should ordinary citizens care about that?

Besides, if you could go back and poll the Germans who survived the Nazi catastrophe on whether it would have been better to break up their nation in advance — allowing more room for the country’s various factions to experiment with different forms of governance — it’s fair to assume almost everyone would have preferred that option to the country destroying itself under Hitler.

There’s a broader issue here too. Though Weimar’s state repression wasn’t justified, at a certain point those in power must answer how they’ll deal with opponents who refuse to back down. Despite initial readings of the situation, it seems increasingly clear that Renee Good and her wife Becca were indeed obstructing ICE efforts before the shooting, with Becca taunting Ross in a highly reckless manner. None of this justifies Good’s killing, which was easily avoidable. But this is precisely how civil wars erupt. Flash‑bulb moments that have less to do with the immediate facts than with what they come to symbolize. If Renee Good’s death doesn’t trigger a national breakup, something else will. When these protests reach their denouement, the key questions will be who holds federal power, what their ideology is, and how they choose to respond. Yet as long as the two‑party cartel remains intact, the answer will almost certainly be law‑and‑order brutality that demonizes protestors — one way or another.

The mythic sanctity of a 50-state America still pervades, but cracks are forming. Red‑state secessionism, like the Greater Idaho movement, is real. Yet once Trump returned to power, much of that rhetoric evaporated, revealing that many Americans still cling to the illusion that they can eventually win outright and impose their will on unwilling regions. Blue‑state secessionism, by contrast, has never got off the ground. Fundamentally, this cuts to the core of progressives’ self‑conception, much as Twenties Marxist internationalists rejected settling for control over a single German province. Unlike deep‑red states such as Texas and Idaho — which flirt with secession when they’re out of power — deep‑blue states like Minnesota and Washington reject the idea entirely: they openly wish to impose their progressive vision on the rest of the country, imagining they enjoy widespread support in regions they’ve never even visited.

As an American who has lived in eight states, I find our conflict deeply sad and also deeply stupid. If we could recognize the problem for what it is — an irreconcilable divide in moral, religious, and cultural norms that cannot be solved by a federal government as powerful as ours — we might escape our march towards a second civil war and an illiberal, undemocratic future. But both sides still want to control the entire country, and that doesn’t bode well, just as it didn’t during Germany’s Weimar years. And at least they only had newspapers and the radio to contend with. These days, of course, social media pours constant, second‑by‑second fuel onto the red‑blue fire.

More anger means more engagement, which means more profit. Effectively speaking, big tech has exercised an outsized control over American governance since the Obama administration, and that isn’t likely to change anytime soon. The upshot is that the culture wars will continue to consume any possibility of a rational, broad‑based democratic movement capable of challenging America’s existing power structure. So until people abandon social media en masse, efforts to impose national unity through force will only escalate — until state terror becomes routine, regardless of which side happens to be wielding it. The sky isn’t falling yet, but the only way forward to halt our escalating dysfunction is to embrace the fact that local regions ought to decide basic governance decisions, like who is a citizen and who is not. Either that, or we accept many more Renee Goods over the months and years ahead.

The factory workers constructed and inscribed the black granite for the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. They created a national monument at Arlington for the Pentagon victims of the September 11 attacks, and they did the same for the heart-stopping 9/11 monument to New York City. They do it too for individual men and women who have been killed in action. When I was there, the Iraq war was raging and they were busy.

Two things struck me about Granite Industries and its place in US life. The first was how remote America’s beating heart can be. Vermont is mainly forest. In winter, it glistens in gorgeous silence as the snows come and go. This company plays a central part in American life and yet exists in an unexplored, unpopulated corner of the nation.

The second thing was how corners of the nation can be not just unexplored but genuinely separate from the rest. Yes, America is a collection of states, and yes, the constitution does not refer to a single nation. But the lived experience of these facts is still somewhat alien to those of us who come from centralised nations, and frankly alien to some Americans, particularly on the Left, who have convinced themselves in recent decades that the Unum is more important than the pluribus.

It’s a fascinating fact that the very same people who value diversity seem not to be keen on it in an area of American life where it has traditionally existed: the relationship between the states and the central federal government. There is evidence aplenty that this diversity is growing to an extent that is unavoidable, occasionally dangerous, but in some ways positive.

To state the obvious first: American states are hugely different even in areas where the geography, the weather, the feel to a visiting Martian, might be similar. Vermont and New Hampshire are good examples. When I drove to see the headstones that day, we crossed from New Hampshire. There’s a sign, “Welcome to Vermont” — but there doesn’t have to be. The last thing you see on the New Hampshire side of the interstate is a Walmart and dozens of other large stores and car parks and accompanying tat.

Then just trees. This is because New Hampshire has no sales tax. So no big stores see the point of basing themselves on the Vermont side of the border where you have to pay a hefty 6% on anything you buy. In theory Vermonters have to declare stuff they bring home but, well, that’s in theory.

There is otherwise little difference between the states — both mainly trees perched on granite. But New Hampshire is a proto-libertarian paradise whose state motto is “Live Free or Die” (there used to be a Free State Project that tried to get libertarians to live there) and Vermont is one of the most taxed and regulated states in the Union whose most famous politician is a self-described socialist, Bernie Sanders.

Good luck to them both. That’s the kind of difference that all America can cope with, even celebrate. What happens now though if the differences become even wider and extend into areas of life that touch everyone?

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Why does America hate itself?

By Justin Webb

One of the greatest political victories of recent times in America was that of the Federalist Society founded at Yale Law School in 1982. Its aim was “checking federal power, protecting individual liberty and interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning” — in other words, upholding the legal concept of “originalism”. It set about its business of changing the judiciary and advancing its own members with gusto and guile and, via the Supreme Court justice picks of Donald Trump, has won its battle, indeed for a generation, won its war.

But coverage of the victory has concentrated on the wrong aspects of that core mission statement. Yes, originalism and individual liberty have consequences for law, but what of the first part, the checking of federal power?

This is what the court has begun to do and this is what might change America: de-nationalise it to an extent that goes far beyond the odd tax difference. The court may pull it apart or allow it to come apart gradually, but either way points to a new dispensation with some basic rights that all Americans can enjoy, but not nearly so many of them.

It’s worth stressing that the nationalisation of so much of American life was a bipartisan affair even if the Republicans rhetorically railed against it. The prominence of business regulatory issues on the GOP’s agenda meant that in some areas they were the keenest of federal regulators. Large companies tend to prefer comprehensive standards to a hodgepodge of local rules. But now of course the party has largely said goodbye to big business and howdy to the mom-and-pop world of low tax and local regulation. This change allows state control to be a genuine aim.

Individual states will be where the action is in this new world. The end of Roe v. Wade made no difference to the rights of women to have abortions in those states that want those rights protected. Indeed, in Kansas it may well have reinvigorated a local sense of the importance that abortion should remain legal. But what the court undoubtedly did is check federal power.

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The death of American dignity

By Justin Webb

The idea of national progress — an idea that extends back to FDR and the New Deal — may well be coming to an end. American history is rightly seen as a series of broad periods of consensus with one party or tendency in overall power. The most recent is the post-war welfare state, which not only improved the lives of Americans in material ways but also gave them the right to a decent life. This helped to forge a sense of national destiny, as such rights must be for everyone or else they don’t count as rights. That is what is threatened now. How odd if Trump — flawed in so many ways — goes down in history as the bringer of such profound change.

Of course, there are dangers. “States’ rights” used to mean rights for racists: a rallying cry for the slave-owning South. Might it again? Might states that don’t care much for national democracy go their own way? In Arizona, the Republican candidates for Governor and Secretary of State are both refusing to commit to accepting potential defeat in the midterm elections next month. They seem to be suggesting that Arizona opts out of democracy as it is currently understood. In the event of them winning office, it is difficult to see Arizona accepting anything other than a Republican victory at the next presidential election.

Unilateral secession is not permitted of course under the post-Civil War settlement. But what about plain rogue-ness? The Supreme Court is about to hear a case that would give added power over federal elections to state legislatures and might encourage them to refuse to certify results they didn’t like. It’s freedom for states to be sure, but is it democracy?

None of those threats is easily dismissed. But nor should the potential upside be ignored in a situation where — as a matter of simply empirical fact — Americans have grown apart and done so with some enthusiasm on both sides. Some will see federalism as a rescue mechanism: a multi-speed America where California can press ahead on climate change, Florida can cut tax on business, some states can decriminalise marijuana and some not. In the battle over trans rights some might favour natal females, perhaps in girl’s sport, and some might back the rights of trans women. Choices, choices, choices. Above all this becomes an America where you might want to do something, ban something, enforce something, but in my state we tell you to sling your hook. And the Supreme Court backs me.

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How Turbo-Wokism broke America

By David Samuels

America is huge. You can get a U-Haul truck and move. Millions do. You can also write home from where you have gone and tell folks how much better things are where you live. If you are convincing, they may press for change where they are too.

In 1968, Vermont became the first state in the continental USA to ban advertising billboards. You need a clear view of the trees, they decided. Some thought it was the beginning of communism, and would soon beenforced nationwide. In the end a couple of other tree-filled states joined in, but most of America is still a billboard heaven.

The point is this: you have no right to billboard-free life in America. But you do have a right to live in a state that bans them. If you feel strongly about universal billboard rights you are going to hate this: but you might have to live with it, and in time you’ll settle down.

The midterm elections next month will lead — via Democratic Party losses in the House and possibly the Senate — to more talk of the end of American democracy. Election deniers will be on the march. Yet although America is indeed troubled, there are still options short of conflict. Perhaps that’s the way to see the new federalism: as balm, in troubled times.

But the blocs aren’t monolithic. Hairline cracks at the margin of each coalition foreshadow the defections that often decide elections.

That, at least, is the implication of a new report from the Pew Research Center. According to its findings, the Democrats are divided by cultural issues such as critical race theory — look at how many of them flocked to Glenn Youngkin in Virginia — while the GOP are split over economic questions. Indeed, it’s all too easy to forget that an important minority of Democratic voters is patriotic, worried about cancel culture, and wants border control and strong policing. Likewise, a significant bloc of Republican voters is sceptical of banks and large corporations and wants them to pay higher taxes.

These observations echo the analyses of David Shor, Michael Lind, Lee Drutman and others: that the median voter leans Left on the economy and Right on culture. The serious challenge for both parties, then, is whether they can resist influential factions in their respective parties: for the Democrats, that’s the AOC-Elizabeth Warren progressive caucus; for the Republicans, the Paul Ryan-Mitch McConnell corporate tax-cut wing.

Drawing on a large representative sample of Americans, Pew has developed a nine-cluster typology of voters, including four Republican and four Democratic categories, in addition to one in the middle. Clusters group people’s answers to a large number of questions by the degree to which their responses correlate. For example, if people who support Black Lives Matter tend to support higher immigration and higher taxes, then those three questions can be reduced to one measure. If, however, there is a group of people who support the first two but not the third policy, that becomes a separate cluster.

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Ignoring the less distinctive middle three clusters of the Pew report yields six groupings: three for each of the two main parties. For Republicans, ‘Faith and Flag Conservatives’ are on the Right of pretty much every question. ‘Committed Conservatives’ are more moderate, with a final category, ‘Populist Right’, who are conservative on immigration, progressivism and race, but moderate on economics and somewhat centrist on religion. ‘Faith and Flag Conservatives’ tend to be older, while ‘Populist Right’ voters are distinguished by lower levels of education and religiosity.

Among Democrats, the ‘Progressive Left’ are very Left-wing on essentially all issues, while the ‘Establishment Liberals’ are a more moderate group. ‘Democratic Mainstays’ are Left-wing on economics, but centrist on cultural issues such as immigration or cancel culture. The ‘Outsider Left’, meanwhile, is largely made up of voters who opted for Biden but are frustrated with the party and its leaders. Of these, the ‘Progressive Left’ make up just 12% of Democratic voters and are the whitest Democratic cluster, at 68%. They are also younger: the share of Progressive Leftists among Democrats under 30 is 18% compared to just 8% among the over 50s.

On the face of it, splitting the two parties into these groupings reveals where the two parties are most strongly united. Across the four Democratic clusters, for example, 75% or more generally support higher taxes for high earners and say big business earns too much profit, while 85% support Black Lives Matter. On the other hand, more than 80% of Republicans oppose BLM; a similar proportion believe that government assistance to the poor does more harm than good, creating welfare dependency. These are the issues which unify each party’s coalition.

More interesting, however, are the fissures that divide them, presenting opportunities for the other party to poach supporters and win the tight contests that mark the current electoral era. This is most clear with the ‘Populist Right’ Republicans and ‘Democratic Mainstay’ Democrats.

Figure 1, above, adapted from Pew’s report, illustrates the responses to two statements. The first highlights threats to free speech: “People being too easily offended by things others say is a major problem in the country today.” The second concerns hate speech: “People saying things that are very offensive to others is a major problem in the country today.”

Notice that all four Republican groups lie inside the red circle in the top left quadrant. This means that most Republicans, more than three-quarters of most GOP clusters, think there is a problem with free speech while only a minority think there is too much offensive speech.

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On the other hand, the blue circle includes clusters in both right-hand quadrants; they are less closely aligned. Indeed, despite what a number of progressive politicians would have you think, some 81% of the ‘Democratic Mainstay’ cluster believe people are too easily offended, aligning them with Republican opinion. Nor is this a small minority: this group makes up 28% of the Democratic coalition — and is older, less educated and relatively Black and Hispanic. It voted heavily for Biden in the primaries, but is much cooler toward candidates like Sanders or Warren.

It represents, therefore, an important target group for the Republicans. As Glenn Youngkin’s victory in Virginia revealed, culture war issues can act as an important wedge issue for the GOP, making it imperative for the Democrats to put distance between themselves and unpopular progressive causes. And the ‘Democratic Mainstay’ group diverges from the small ‘Progressive Left’ wing in more ways than one. On increasing legal immigration, 63% of Progressive Leftists agree, but only 28% of Democratic Mainstays do; 71% of the first group think American institutions are systematically biased and must be rebuilt, but only 38% of the latter agree.

Meanwhile, the Right is also riven with its own divisions. The biggest outlier is the ‘Populist Right’ cluster which makes up a sizeable 23% of Republican voters. Its members were more likely to say Trump was the best president in recent times rather than Reagan, whereas other Republican clusters either split or favoured Reagan. 87% of this relatively less educated and less religious group say “the economic system in this country unfairly favours powerful interests”, and more than half want higher taxes on people earning over $400,000 a year.

Crucially, this puts them at odds with most Republican voters — and in the company of most Democrats. Here, then, lies an opportunity for the Democrats: if they can peel away populist Right-wing voters turned off by country-club Republicanism, they can split the GOP and flip some Trump voters while uniting their own ranks.

Similarly, the relatively old and evangelical ‘Faith and Flag Conservatives’ cluster is also distinct in its religious Americanism. Among its members, 75% say the “Government should support religious values and beliefs”, whereas fewer than 30% of Republicans outside this cluster agree. On same-sex marriage and abortion this group is more than 20 points more socially conservative than other Republican groups.

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By Joel Kotkin

So if Republicans shift too far toward religious conservatism, they will open an opportunity for Democrats. But while Pew’s findings reveal that the Republicans are more fragmented than many would expect, it is still the case that the Democrats should be more concerned. For ultimately, Pew’s research reinforces the conclusions of More in Common’s recent Hidden Tribes report. Using data from 2018, Hidden Tribes identified a heavily white 8% ‘Progressive Activist’ segment of the population that was Left-wing on identity issues, unconcerned with free speech and highly active on social media. Pew’s report finds a similar segment: the 6% ‘Progressive Left’ group, who share the same elite, young and white social profile that David Shor and James Carville warn is too dominant among Democratic staffers.

In both surveys, a much larger group of moderate Left-wing voters — often non-white, older and less educated — reject the activists’ progressive politics. And since cultural issues in recent western elections appear to be more important in motivating voters to switch than economic questions, the activist Left could prove a distinct electoral liability. This was the story told by recent elections in Virginia, New Jersey, Wisconsin and Seattle. And as long as the Democrats fail to realise this, it’s only a matter of time before more of its support base is lured across the political aisle.

And nowhere does this sort of reconfiguration stand a better chance of success than in Atlanta, where an organised and well-funded group of residents is pushing for Buckhead, the city’s wealthiest neighbourhood, to break away from the de facto capital of the South and form a municipality of its own. But while ‘Buckxit’ may be a local campaign to create a city of just 80,000 residents, it also goes to the heart of the challenges facing cities — and the Democrats who run them — across America.

In Buckhead, as in so many places across the country, calls for secession are being driven by one factor: crime. “We feel like we’re living in a war zone,” says Bill White, who is running the campaign. White says the problem has driven many Buckhead residents out of town. “They’re not leaving because of the potholes,” he tells me. “It’s crime, crime, crime.”

Atlanta is one of the many major American cities that has seen violent crime spike in recent years. Between 2019 and 2020, the city’s murder rate rose by 62%. The problem has worsened further this year; as of June, the city’s homicide rate was up by another 58%, while in the first half of 2021, shootings rose by 40%. Meanwhile, the number of arrests has nearly halved. The city’s mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, once a rising star in the Democratic Party who was even talked about as a possible Vice-Presidential pick for Joe Biden, has been chastened by the crime explosion on her watch and is not seeking re-election.

Were Buckhead to go its own way, it would take with it a fifth of Atlanta’s current population and threaten to do real damage to the city’s finances. According to one estimate, Atlanta would lose 38% of its tax revenue were it to gain city status. David Sjoquist, Professor of Economics at Georgia State University and an expert of public finances, predicts grave fiscal consequences from Buckxit, as well as a tangle of lawsuits over a move that is without precedent; no neighbourhood in Georgia has ever broken off to form its own city. “Atlanta would be much worse off,” he tells me.

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Buckxit, then, has the potential to be fiscally ruinous for a major American city. And Atlanta’s political and business elite are firmly opposed. Bottoms argues that Buckxit would not solve the city’s problems: “Even if an impermeable wall were built around this proposed new city, it would not address the Covid crime wave that Atlanta, the state and the rest of the nation are experiencing,” read one recent statement. “That is why the measure is opposed by many residents and the business community. A better use of this energy would be to work together to address the challenges facing our city, not divide Atlanta.” Every candidate in the crowded field to replace Bottoms agrees.

White, unsurprisingly, paints a rosier picture of a world after Buckxit — both for Buckhead residents and the rest of Atlanta. Much like a Brexiteer shrugging off “Project Fear”, he is dismissive of a political system that he says has become a “cesspool of corruption”. Under a plan put forward by Buckxit campaigners, an independent Buckhead would more than triple police numbers in the area, from 80 to 250, and ensure Buckhead City police were better paid than any other cops in the state. (Atlanta’s police force saw 200 officers retire last year.)

As for the rest of the city, White argues that a safer more prosperous Buckhead is in the interests of the metro area more generally, and would bring more jobs to the city. “If we get this right, we can be a wonderful example,” he says.

But White’s cheery win-win predictions are hard to square with the fiscal reality of a city losing such a huge part of its tax base. And, ultimately, White is open about the fact that he is first and foremost interested in the fate of his community, not the rest of the city. “You know,” White adds, “we’re not doing this to be an example for anybody. We’re doing it because we’re fighting for our lives.”

There are signs that White’s message is resonating. The campaign has so far raised a million dollars and an Atlanta Constitution-Journal/University of Georgia poll recently found that 54% of Buckhead voters support cityhood. Surveys commissioned by the campaign for cityhood also find a stronger majority in favour.

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The man driving the Buckxit train is a colourful newcomer to the Atlanta scene with an unusual political story and a talent for fundraising. Until recently, White, 53, was a fixture on the New York Democratic scene. In 2016, he and his husband Brian Eure were devoted Hillary Clinton supporters, raising money for the Democratic candidate and hosting a $39,500-a-head fundraising dinner in their Chelsea townhouse with Barack Obama as the guest of honour. But since then, White, who relocated from New York to Atlanta three years ago, has been on a journey from Manhattan liberal to MAGA enthusiast.

He admits his flip-flopping has led to accusations of him being “a political whore”. He and his husband have been some of Donald Trump’s most vocal gay supporters and are close to the Trump family. They were reportedly at the White House on election night, and White spent the ensuing weeks lending his voice to the outgoing President’s efforts to overturn the result. (White has subsequently denounced the January 6 Capitol Riot and seems focused on the Buckhead campaign, but his political leanings hardly help his claim that the cityhood effort transcends party politics.)

Notwithstanding White’s politics, “Buckxit” maps awkwardly onto conventional political divides. The upmarket enclave may be the most Republican part of Atlanta, but that’s not saying much. In fact, swings in white affluent Atlanta suburbs such as Buckhead were crucial to Biden’s narrow win in Georgia last year; according to Atlanta Constituion-Journal analysis of the election results, 60% of Buckhead voters opted for Biden in 2020, and 51% backed Hillary Clinton in 2016. “We have people from the Left, from the middle, from the Right,” says White. “We have Biden people, Trump people, people who hate Trump, people who hate Biden. We have environmentalists, we have everyone.”

Buckxit’s critics also point to Atlanta’s racial politics — though this time as a cause for concern. Atlanta as a whole is 51% black, while 82% of Buckhead residents are white. Jim Durnett, CEO of the Buckhead Coalition, a group opposed to cityhood, argues that while he “[doesn’t] believe race is motivating the movement to create a new Buckhead City”, the “racial implications” of Buckxit will be obvious. “Drawing on Atlanta’s rich history of the civil rights movement, we are clearly best when we come together during times of challenge, not when we separate.”

White, however, has little interest in engaging with the possibility that his campaign drives a wedge between Atlanta’s white and black neighbourhoods. Race, he says, is the “go-to narrative” to cancel your idea. “What are your solutions as opposed to saying, ‘This is racist’?” he asks of his campaign’s critics.

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The mechanics of securing popular support for Buckxit are reasonably straightforward. A bill needs to be passed in Georgia’s general assembly and state senate. Both are Republican-held and legislators will presumably be eager to stick it to the opposing party’s city stronghold. Votes on those bills will take place early next year and, if they pass, Buckhead residents will get a say on cityhood in November 2023. White claims that by spring 2023, a mayor and city council could be up and running, spending taxpayers’ money. A slew of complicated rows about settling debts with Atlanta and securing contracts to secure utilities from the city would follow.

But regardless of whether Buckxit becomes a reality, the campaign for cityhood should at the very least be a warning shot across the bows of Atlanta and other American cities, where comparable neighbourhoods might be tempted to try something similar. The success of a modern metropolis depends on persistent vigilance against the threat of crime, public disorder and economic decline. In a year of plague, shutdowns, protests, riots and a violent crime spike, too often political posturing has been prioritised over making sure cities work for all their residents.

For White, though, Buckxit is more than a warning. “The divorce should be something that both sides strive to make smooth, because it’s definitely happening,” he says. “At the moment, barring a lightning bolt or the second coming of Jesus Christ, the writing’s on the wall.”

Weeks ensue and a multitude of these postal ballots are contested in the courts. Soon after, they are appealed to the highest legal authority. The now heavily Trump-laden Supreme Court (including its newest member, the recently confirmed Justice Amy Coney Barrett) largely adjudicates in the GOP’s favour. But there’s still no definitive outcome in the Electoral College tally. Encouraged by Hillary Clinton, Biden refuses to concede.

Absent a determination in the electoral college, the US Constitution mandates a vote in the House of Representatives where Speaker Nancy Pelosi will lead a roll call of voters. The only problem here is that if the determination goes to Congress (which has only happened once before in the nation’s history), each state gets one vote, and Republicans now control 26 of the 50 state delegations. Assuming the party lines hold, that would mean re-election for Trump.

Democratic supporters are in a state of hysteria. Feeling cheated out of the popular vote yet again, violent protests surge across the country. Some of the biggest are in California, whose residents are tired of having their votes persistently nullified by tiny states like Wyoming or South Dakota. After a few weeks of riots and the National Guard’s inability to quell the unrest, a dormant “Calexit” movement springs to life…

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Uber's dangerous drive to serfdom

By Marshall Auerback

Secession has not been seriously contemplated in the US since April 1861, when Confederate guns around Charleston Harbor opened fire on Fort Sumter in South Carolina just over a month after Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration. The Union’s victory in the four-year long Civil War, along with a later constitutional ruling in the case of Texas v White in 1869 was thought to have settled once and for all the issue of unilateral secession. 

But this does not preclude a constitutional renegotiation. Much like Brexit, once seen as a wild-eyed fringe movement, a California independence movement is no longer fanciful. Since the election of Trump, the idea has been gaining traction: a 2017 Reuters poll suggested that one in three Californians was supportive of an independence movement. In the context of a highly contested election in which Trump is re-elected, that’s almost certain to rise.

A California Independence Referendum initiative was drafted last July, a proposed initiative that, if qualified by the California Secretary of State, would allow a popular vote on whether to leave the Union to be on the state ballot by 2022. It is unlikely that this process would lead to civil war. Indeed, when confronted with the happy political implications of the largest Democratic state leaving the union, Republicans might welcome “Calexit”.

But would sovereignty truly represent a panacea to most Californians? On the surface, it would certainly appear to be viable as a stand-alone country: California would have the 5th largest GDP in the world, barely behind Germany, but ahead of both India and the United Kingdom. And its ostensibly progressive politics would no longer be hampered by American constitutional arrangements that seem designed to frustrate such aspirations.

But look a bit closer, and the benefits appear less obvious. It is true that Californians by large margins disapprove of almost everything Trump has done as president, notably on housing policy, climate change, healthcare reform, deregulation, tax, and issues pertaining to economic inequality. However, the state also exemplifies the most extreme version of America’s worst pathologies, many of which are the reasons why Trump got elected in the first place.

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How Trump could refuse to go

By Dan Boer

Consider that California’s economy remains profoundly unequal, despite its robust economic growth historically. Its level of income inequality exceeds that of all but five states. Wealth inequality is even more pronounced: 20% of all net worth is concentrated in the 30 wealthiest zip codes, home to just 2% of Californians. 

The response to the Covid-19 pandemic has further exacerbated these disparities, as have the wildfires currently incinerating the state. The latter highlights the state’s vulnerabilities to the ravages of climate change and droughts, which have decimated its many agricultural-based industries. Similarly, the decaying public infrastructure has necessitated rolling electricity blackouts in order to prevent the state’s electric utilities from starting yet more wildfires (we’re not even through 2020, but already this year’s fires dwarf the 10 biggest from the previous decade).

Anybody moving to the Golden State today would be shocked at the cost of housing; California’s housing affordability ranks last among the 50 states. This has led to an epidemic of homelessness that evokes scenes from the dark ages, as author and long-time California resident Michael Shellenberger has described: “The 44,000 people living, eating, and defecating on the streets of L.A. have brought rats and medieval diseases including typhus.” And all this is occuring in a state that is home to the largest number of billionaires living in the country.

Virtue-signalling Silicon Valley oligarchs (who comprise a large chunk of these billionaires) hope to sustain the status quo through the expedient of a Universal Basic Income guarantee. The UBI sounds like progressive policy, but in fact is a placebo reform that fails to address the serf-like employment conditions that increasingly prevail in the state. 

Silicon Valley employers love the idea of the UBI. For them, it represents a de facto subsidy from the government, which means they could retain more of their fat profits instead of paying them out to their increasingly stressed workers. But at least they find the time to pay lip service to social justice movements like Black Lives Matter.

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Who will salute Trump's man in Berlin?

By Marshall Auerback

For all of the state’s celebration of innovation, entrepreneurialism, and job creation, a research brief from Chapman University’s Center for Demographics and Policy highlights that California is producing far fewer mid- and high-paid jobs than the rest of the country. The brief also indicates that most of these jobs pay under the US median wage, and 40% pay under $40,000 a year. 

By contrast, higher-paid industrial jobs, critical to the progress and upward aspirations of the working class, have dropped well below the national average over the past decade. As a result, “California has now taken on an increasingly feudal cast, with a small but growing group of the ultra-rich, a diminishing middle class, and a large, rising segment of the population that is in or near poverty”, writes Joel Kotkin.  

While Silicon Valley itself has become synonymous with high tech-led prosperity, cities in North Carolina, notably Charlotte and Raleigh, along with Austin, Texas, now outrank many leading California metropolitan areas as the top spots for tech professionals to work. And let us not forget how Washington state has risen as an alternative high-tech hub with the creation of Amazon and Microsoft over the past 30 years. 

Secession, therefore, would complicate matters, as that specific employment escape-valve might no longer be automatically available to Californians if or when its workers decided to emigrate in search of superior job opportunities. 

Which brings another uncomfortable truth closer to home. As much as California likes to see itself as the new frontier for technology and cutting edge visions for the future, this rose-tinted view conveniently forgets the significant role that the US government itself played in creating the innovation platform that established the foundations of much of the state’s prosperity. 

It is the US government, for example, that created the Internet, as well as many other transformative general-purpose technologies. If we see a return to ambitious hi-tech industrial policy on the part of the US government, then a separate nation of California obviously wouldn’t benefit.

Of course, this conjecture about California’s future as an independent nation-state is still all in the realm of fantasy. Depending on the national US election outcome, however, the fantasy could well morph quickly into reality.

But that future reality provides no happy ending. Breaking up the alliance between Washington DC and Silicon Valley would leave the latter exposed — especially in a world where the continued dominance of the existing tech giants is by no means guaranteed. If the standard-bearers of the Golden State’s economy end up sharing the same fate as Lucent or Eastman Kodak, then Californians would regret forgetting that they are, at heart, Americans.