By Rinaldo S. Brutoco
September 17, 2025
It is with a heavy heart that I am recirculating three articles originally published in the Montecito Journal in 2021. These pieces were written in response to remarks by Marjorie Taylor Greene suggesting that Red States should secede from Blue States.
In those articles, I advanced the view that the critical issue is not whether secession might occur, but rather the manner in which it should unfold. My premise is that some form of political separation within the United States is increasingly likely. The longer we postpone serious consideration of a peaceful and structured process for such a possibility, the greater the risk that it will be accompanied by massive violence.
Sadly, we are already witnessing rising political violence—from the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the assassination of two extraordinarily well respected Minnesota politicians, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, the Molotov cocktail fire-bombing of Pennsylvania Governor Shapiro’s home, the tragic near death hammer assault of Paul Pelosi, and all the way back to the wounding of Steve Scalese at a Congressional softball game in 2017, to the recent slaughter of students at Annunciation church, and the other tragedies of gun violence (319 mass shootings so far in 2025), all demonstrate the fraying of our Sacred Union. Clearly, we have been in a cultural war ever since the Civil War, and it has only become more severe over time since Ronald Reagan launched his “Southern Strategy.”
When Red and Blue States are no longer forcibly chained to each other, we will likely see incredible changes in both, as the culture of each is allowed to flourish without the restraint of the other cultural views. If and when Blue States are no longer bound to Red States, we will see the possibility of meaningful reforms: gun safety laws, reproductive freedom, equal protection of voting rights, rapid advances in renewable energy, and the safeguarding of programs like Social Security. These are only a few of the critical issues that would be strengthened under such a realignment. Let’s not remain so attached to our history that we destroy our future and that of our children for generations to come, should we survive so long.
To be clear, I am not advocating for secession[1]. Rather, these articles from four years ago contend that the likelihood of some form of “rearrangement” has grown to the point where responsible dialogue about it is essential. The central challenge before us is how to address this prospect in a manner that preserves stability and prevents a recurrence of the large-scale violence last experienced during the 1860s. When the president of the United States himself declared he is going to “war” in Chicago using a photographic image of himself as a mad soldier from the film Apocalypse Now, and his chief advisor Stephan Miller says that all people on “the left” should be exterminated, we are clearly in a post-civil society reality. Not one commentator who has followed the Kirk assassination touched upon the real issue here: how should we rearrange the political structure of the nation so that full civil war with real bullets does not inevitably follow?
We know the Supreme Court in the 1850s worked overtime to provide the southern states with an opportunity to retain slavery (five of the justices were slave owners themselves) and felt by doing so, with opinions such as the Dred Scott decision, they could help avoid a civil war. In fact, that very case became one of the major catalytic events that created the war Lincoln and all sentient Americans attempted to avoid. Other missed steps added to the turmoil by Congressional legislation in the 1850s, including the Fugitive Slave Act, which was intended to give slave owners the opportunity to recapture their ”Property,” even when the former slave made it safely to the North (sounds like what ICE is doing today in the Blue States). That act by Congress was also a catalytic agent for the Civil War.
History clearly shows that Fort Sumter did not occur without advance warning. Those warnings went unheeded. Had President Lincoln permitted the rebellious Confederate states to peacefully leave the Union, rather than his blind allegiance to the Union “at all costs,” 750,000 soldiers and civilians would not have died in vain, and an untold number of wounded would not have been shattered. Yes, they died in vain, given that the South never lost the Civil War, and we are dealing with that fact in horrible ways to the present day.
Article 1: Perspectives: Marjorie Taylor Greene–Leaving?? “Irreconcilable differences?”
Article 2: Perspectives: “Conscious Uncoupling” Loving separation vs. violent divorce
Article 3: Perspectives: Secession Revisited: Peace is always cheaper than war
[1] For a cogent argument in favor of soft-secession, see the article written by Chris Armitage entitled
“It’s Time For Americans To Start Thinking About Soft-Succession,” (August 17, 2025).
