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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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If there were a way to avoid that, I'd be for it.

Well, you could cut out the middleman and simply secede. Didn't work so well the first time, I'll grant you, but, like… if Trump announced some kind of federal split live on air tomorrow, do you really think that ends with a boots-on-the-grounds, millions-dead civil war? Somehow I can't picture that. If it gets anywhere, I'd expect something more like a messy, drawn-out, infrastructure-wrecking, but ultimately-bloodless Brexit-type scenario. Lawfare, not warfare. Who knows how it would end, but starting from your premises, it seems worth a shot.

Well, you could cut out the middleman and simply secede. Didn't work so well the first time, I'll grant you...

Outright dissolution of the union seems like a bad idea for a lot of reasons. A better plan is to deconstruct federal authority and the institutions from which it springs, such that the states can each have their way within their own borders. "sanctuary city" and "sanctuary state" ideology is an obvious strong movement in this direction, and has been developing for decades now. Flowering defiance of Federal law is a welcome and flourishing development; it cements the norm that federal law is and should be toothless, and it incentivizes those on the other side to do likewise.

If this continues and we are fortunate, the culture war might well be defused as the tribes sort themselves into mutually-exclusive borders and then more or less leave each other alone. An actual de jure breakup of the nation seems to me neither necessary nor wise; who gets the nukes?