Author Note: This essay builds on Clara Jeffrey’s recent piece in Mother Jones about “soft secession.” It’s not a reply, exactly, more of a companion meditation on the empire we built within ourselves. It’s long, dense, and meant to linger. No paywall here, just thinking out loud about a nation that still doesn’t know how to talk to itself.
I have been thinking about Clara Jeffrey’s Mother Jones piece and the quiet thunder inside her thesis, the idea that blue-leaning states are not merely wealthier or more urbanized, but are, in effect, financing the republic’s decay. California, New York, and Massachusetts are no longer just states, but patrons underwriting the continued dysfunction of their ideological opposites. It’s not secession Jeffrey is describing so much as a slow withdrawal of faith, the recognition that one half of America carries the weight of the other, both fiscally and spiritually.
Jeffrey’s argument is clean and cutting: the blue economies feed the red dependencies, yet it is the red-leaning regions that rail most loudly against the hand that sustains them. It’s a structural irony so vast it borders on the theological. She calls this dynamic a “soft secession,” a separation not of borders, but of purpose, of investment, of belief. The kind that unfolds in budgets rather than battlefields.
And yet, when I read her piece, I can’t help but hear the deeper note beneath it, or the sound of an empire talking to itself and finally realizing the language it speaks has been fractured beyond recognition.
The Empire at Home
What Jeffrey outlines as a fiscal divide is, to me, an echo of an older wound. The language of empire, one of center and periphery, of metropole and colony, has always been the real vocabulary of the United States, even when disguised by the soft vowels of federalism. The states that voted for the current administration are, by almost every metric, those now most exposed to the consequences of that allegiance: eroding health subsidies, civic unraveling, the rot of underinvestment that gnaws through hospitals, schools, and local newsrooms.
But the wound isn’t new. It’s just inherited.
When we examine contemporary politics not as an ideological failure but as the aftershock of imperial design, the grievances that animate so much of red-state populism begin to look less like madness and more like misdirected mourning. These are the cries of regions that were never made to thrive, only to serve. The great heartland was the empire’s interior frontier—mined for coal, drained for cotton, felled for timber, and later romanticized into submission. Its people were given a flag and a fable in place of agency. And when industry abandoned them, what remained were the empty warehouses of faith and labor, echoing with the rhetoric of grievance.
So yes, Jeffrey’s point is correct: blue states are subsidizing the rest. But the imbalance isn’t just economic; it’s ontological. The nation was built as a layered empire, not a federation of equals. The Civil War didn’t change that, but perfected it.
The Civil War as the Empire’s Genesis
I’ve been reading the Civil War differently lately, not as a moral reckoning or even as a sectional conflict, but as an imperial consolidation. The war transformed Lincoln’s America into a modern state: centralized, industrialized, monetized. The executive branch expanded, the greenback was born, and speculative capitalism fused with the machinery of war. What began as a rebellion against slavery evolved into an exercise in total war, the first modern rehearsal of the kind of industrial carnage that would later define Europe.
In the ruins of Richmond, a new empire rose. Its victors were not only abolitionists but architects of an order where financial capital and moral capital became entwined. Reconstruction, in many ways, was not just a rebuilding of the South; it was an occupation. It mapped the same power dynamics outward: the North as the metropole, the South as the colony.
From there, the American flag did not just wave; it spread. Across the continent, across the Pacific, across every boundary it could redraw in its image. The country learned how to govern through conquest and justify it through destiny. What Jeffrey calls “soft secession” today is, in that lineage, the revolt of the metropole against its own internal empire, or California realizing it no longer needs the colonies it once helped “civilize.”
Factories of Exploitation, Not Civic Projects
When the industrialists of the postbellum North turned their attention westward, they replicated the same formula that built the South: resource extraction dressed up as statehood. The West was not a civic project, but an enterprise zone with flags. Territories became states not to balance representation, but to extend access to gold, oil, land, and the illusion of democracy.
What that left us with was a continental hierarchy disguised as a union. Some states were cultivated as workshops of the mind: hubs of education, technology, and finance. Others were left as factories of exploitation, maintained through dependence, grievance, and destructive nostalgia. The latter were told they were “real America,” even as their children were taught to revere the very myths that kept them poor.
Jeffrey’s analysis of California’s economic dominance and political frustration reads like a mirror to this history. The state, now the fourth-largest economy in the world, is acting less like a partner in a federation and more like a restive province of a failing empire—wealthy, culturally ascendant, but spiritually alienated from a central government that has been captured by. Its rebellion is not to leave but to ignore. To build parallel institutions, alliances, and moral economies that can function without federal permission.
Grievance Without Language
The cruelest trick of empire is that it erases the vocabulary of the conquered. And so, what we hear now from the “red states” is not a coherent ideology but a cacophony of displacement, grievance without grammar. The anger is real, but the history behind it has been erased from collective memory. These are communities that were economically gutted by industrial automation and globalization, yet told to blame the immigrant, the bureaucrat, and the coastal elite.
In that sense, their rebellion is tragic, not treasonous. It is the sound of a people trying to articulate pain in a language that was never theirs. When they chant about freedom, they are really mourning agency. When they rage against the federal government, they are reenacting an old imperial drama, one in which they were both foot soldiers and casualties.
Jeffrey’s notion of “soft secession” offers an unsettling inversion: what happens when the colonizers of the internal empire—the blue states—start disengaging from their own subjects?
What happens when empathy gives way to efficiency, when solidarity dissolves into fiscal realism?
The American project risks not a breakup, but a bifurcation of consciousness. A union that exists on paper but not in purpose.
The Acela Corridor and the Extraction Belt
The Acela corridor now speaks a different language. It’s fluid, cosmopolitan, and algorithmic. It trades in abstractions: data, credit, content, capital. The rest of the country trades in memory. One speaks in quarterly earnings while the other speaks in ghost stories. The former writes the future and the latter edits the past.
This isn’t a moral hierarchy, but it is a functional one. Information economies no longer rely on extraction economies to drive them. The digital empire runs on silicon and speculation, not steel and sweat. The tragedy, as Jeffrey implies and I fear, is that the old regions of labor and sacrifice still think they’re indispensable to a system that’s already automated their obsolescence.
They are taught to see themselves as patriots standing against modernity, when in truth, they are subjects of an empire that has outgrown them.
Empire as Tragedy, Union as Possibility
And that is where Jeffrey’s piece becomes, for me, not a manifesto for division but a call for clarity. “Soft secession” is both a diagnosis and a warning. It reveals that the American union has always been an uneasy truce between empire and republic. The dream of egalitarian statehood was a mask, a performance meant to hide the extractive logics underneath.
If we are to find unity again, it won’t be through nostalgia or bipartisan pageantry. It will come from naming what we are: an empire that turned inward, a nation that colonized itself, a people who learned to build kingdoms of grievance instead of communities of care.
The states that vote against their own survival are not villains, but actors in a Shakespearean tragedy, bound by scripts written generations ago. Their rebellion is the echo of the empire’s first sin: building power through division and calling it destiny.
The winds of history, as ever, are the best storytellers.
And if you listen closely, you can hear them whispering the same refrain Jeffrey began: the union is not breaking, it’s just remembering what it always was.
