Literally The Least They Can Do: Some Hard Words About “Soft Secession”

*“Soft secession”, like “quiet quitting”, seems to just mean “doing the absolute minimum necessary for your actual job”.*

I don’t think I’ve heard of Chris Armitage before, but he made quite a splash last week with his Substack post “It’s Time for Americans to Start Talking About “Soft Secession“.

It’s … OK?

I mean, it’s well written and if you’re in need of a breakdown of things state-level officials have been doing to try to soften the impact of the coup on the folks in their areas then it definitely does the job.

But while it presents its subjects as a hotbed of resistance, it’s not a particularly impressive list. Sure, OK; so governor’s and other officials are coordinating across multiple states. That’s nice. But what they’re actually coordinating is mostly spin and talking points, with a dash of ignoring the feds and an occasional lawsuit for flavor.

It’s doesn’t actually show that any of these officials really understand that a fascist coup has already happened.

(Though I definitely agree with him that the plural of “Attorney General” should be “Attorney Generals”.)

I believe the term is “hopium”?

The outcome that Armitage and his subjects seem to be anticipating is:

We’re not heading toward another Fort Sumter. We’re watching something else: states quietly walking away from each other. Blue states will protect abortion rights, support organized labor, and protect individual rights. Red states will allow Christian theocracy, suppress wages, and criminalize free speech, and destroy healthcare. The federal government becomes a hollow structure that states have a moral impreative [sic] to ignore.

And this was published just after Trump deployed the National Guard onto the streets of the capitol city.

And months after he deployed the National Guard and active-duty Marines to Los Angeles.

So they’re kinda missing the moment.

This idea of states and localities peacefully going their own ways would have been appropriate in dealing with Trump’s first term, or G. W. Bush’s second, but as a response to having MRAP’s wandering through D.C. it’s not really the hopeful scenario Armitage seems to think it is.

A gentle drifting apart is the best case scenario here, and it’s almost certainly too late for that anyway.

It’s going to take more than a regularly-scheduled conference call to deal with this situation.