2021-07-16

Social Mood is at an Interim Peak and Secession Polls at 50 percent

Nearly 50 percent of Democrats in the Northwest and more than half in the South want to secede from the Union during these "good times." Will any of these movements come to fruition when the 4th Turning accelerates into the nadir of social mood?

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As in our previous report, we caution that this survey item reflects initial reactions by respondents about an issue that they are very unlikely to have considered carefully. Secession is a genuinely radical proposition and expressions of support in a survey may map only loosely onto willingness to act toward that end. We include the question because it taps into respondents’ commitments to the American political system at the highest level and with reference to a concrete alternative (regional unions).

Support for secession under the specific hypothetical unions format is illustrated in the map below. As in the previous survey, levels of expressed support for secession are arrestingly high, with 37% of respondents overall indicating willingness to secede. Within each region, the dominant partisan group is most supportive of secession. Republicans are most secessionist in the South and Mountain regions whereas it is Democrats on the West Coast and in the Northeast. In the narrowly divided Heartland region, it is partisan independents who find the idea most attractive.

The map understates the desire for secession, except in the South because that is the only map that accurately reflects a potential nation. Half of independents and two-thirds of Republicans would support Southern secession. The numbers will only rise with smoking-gun evidence of electoral fraud emerging in Georgia and the federal government's moves to stop any and all investigations.
These patterns are consistent from our January/February survey, but the changes since then are troubling. Our previous survey was fielded just weeks after the January 6 uprising. By this summer, we anticipated, political tempers may have cooled — not necessarily as a result of any great reconciliation but perhaps from sheer exhaustion after the relentless drama of Trump. For instance, the historian Heather Cox Richardson posited that sustained consideration of the Big Lie narrative would diminish political ardor among Trump supporters, which she related to waning popular support for secession in the Confederacy during the spring of 1861.

Yet rather than support for secession diminishing over the past six months, as we expected, it rose in every region and among nearly every partisan group. The jump is most dramatic where support was already highest (and has the greatest historical precedent) — among Republicans in the South, where secession support leapt from 50% in January/February to 66% in June. Support among Republicans in the Mountain region increased as well, by 7 points, from 36% to 43%. Among Democrats in the West, a near-majority of 47% (up 6 points) supports a schism, as do 39% (up 5 points) in Northeast. Support jumped 9 points among independents in the Heartland as well, reaching 43%. Even subordinate partisan groups appear to find secession more appealing now than they did last winter, though only increases for Democrats in the South, Heartland, and Mountain regions are statistically discernible at the 0.05 significance level. The broad and increasing willingness of respondents to embrace these alternatives is a cause for concern.

America is a pool of gasoline in search of a match. Consider that none of these areas has a serious secessionist movement underway, not at the national level. There are secessionist movements calling for reshaping state boundaries, for suburbs to leave cities, and so forth, but no major movement calling for independence. That won't be the case for long if these numbers reflect serious attitudes though, because this is an intermediate-term peak in social mood. As bad as you might think partisanship might be, these are the good times. Republicans are still talking to Democrats. When mood goes towards the nadir, the stock market will be far lower. Unemployment will be high, perhaps as high as during the pandemic, with no hope it will end. The U.S. dollar will start collapsing at some point, meaning the Federal Reserve and U.S. government will be unable to spend money to boost the economy. Their actions will only increase unemployment and accelerate the collapse of the currency. There will be out of control riots all over the cities. Democrat areas will not deploy police, looters will run wild. The federal government, if controlled by Democrats, will likely arrest white people, including police officers, who defend their property or do their job. There will come a point when being in the union will offer nothing but economic pain. Core functions of government such as law and justice won't exist in the USA. We could see a region such as the South go from zero to independence in a very short period of time. Once one area goes, the nation will split because that nation is so evenly divided politially. One or two key states would tip the balance of power "permanently." Then you will see the United States dissolve like the Soviet Union did in the early 1990s.

I wish I could say that is an extreme fantasy scenario, but the way police and citizens were treated when they confronted rioters in 2020 says it is not. The riots of 2020 were a product of the forerunner of critical race theory, it was created by indoctrinating students during the 1990s and 2000s. What is being taught in the 2010s and 2020s (if critical race theory isn't banned) will be an order of magnitude larger outburst of violence and mayhem.

More broadly, support for secession can rise with social mood when there is a unifying theme behind it. Breakaway movements most often benefit from negative mood however, because it requires reaching the point where union is no longer tolerated. There are multiple local secession movements in the United States alone, along with various movements around the globe. Few achieve anything because it is a very difficult step and mood seldom reaches the point where it sparks action. Even if both sides on the issue agree, consider how long it took the United Kingdom to achieve Brexit, and that wasn't a national breakup. The sstates created by the fall of the Soviet Union were already nations, they were simply returning to their natural state once the empire dissolved.

With mood headed for a great decline in the decades ahead, secessionist movements that grow today and prepare for independence will likely see a moment when the general public will support independence. If somewhere like the Southern U.S. develops a serious move towards sovereignty, such as a joint governors' council between the states that coordinates on major political policies, including those where it resists or ignores federal power, then the framework for an independence declaration will begin forming. Fully formed independence movements in Scotland, Catalan, etc. already have taken this step. Odds of secession are highest in those regions.

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