By Tom Jacobs, UCSB
Benjamin Cohen begins his new book — his 20th, if you are counting — with a fictional news dispatch from the year 2035.
“After years of festering discontent with the direction of politics in Washington, California today formally declared its independence as a sovereign nation,” it reads. “President Vance has threatened a military takeover of state government in Sacramento, backed by National Guard troops from nearby red states. Armed conflict looks increasingly possible.”
A provocative scenario, all the more plausible coming at a time when California’s governor is furious at the president for ordering troops into the state to keep order at immigration protests. But for all our partisan acrimony and political polarization, America isn’t really headed towards a second Civil War — right?
“I wish I could be that sanguine about it,” said Distinguished Professor Emeritus Cohen, who spent 30 years as the Louis G. Lancaster Professor of International Political Economy in the Political Science Department at UC Santa Barbara before retiring from teaching in 2021. “I’m not. It seems to me we cannot ignore the risks of the current fissures and fragmentation — the breakdown of a sense of community.”
Given that today’s political divide is more between urban and rural as opposed to North vs. South or East vs. West, “It’s difficult for me to imagine how things would divide up if there were a civil war,” Cohen added. “But the probability of such a war is substantially greater than zero.”
Cohen’s views on the subject are extremely well-informed. His new book “Dream States: A Lurking Nightmare for the World Order” (Oxford University Press, 2025) is a comprehensive guide to secession movements currently active all around the world. He provides an assessment of the risk of these efforts leading to violence, and offers a possible path to diffusing tensions.
“I consider secession a grievously underappreciated phenomenon,” he said. “My motivation to write this book was to call people’s attention to this fact.
“We tend to simplify geography by looking exclusively at the existing lines on a map that separate one sovereign state from another,” he continued. “But the reality is there are many people within those states that are very unhappy with the arrangement. They’d prefer to draw the lines in a different way. In some cases, they’re prepared to fight to redraw those lines.”
“It’s similar to the relationship between Quebec and Canada. Quebec is a distinct community, with a different language, which has periodically challenged its incorporation into the larger state. The same is true of Ukraine. A majority of Ukrainians believe they have the right to a state of their own. Putin and his people take a quite different view.”
The difference between the two situations, of course, is that Canada has found a way to keep Quebec in the fold, primarily through allowing the province to have considerable sovereignty over its own affairs (including the use of French as an official language). Cohen sees this sort of compromise — also found in the relationship between the United Kingdom and Scotland, and Spain and Catalonia — as the most promising way to avoid violence.
But it’s simply not happening in most potential trouble spots. The most dangerous of these is surely Taiwan, an island off the Chinese coast that has been independent from the mainland since the end of World War II. “From the point of view of the Chinese government, and probably the Chinese people, Taiwan belongs to China,” said Cohen, who sees the odds of China eventually using force to establish control as “very high.”
“The Chinese are increasingly bold in the waters around Taiwan,” he noted. “They’re gradually encircling the island in anticipation of an eventual embargo, in which ships could not enter or leave. It’s a clever, incremental strategy. At some point, my fear is Taiwan will feel it necessary to resist this by force. That’s when things could get ugly.”
Of course, things are already pretty ugly — not to mention chaotic — in the realm of international trade. Cohen said he has never witnessed anything like the current state of disorder in his lifetime. The closest analogy he can find is the period immediately after World War I which produced the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930.
But as Cohen notes, much of human decision-making is driven by forces other than logic. In the case of the secession movements he documents in “Dream States,” the primary driver is usually a sense of identity — the impulse to rally behind the group you feel you belong to, and the insistence on its right to act independently.
“Identity can be a very powerful motivator,” he said. “That’s why I worry about the risk of civil war. When it comes to something as strong as a sense of community identity, rationalism falls by the wayside.”
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The Republican party has turned into a sick and malevolent cult and appears to be acting as a terrorist organization. The followers of the orange autocrat appear to have been fully hypnotized (as were Jim Jones followers) and act in ways that harm their own best interests and destroy the very basic things that have made our country great. They seem to be fine selling public lands and taking away very basic social safety nets for the most vulnerable, in the largest transfer of wealth ever, in order to make tax cuts for the wealthy possible.
Go find a better candidate next time. If you can do that AND he’s so bad for the country, he should easily lose, right?
In terms of experience, skills, and character the Democratic Party has had the superior candidate in every single election since 1988.
Obviously not right. The notion that the best candidate will necessarily win is completely baseless. Only profoundly stupid, ignorant, and dishonest people would make such an assertion.
The above comment by the previous commenter is more proof that the virus is all consuming.
If we split off from the feds, the rest of the nation would buckle. completely. we are the #1 doner state, #5 economy on earth, massive military presence, agriculture, corporations, massive natural resources and I’m sure we’d take Washington and Oregon with us. Just CA a lone breaking away would be the end of the Federal Government. They would not be able to manage their budgets without our money.
This notion has been floated around for a long time. There are other movements underway for some states to break apart and merge with other states ie: eastern Oregon wants to be part of Idaho….
eastern oregon is a dry wasteland for the most part. California has also floated the idea of a North California and South California. We shall see….
How do you fantasize CA being able to stand alone though? No more federal support economically, militarily, etc. Gavin’s CA could just open the southern border though, which would be a real hoot.
Seems absurd, but do tell….how would it work?
No more federal support???
We give more money to the feds than we receive back from them. As it is, we’re sending what would be foreign aid to the red states, and you cons hate foreign aid.
Think past the tax component. It’s not that simple. But hey, you “libs” go ahead and push to secede. See how it goes!
The money that California provide funds to other states that need it the most. California money goes to these states by the bucketful, but how it’s spent is a different story. My very good friend some years ago used to collect food stamps, but would sell them at 50 cents on the dollar. With that free money he would buy whatever he wanted (mostly beer, $20 bags of leaf weed, junk food…he loved Hostess Zingers, and so on).
Nice anecdote, proving nothing, except that you need to find better friends.
MAGA will have its day of reckoning. Stay tuned. The followers will be purged from the country or imprisoned for their crimes against the constitution. With the unlimited power the Supreme Court has given the Executive branch – the next Democratic president will terrorize this lot of thugs. The really sick repubs crawled back in their holes when Nixon was exposed – only to crawl out again during the 2016 campaign.
It is very interesting that Prof Cohen points to ideology. The West Coast, CA, OR, WA states have a very different ideology than the other states.CO to some degree may be sharing these ideologies. I group the West Coast states together as Pacifica in my mind. I am sure there are economic and otherwise directed models that explore the advantages and disadvantages further. We all probably should buy his book to explore his thought process. Hard to see though why the US would ever sign off to have economic powerhouse states like CA and WA leave the union. Being financially and militarily backed by other countries like Canada or Mexico for economic trade and resources (who would obviously have their own agenda) would make this more plausible. CA alone has incredible revenues and resources, but I dont see how they could permanently defend their own expansive borders, especially with some of the terrain…then again, the world is ever changing and it is extremely difficult to govern such a vast area as the United States, but unity amongst all states also brings more negotiation power and leverage with other countries. The unitedness of these states makes this country so unique and carries it’s own ideology as well while the individual states keep their very own unique identities. In my opinion, this uniqueness has made the United States so incredible, the current splitting of this united ideology on the other hand is undeniable…it certainly is an interesting time to be alive.