As I write this to you, Charlie Kirk has just been assassinated at a campus event in Utah. The thirty-one-year-old founded Turning Point USA in 2012 and became a major political player, funneling thousands of high school- and college-aged youth into the Republican Party and its causes. His death closely follows the politically motivated killings in June of Democratic Minnesota state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark Hortman.
Enter The Lincoln Project, the political action committee (PAC) founded in 2019 by Republican strategists to oppose Trumpism. On September 10, earlier the same day Kirk was fatally shot, its Lincoln Square media outlet published a piece on “soft secession.” It isn’t coming, the piece argued. It is already here.
“Soft secession does not declare itself,” wrote the author, Brian Daitzman. “No flags are lowered; no forts are seized. Instead, trust flows away from the federal center toward regional blocs.”
In our last issue, I wrote about a United States undergoing “administrative fracture,” becoming a country “whose borders—physical, legal, and cultural—have begun to shift.”
The fractures now threaten to split. Amid the high-profile political assassinations of summer 2025, the National Guard has occupied Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. And the President has threatened to send the National Guard into other Democrat-led cities. In Illinois, Governor JB Pritzker is so far staving off the deployment of the National Guard in Chicago. “Trump appears to lack the legal authority, at this point, to deploy troops to Chicago without Pritzker’s request,” National Public Radio reported September 10. Meanwhile, the majority-Black city of Memphis the next on Trump’s list for National Guard escalation, and Tennessee Republican Governor Bill Lee said he was “grateful” for Trump’s “support and commitment.
But Daitzman highlights less flashy indicators of a soft secession: the regional blocs that have recently formed in the vacuum of federal leadership. It started with the first Trump Administration’s mishandling of the pandemic, he argues, where regional pacts formed to address critical logistics. Fast-forward to 2025, and California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii have formed the West Coast Health Alliance to fill the gap left by a degraded U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Daitzman also calls attention to our diluted Congress—as states that contribute the most tax dollars, which have large urban populations, go without equal representation.
Also listed are the factors that “magnify” this political imbalance, including redistricting. On this, Daitzman makes special mention of Wisconsin, home to The Progressive since 1909, when the state was a national hub of the Progressive Era. More recently, Wisconsin Republicans have honed the deceitful dark art of gerrymandering. Only in 2024 could Democratic Governor Tony Evers sign fair state election maps into law following a state supreme court ruling.
“Wisconsin provides a stark case,” Daitzman writes. “In 2018, Republicans secured sixty-three of ninety-nine Assembly seats while winning less than half the statewide vote.” He then says that the secession will break along old lines: “industrial Northeast, high-tech West Coast, and diverse metros on one side; rural, extractive, and agrarian states on the other.”
But Wisconsin shows that states labeled as agrarian and rural and on the side of Trump are quite full of people who oppose his agenda. Daitzman himself called out what Wisconsinites have long noted—that despite a Republican-controlled statehouse since 2011, statewide contests consistently select Democrats. Evers and recently elected Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Susan Crawford are just two examples.
Throughout this October/November issue, you’ll find examples of local efforts in states both “red” and “blue,” urban and rural, agrarian and industrial, all reenvisioning this nation and its systems to serve the people. Anna Lekas Miller covers groups from the Florida Everglades to the urban streets of downtown Elizabeth, New Jersey, shutting down detention centers and refusing cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In Salina, Kansas, Curt Meine writes, Wes Jackson and the thinkers at The Land Institute reimagine “the problem of agriculture” for true sustainability. Our former intern Owen Jakel takes us to the northern reaches of Minnesota, where Indigenous and grassroots activists are protecting the Boundary Waters wilderness area from mining. In Southern Colorado’s arid San Luis Valley, Giles Clasen reports, a group of family farmers is betting on one water-saving crop, rye. In New York City, as both John Nichols and our Associate Editor Rachel E. Hawley cover, Zohran Mamdani is proposing radical changes to the status quo—including to the Big Apple’s long-standing mental health and homelessness crises.
Stories like these encourage us to resist painting whole states and regions with too broad a brush. Those featured in these pages make clear that the new country emerging requires invoking remaining local rights and building coalitions across traditional divides. Whatever secessions now forming need not fall along old lines.
When Charlie Kirk was killed, he had been on the first stop of what Turning Point USA called “The American Comeback Tour.” Through this autumn, Kirk was set to spread his message of returning this country to a glorified version of its ugly old self. Instead, his death may have signaled the end of whatever America there was to come back to. And only something entirely different can take its place.
In solidarity,
Alexandra Tempus