because New Hampshire didn’t simply catch secession fever from MAGA.
Texas gets to independence through the mythology of the Lone Star Republic and a Republican movement increasingly hostile to federal authority. New Hampshire gets there through libertarianism and the Free State Project, which was encouraging people to move here and shrink government long before Donald Trump entered politics.⁶
Different roads. Same intersection.
Both eventually arrive at the idea that Washington is no longer merely a government whose policies they dislike. It is an outside power whose authority a state may have the right to reject.
Gericke herself exposes the oddity. She recently said one politician was surprised she was still pushing independence now that Trump was back in the White House. She was. She also acknowledged that enthusiasm for national divorce tends to rise and fall depending on which political team controls Washington.⁷
The polling says she’s right.
When Joe Biden was president, Republicans were much more likely than Democrats to support their state seceding. With Trump back in office, that has flipped. In a large YouGov survey this year, 22 percent of Democrats supported their state leaving, compared with 14 percent of Republicans.
And the state with the highest measured support was California.
Not Texas.⁸
That may be the most revealing fact in this whole debate. For many Americans, secession isn’t a constitutional philosophy. It’s what you start thinking about when the other guys win Washington.
What remains disproportionately Republican is the machinery for doing something with that anger.
California separatists have repeatedly struggled to get Calexit onto the ballot. New Hampshire independence bills get crushed. Texas, meanwhile, has put secession into the official platform of its governing party, alongside language saying federal actions violating Texas’s view of the Tenth Amendment should be “ignored, opposed, refused, and nullified.”⁹
New Hampshire separatists have gotten their ideas into the Legislature.
Texas separatists have gotten theirs into the governing party.
And now the Texas Nationalist Movement is trying to export the model, launching an effort called US★EXIT to spread state-independence organizing around the country.¹⁰
There is one rather wonderful contradiction in all this talk about sovereignty.
Texas Republicans argue that Washington should stop telling Texas what to do because government closer to the people is better government. Yet Texas has also passed sweeping restrictions on what Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and other cities may do when their local governments adopt policies Austin doesn’t like.¹¹
Apparently local control is a magnificent principle until the locals vote the wrong way.
New Hampshire has its own milder version whenever Concord complains about Washington while towns complain about Concord overriding local decisions.
The principle often seems to be less “government should be closer to the people” than “power should be located at the level of government my side controls.”
None of this means Texas or New Hampshire is actually going anywhere. The Supreme Court settled the legal question after the Civil War: states cannot simply secede on their own.¹² And the practical questions would make the romance disappear very quickly.