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President Donald Trump speaks about the coronavirus, accompanied by Vice President Mike Pence, in the James Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House, Thursday, April 16, 2020, in Washington. /APIn a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Homeland Security joint memo leaked by the New York Times on Monday, new COVID-19 projections in the United States look to catapult as summer nears.This is largely thanks to reopening strategies being rolled out in various states, at the behest of the federal government. The picture is grim – an estimated 3,000 Americans could die per day by June 1.Another new model released by the University of Washington shows that the "65,000" death prediction touted by U.S. President Donald Trump a few weeks ago as a victory will not hold. The new projection supposes 134,000 deaths, nearly double its prior projection, by August alone.The president himself waffled on projected death counts on Sunday during a live town hall with Fox News, suggesting that he is well aware of what's happening with projections:"I used to say 65,000 and now I'm saying 80 or 90 and it goes up and it goes up rapidly."Can Trump be held responsible for this increase, since he knows that the projections are rising and it's a direct result of his reopening plan?Top coronavirus task force adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, posed a serious question to the American people on CNN’s "Cuomo Prime Time.""How many deaths and how much suffering are you willing to accept to get back to what you want to be, some form of normality, soon rather than later?" Fauci asked. This question may as well have been directed at the president.Trump, with his signature lack of human empathy, has made clear that he is willing to move forward with this human sacrifice in order to maintain corporate profits.On April 28, Trump directed Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to "ensure that meat and poultry processors continue operations consistent with the guidance for their operations jointly issued by the CDC and OSHA," despite calls by labor unions as COVID-19 ravages the industry's workers.Even meat plants in states such as Iowa and Nebraska that have been less affected by COVID-19 are hotbeds for the disease due to unsafe practices.A new GOP bill proposal, headed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, will ensure that workers will have no legal recourse for illnesses they may suffer due to employers not abiding by CDC standards. This will time largely with the reopening, ensuring that the inevitable resurgence of the disease will only harm workers' health and economic wellbeing.People wait for a distribution of masks and food from the Rev. Al Sharpton in the Harlem neighborhood of New York, after a new state mandate was issued requiring residents to wear face coverings in public due to COVID-19, Saturday, April 18, 2020. /APTrump and Republicans know that there will be blame to lay and they're preparing for it – it's why the State Department is making up clear lies, saying the virus originated in a Chinese lab. But, the true question of whether Trump and his circle will be responsible for this will largely depend on the political support his reopening has.The "Opening Up America Again" plan in general is federalism at its finest, because it epitomizes the best that the country's political system has to offer. The federal government started centralizing its control over the states since even before the Civil War of the mid-19th century, but this trend accelerated in its aftermath, and has noticeably been observed every time that the U.S. finds itself in a serious crisis, be it a world war or the global war on terror, for instance.This time, however, the federal government did the opposite of what was expected of it by devolving a lot of responsibilities to the states, where they always constitutionally belonged. The centralization trend that's been on display for over the past one and a half centuries was always questionable from a legal standpoint but accepted as a fait accompli since the end of the Civil War, though the specifics of the coronavirus crisis, that's currently ravaging the country, made it impossible to resort to that method any longer.The invisible enemy against which Trump always reminds his countrymen that they're fighting can't be defeated by the power of the federal government alone, but through the efforts of each state and citizen working together with the higher authorities in pursuit of a common victory. All attempts to exploit this crisis to carry on the decades-long trend of centralization are doomed to fail since the federal government can't fully control the on-the-ground situation across one of the world's geographically largest and most populous countries.In an interview published by the New York Post on Tuesday, Trump suggested that Americans were ready to get back to normal."I think they're starting to feel good now. The country's opening again. We saved millions of lives, I think," Trump said. "You have to be careful, but you have to get back to work."However, a new poll by the Washington Post and University of Maryland directly contradicted this notion. According to the poll, Americans broadly oppose reopening most businesses. According to the poll, 67 percent said they would be uncomfortable visiting a retail store and 78 percent said they'd be uncomfortable going to a sit-down restaurant.It seems that the president believes that a majority of Americans share his same callousness and want to open businesses as soon as possible because Fox News has been favorably reporting on radical right-wing protests for weeks.These same protests that have violated stay at home order issued by governors and local leaders have led to spikes in COVID-19. For example, in Kentucky on April 20, the state had its then-biggest spike in cases after protests were launched against the lockdown. Inevitably, these radicals have prolonged suffering and led to deaths all over the nation.Social distancing in the United States has so far plateaued the spread of COVID-19, about 30,000 new cases per day for nearly a month, but it has not created a marked decrease. It only shows that social distancing should have continued, not ended.Undoing this too quick means that all of the lives lost, especially those of healthcare workers who died fighting the disease, have been in vain. So too has been the economic suffering of average Americans who are filing for unemployment in droves, some 30 million so far. Scientists and economists both agree that lifting the lockdown now is short-sighted.Trump has had every opportunity to face the facts and has still declined to make the decisions that will save American's lives. If it were any other country than itself, the United States would be demanding a human rights inquiry. But it is indeed a violation of human rights, and every death from the resurgence of this disease likely to happen next month will be tantamount to pre-meditated murder.Source:Trump's reopening plan is murderous and Americans do not buy ithttps://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-04-17/Trump-s-plan-to-open-America-again-is-federalism-at-its-finest-PKVo5t2vIY/index.html

Ok, so imagine it like this:George Washington - (1789–1799)VP: Adams (1789–1799)Washington and Adams both realize the US is not strong enough to go to war against Britain or Napoleon. The Jay Treaty still happens in 1794, and when Washington tries to walk a thin line between the two, he does marginally better than Adams did. Tensions reduce a bit, and the impression of sailors is resolved somehow so it is not such a hot button issue. Suddenly, there begin to be murmurings about the horrors that were happening in France, and then the crowning of an Emperor causes a bigger ripple in how America sees their recent ally. So the British don’t seem quite so bad, especially after the statement of George III that he wishes friendship with the US as an independent power. The other major change is that the concept of parties does not take hold quite as strongly and as quickly, because Washington remains above the fray. Congress remains under basically Federalist control. Jefferson and Adams still kind of hate each other, at this point, but Adams and Jay are still in the thick of increasing cooperation with England, and Jefferson gets more and more marginalized.Since the follow ups to the Jay Treaty come at a time when Britain desperately needs alliesare slightly more conciliatory, and Jay brings home another treaty that is slightly more favorable to the US, it gets trumpeted as a rallying point for the folks that see France as a danger, rather than an ally, and further angers France to the point that they start attacking American shipping and America forms even stronger bonds with Britain. Jefferson rails against this in print, but he loses the battle for the public’s approval because he is going against Washington at this point instead of Adams, who did not hold the prestige and gravitas that Washington did. So therefore, the next president is:John Adams - (1799 - 1826)VP: Jay (1799–1825)VP: Calhoun (1825–1828)VP: John Quincy Adams (1828–1829)when Adams becomes president, Jay finishes second because he is the man of the moment. Jefferson skulks off to Virginia, and pops up occasionally, especially after he and Adams patch up their feud through letter writing, and he becomes an elder statesman, contributing where he can. Additionally, Washington’s freeing of his own slaves, combined with the freedom to write what he wants without fear of whether or not it has anything to do with party politics, which he has come to despise, makes Jefferson a popular philosopher on many issues, including slavery. He writes several influential pieces about how it is a horrible institution. This begins to turn the tide even more quickly towards the abolition of slavery.the war of 1812 does not happen, and Andrew Jackson rises no higher than governor of New Orleans. Jay never becomes Chief Justice, but he does propose an amendment codifying the fact that the President and VP are running as a package deal, because some of the divisive rhetoric from the election and its immediate aftermath, when Jeffersonians and states rights advocates nearly led to a civil war caused him to think about what a split leadership would have meant. The Rutledge Supreme Court narrowly fails to defeat it when Jefferson comes out in favor of the amendment in a series of editorial essays that use some of the ideas from the original Federalist papers to show that the country would be irreparably damaged by the divisiveness that would be brought up by this division becoming endemic to our system.The other thing it writes into law is a line of succession that calls for immediate elections after the death of a president, with temporary authority granted to the Vice President as a placeholder only, so there is no leadership vacuum. Jay refuses to run for President, because Rutledge has fallen out of favor and is going to resign from the Supreme Court due to the fact that his positions have not been on the winning side for quite some time, and his replacement as Chief by John Marshall. Jay becomes Chief Justice late in the 1820s, when Marshall becomes too ill, setting a precedent for the Chief Justice position to become fungible rather than a lifetime appointment. Marshall takes the position back for a few years after Jay dies in 1829, just before Adams.In an attempt to placate the restless south, Adams forms an alliance with the southern slaveholders, who have been less and less influential since Jefferson spent years writing about how the agricultural South was at a dead end in the growing industrialization and the economic prosperity that it was bringing. But Calhoun’s intransigence and resistance to progress on that issue and many others made him into an increasingly ineffective and shrill cipher who resigned in furious disgrace. In the frantic search to replace him, owing to the declining health and advanced age of the president, his son John Quincy Adams was appointed as interim VP, after a well reasoned and passionate speech about how he would never seek the office of President because of the danger of creating a hereditary system, which he considered the worst kind of government. The speech would always be remembered for his humorous reference to how with the noticeable exception of himself, sons of capable fathers have just as much chance of being imbeciles as they do geniuses, so as the sins of the fathers should not be visited upon their sons, neither should their successes.Henry Clay - (1829–1852)VP: John Quincy Adams (1829–1848)VP: Salmon P. Chase (1848–1852)After the death of his father, Quincy Adams famously said that he would keep the caretaking position of power until only the last second necessary, and then would hand it over with the greatest relief ever felt by man. This caused Henry Clay, who had been famous for being the architect of several proposals that carried the day in the strategies used to industrialize the south and move the economy from slavery towards a more equal economic basis as the northern states. He was elected in a landslide after the policies he put forth in the House of Representatives started to bear fruit, especially in his home state, where it was hailed as the Kentucky Miracle when they created roads and infrastructure paid for by the government, which led to railroad and highway transportation through Ohio from the Great Lakes, and from there to the ports of Virginia and North and South Carolina.He also gained in popularity by having Adams on the ticket, because Adams again said that he liked to be the VP much more than he ever would being the president, due to his ability to focus on fewer priorities in a less distracted way.During the Clay presidency, the pragmatism and negotiating abilities of both Clay and Adams let to a gradual withering away of slavery, albeit not the prejudice inherent in so many years of its existence. There were periodic attempts at insurrection, as when Texas tried to start a war and absorb the Indian Territories into an alliance meant to pick off the still restive far south as well. Only Louisiana thwarted the alliance, largely because Andrew Jackson, the famously belligerent governor, refused to join any alliance that was to include Native Americans. Additionally, the Mississippi River traffic of goods had risen dramatically after the implementation of steamboats from the north and the ability to transport goods by rail. New Orleans and Baton Rouge were major port cities, and since George Dunbar had received federal assistance in building his ambitious drainage and pumping systems, New Orleans had been able expand to become the major metropolis of the south.By this time, America had become prosperous and had mostly settled into a country with a national bank, a national transportation infrastructure, and a reasonable amount of power devolving to the states on matters that were purely internal to those states. But there was a clear divide between the powers of the government and the powers delegated to the states, most of which had been affirmed by dozens of interlocking Supreme Court precendents.This era became known as the “Era of Good Feelings,” because although there were occasional dust ups and minor issues, on the whole, it was an era of great stability.After the death of Adams, Clay appointed Salmon P. Chase as his VP, largely because of his leadership in the Senate and his championing of the admission of California and Oregon as free states, which was the final nail in the coffin for slavery. Chase was also instrumental in the unification of the national bank and the regulations which allowed it to become able to issue bank notes and create a more stable currency management system.Lincoln - (1852–1873)VP: William Seward (1852–1872)VP: James Garfield (1872–1873)Lincoln’s presidency was marked by several accomplishments. Because of his proclivity for bringing opponents into his close confidence, he appointed Chase as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, which created a minor scandal, as it seemed to some to be a corrupt bargain, but that soon faded as Chase proved able, and also ruled against some of Lincoln’s more extreme suggestions.Lincoln passed the 13th amendment disallowing slavery and codifying the rights of union for workers. Then the 14th, which gave to vote to all citizens of the country. Through Seward’s active involvement, expanded the country by the purchase of Alaska, the admission of the former Indian Territories as two states, the settlement of the Spanish-American war by the purchase of the captured territories and the signature of an economic treaty with Mexico, and the admission of both Quebec and British Columbia (renamed Columbia) as new states after their separation from Britain, and the creation of the commonwealth states of Cuba, and the rest of Canada. The impregnability of the North American continent complete, he also encouraged and sponsored trade relations with and exploration of Africa and South America, and a moral doctrine that influenced other colonizers.Domestically, he made sure that there was political opportunity, education, and upward mobility for the former slaves. He formed the doctrine of American neutrality in war, ensuring that the country was protected by its economic links and its ocean borders.After Seward died, he appointed Garfield as VP because of a conversation he had had with him during his not infrequent trips to observe debate on Capitol Hill, usually in ineffective disguise. He was impressed with Garfield’s pragmatism during the debates over the amendments that had been passed, and his obvious intelligence and moral center.James Garfield - (1873–1880)VP: Chester A. Arthur (1873–1880)Garfield created a first: government support for the development of agricultural technology, inspired by his first glimpse of a mechanical reaper as a child, and the slow adoption of mechanical cotton pickers after their invention in the 1840s. It later evolved into the National Institute of Agricultural Technolgy.He also wanted an educated electorate, mandating a national support of the school systems, with national standards for educational canon and a requirement to encourage literacy for all citizens.He continued to press for civil rights for African Americans and Native Americans, subsidizing the creation of infrastructure and opportunity in the still majority Native American states of Uklahumma and Akansa.He also proposed substantial civil service reform, eventually passed by Congress in 1876, which ended the system of patronage, instead creating a merit-based and aspirationally politically neutral system.His VP Arthur was instrumental in some of these reforms, and was later pilloried for the attempt to allow federal employee unions.Chester A. Arthur (1880–1892)VP: George Henry White - (1880–1886)VP: Grover Cleveland - (1886–1892)Arthur’s presidency was fraught with division, as the New Democrats tried to become a viable third party. Even in a climate of rising party factionalism, it was tough to see what the chances were. Arthur had expanded unionization to the federal government, and was abandoned by many in his own party because of it. The Republican party had shifted during the Gilded age to embrace the idea that capital should define power, and Arthur argued for the wealth to be spread out, thereby allowing the common man to increase their buying power. But as happened with his proposal for a national pension system, in which portions of a retirement cushion be paid from excise taxes on goods shipped over state lines, this idea was anathema to his own party.He also campaigned with George Henry White, who became the first African American VP. White tirelessly advocated for a social safety net, because although many of the nation’s poor were African American, there was a growing understanding that the moneyed classes and the industrial leadership of the country was not going to put up with dilution of their power without fighting back.This was shown by the fact that he was shot and killed by Henry Clay Frick during a meeting to discuss the union busting policies of US Steel. Frick was hanged for the offense, but not until what was termed the “Trial of the Century” ended up laying bare the racism and classism of the moneyed class, and how they thought of their workers as pawns to be used at will for any purpose necessary for several months in the spring and summer of 1887. Frick himself said that “US Steel needs me, and America needs US Steel. Otherwise it faces utter ruin.” Notably absent from the proceedings, refusing to testify as a character witness for Frick, was Andrew Carnegie, who was conveniently visiting Scotland for a year.For the rest of the Arthur presidency, his VP was Grover Cleveland, who was chosen to placate the business community and who was content to make no major changes to policy. This became even more obvious after Arthur suffered an aortic aneurysm, followed by a series of small strokes that incapacitated him. In private, the government fell into Cleveland’s hands, but in public, Arthur was well enough to keep his condition secret until his death four years later. It is thought that he had a few moments of control over what the administration tried to do, as when his participation in the negotiations for the annexation of Hawaii were nearly successful, but in general historians agree that he would not have gotten much done even if he were completely healthy.Benjamin Harrison (1892–1907)VP: Booker T. Washington (1892–1907)Harrison prevailed over Cleveland in the election, which was called “The choice without a choice” in the Hearst papers, which had been agitating for war with Mexico ever since it had withdrawn from its economic agreements with the US when it had been taken over by France and a puppet government installed in 1868.Harrison resisted as long as possible, preserving the status quo, rather than lose valuable business to France, whose companies were very amicable, if their government wasn’t. He concentrated on pacifying the last resistance to the rights reforms he had proposed, including universal suffrage for adult citizens. There has been debate over his motivations for this enterprise, but his VP, Booker T. Washington, was a tireless campaigner for the rights of all. He criss-crossed the country saying that “God created us all equal, and as has been shown by the prosperity and success by which this nation has thrown off the shackles of slavery and ignorance, this decision was obviously correct in that particular.” Not everyone agreed with him, however, as shown by the fact that a 1906 plot to assassinate him during a stop in Texas that later implicated several members of the congressional opposition in the planning and funding was foiled by the VP himself, who had overpowered the gunman and threw him off the stage as his shot went awry. Washington then pointed the gun at the would-be assassin as he lay on the ground with a broken ankle and calmly asked if someone would summon the police. He later said that this was one of the main reasons that he never considered running for president, both because of the constant harangue with Congress, and also the dreary nature of the job.Meanwhile, Harrison was content to remain out of the spotlight and work only on foreign economic policy issues and insider arm-twisting to influence the South and West to calm their issues with the increased freedoms he proposed. He was largely successful, with the passage of the fifteenth amendment granting universal suffrage.During the Harrison administration, there was also a movement to regulate and limit monopolies and trusts, but he let it languish unheeded.Theodore Roosevelt (1907–1924)VP: William Howard Taft - (1907–1919)VP: Charles G. Dawes - (1919–1924)The Roosevelt administration was one of the most consequential in history. From his Trust Busting, which led to the breakup of many cartels and conglomerates, to his establishment of national parks, and the quick and successful prosecution of the war with Mexico, he was a blustery president, but he was also able to use diplomacy to his advantage.He won the Nobel Peace Prize for his negotiation of peace between the Russians and Japanese, and his negotiations during the Versailles Peace Conference led directly to the United Federation of Nations, and the strong US presence in this assembly. When Congress balked at joining initially, his personal intervention led to the narrow passage of the treaty. The speech he gave regarding German reparations carried the day, and popularized the phrase “reparations, not revenge.” This later led to the committee to prevent war in the Federation assembly, which changed the way governments looked at war and what the costs would be; and the committee for the resolution of dispute became a model of equality, with no members allowed to veto unless the vote would be unanimous in the reduced group of countries involved.While Taft was largely a public relations boost to the administration, because the president always seemed to be visible in every issue, Taft was the insider who greased the wheels of congress while remaining largely unsung for his efforts. However, when Roosevelt appointed him Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, he showed that he had strong opinions, and a definite wisdom.Charles Dawes was another type of VP altogether, being active and somewhat combative with adversaries, standing up to Rockefeller and Morgan and the trusts, forcing through the legal definitions of monopoly and the amendment striking down corporate personhood and defining the role of a corporation as its initial definition in its charter, which had to be approved by the authorities before it would receive protected status. The officers of the corporation were liable for its actions, and its purpose was defined as its mission to benefit society.Charles G. Dawes (1921–1953)VP: Herbert Hoover - (1921–1926)VP: Franklin Delano Roosevelt - (1926–1948)VP: Dwight D. Eisenhower - (1948–1953)Elected on a massive popular mandate because of his work in reining in corporations, Dawes went further, and eventually ensured that the corporation was part of the larger economy and had responsibility to that economy, but the purpose of the corporation was to benefit society, rather than just a narrow slice of investors. He also revamped the way revenue was collected by the government, instituting a permanent income and business tax, and removing more regressive taxes. It was his intervention in the stock market that caused his first VP Herbert Hoover to resign, but his wisdom was proven by the leadership of the US in the recovery from the Great Downturn of the 1930s, which was much milder in the US due to the strong rules over the trading of stocks. America’s economic power was enhanced, and the position of the country strengthened.Roosevelt was the actual mastermind behind bringing the country fully into the advantages of the new century, and as has been said, “if Dawes was the brain, Roosevelt was the heart.” Crippled by polio before taking office, he made it his aim to create a robust safety net to ensure that Americans were relieved of worry about survival, and his work was one of the inspirations for Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, because his radio speeches galvanized the country with stirring phrases like “no longer will Americans have to worry about whether to put clothes on their backs instead of food in their bellies, to educate their children so they will gain the ability for a better life, or require them to toil instead and move daily ever closer to losing it forever,” and “the promise of clean water, and bright electric light, and roads that allow for the unencumbered progress of commerce are the responsibility of the nation to all of its citizens. And I assure you, this responsibility will not be shirked.” When Roosevelt died, the nation turned out in droves to view him lying in state, and his funeral was one of the first live television programs broadcast coast to coast.In contrast, Eisenhower was an able administrator, and would shepherd the changes that Roosevelt and Dawes proposed to their fulfillment, notably increasing the scope of some initiatives like the national highway system. But he was not a confrontational person, and this caused his loss to Nixon in the election because his mild exterior seemed to not be powerful enough for the times.Richard Nixon (1953–1955)VP: Joseph McCarthy (1953–1955)The less said about Nixon, the better. From the scandals originating in his campaign that eventually brought him down in disgrace, to his selection of Joseph McCarthy as his running mate, this administration was a cavalcade of bad decisions from start to finish. With McCarthy’s morphine addiction and shady financial ties, and all of his “documentation” of possible Communist subversion being revealed to be false, it led to several improvements to the electoral process, including laws requiring financial disclosures of both personal and campaign finance, and a strengthening of the fairness doctrine for news. Nixon himself resigned in what seemed to be a quid-pro-quo for the dropping of charges related to slush fund allegations and multiple quasi-legal dirty tricks perpetrated against the Eisenhower campaign, some of which landed underlings of the campaign in jail.Estes Kefauver (1955–1960)VP: Edmund G. “Pat” BrownKefauver is considered to have won because his concern was law and order, and the regulation of powerful interests, which stood in stark contrast to the previous administration. The fact that he did not have specific plans on how to deal with those issues did not come up, and although there was progress made he was largely ineffectual, partially because of his somewhat undiplomatic nature. There were not very many accomplishments that were completed during his presidency. He died suddenly, after suffering a heart attack during a press conference, and a massive aneurysm on the way to Bethesda.His VP, Pat Brown, the popular former governor of California, was focused strongly on spreading the prison reforms that he had piloted in his state, and which Johnson continued to push in his administration. He did play a major role in the Federation peace negotiations between North and South Korea, and although the result was mixed, both sides had something to hang on to as justification for their signing the treaty.Lyndon B. Johnson (1960–1975)VP: Robert Kennedy (1960 - 1968)VP: Hubert Humphrey (1968–1975)Johnson is also considered a very consequential president, because all of the social safety net changes that occurred during his administration, and the successful handover of the conflict in Vietnam, in which an agreement was concluded for power sharing in the country. As we all remember, he instituted national health, a minimum retirement income, education and poverty reduction programs, and a reduction in the release of harmful chemicals to the environment. The space program, originally started in response to the USSR’s satellite launches, became more about scientific discovery after it became obvious that they were not going to get to the moon before us, so in a major televised announcement, he redirected the focus to setting up a permanent habitation on the moon. Along with this, he reached out to the other countries that were involved in their own programs, and invited them to join the process. Although this did not happen, except with token exceptions during his time in office, it definitely had an ongoing effect on the moonbase project as it stands today.His first VP, Robert Kennedy, was very active in the anti-poverty programs, to the extent that after he pushed through most of the projects he had been working on, and Johnson requested he work on the space program, it was the final straw on the back of the camel of their already frosty relationship. He announced that he would be resigning to run for the senate in New York the following year, and that his last focus would be on the peace process in Vietnam. It was there, in June of 1968 that he was killed in a helicopter crash. To this day, there are multiple theories discounting the official case of mechanical failure, from the somewhat plausible to the completely improbable, but it seems that there will never be a complete certainty among the conspiracy minded that it was in fact a tragic accident.Hubert Humphrey was a tried and true insider who was appointed VP because he knew Congress and was a known quantity in a time of uncertainty. He was diplomatic where Johnson was overbearing, and they complemented each other well, especially during the state visits to China and Russia to open talks on peaceful cohabitation of space, and nuclear arms reduction.Ted Kennedy (1975–2009)VP: George McGovern (1975–1982)VP: Geraldine Ferraro (1982–1998)VP: Chuck Schumer (1998–2009)Ted Kennedy had the longest administration of any American president. This allowed him to put forth many ideas for the improvement of the country. He was responsible for the completion of all of the big plans of Johnson, but also personally made the case for the world court and the programs to create real economic benefit from the moon base. The boom in science in the schools and a national emphasis on arts and culture, and the establishment of the first programs for education that take into account the differing paths and skills of each student, and tailors education for the student rather than a need for “accountability” to standards decided for all by government update. He also pushed through the Equal Rights Amendment, by first mandating most of its provisions by executive order, and then codifying them into the amendment as a fait accompli.He used McGovern as an able deputy, and as the person who could say the things that he could not be seen to say, McGovern was a constant barometer of the real temperature of the administration. He was also a sounding board for events such as the choice by Kennedy to speak directly to the leaders of the protesters who were agitating for increased civil rights in the famous set of televised debates and town halls that created the national advisory councils. After McGovern decided to become the Governor Secretary of the Federation of Nations at Kennedy’s urging, Kennedy took what may have turned out to be the most influential step of his presidency, by choosing Geraldine Ferraro as the first female VP.Ferraro was a staunch advocate for women, and also for further integration of world affairs in the Federation. In one of the first challenges to Federation authority, Ferraro came out against the immediate ratification of the world currency initiative, because she felt it had not been fleshed out fully. The issue deserved further study, she felt, because the poorer countries were not getting full value for their adoption of the currency in the proposed plan. She uttered the famous assertion in front of the General Conclave meeting about the subject, that we might be more well off figuring out how to grow past the use of money entirely, if we are going to use it to lock the treasure chest rather than to distribute the treasure. This led to the study of the idea that will eventually lead to the first world vote on an issue.After Ferraro died from multiple myeloma, Chuck Schumer held basically the same course as she did, but he went back to the role of Kennedy’s bulldog, especially towards the end of Kennedy’s life, as his brain tumor began to impair his performance. He was not popular enough to be elected president, though, losing badly to both Barack Obama and Sheryl Sandberg.Barack Obama (2009-Present)VP: Joe Biden (2009-Present)Everyone knows that they have done so far.

support for the creation of a now must figure out how to enact it. A prior nonpartisan analysis priced it at $400 billion per year — twice the state’s current budget. There appears to be no way to finance such a plan without staggering new taxes, making California a magnet for those with chronic illnesses just as its tax rates send younger, healthier Californians house-hunting in Nevada and big tech employers consider leaving the state.But Newsom is not alone. Other governors have made similar promises, and Newsom calls together the executives of the most ideologically like-minded states — Oregon, Washington, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland. What if they banded to create a sole unified single-payer health-care system, spreading risk around a much larger pool of potential patients while creating uniformity across some of the country’s wealthiest states?Fifteen end up forming an interstate compact, a well-established mechanism for working together, explicitly introduced in the Constitution. They sketch out the contours of a common health-care market: a unified single-payer regime with start-up costs funded in part by the largest issue ever to hit the municipal-bond market. The governors agree, as well, on a uniform payroll tax and a new tax on millionaires and corporations set to the same rate with revenues earmarked for health-care costs. The Trump administration has already proved willing to grant waivers to states looking to experiment beyond the Affordable Care Act’s standards — primarily for the benefit of those seeking to offer plans on their exchanges with skimpier coverage. But the states can’t act unilaterally: The Supreme Court has ruled that Congress must approve establishment of any compact claiming authority that previously resided with the federal government.Newsom pressures his friend House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi to introduce a bill that would give the compact all federal money that flows into its constituent states for health-care costs. Pelosi’s members from Arizona and Florida balk at the proposal, which they fear would enable their states’ Republican governors to gut Obamacare protections. But there are scores more from states looking to join the compact, and their governors marshal Democratic House delegations into a bloc. The bill passes the House, with the support of tea-party Republicans eager to strike a blow against federal power.When it reaches the Senate, the initiative comes from Republicans. In 2011, then–Texas governor Rick Perry championed a Health Care Compact Alliance, joined by eight other states seeking a “regulatory shield” against the Affordable Care Act and full control over their Medicare and Medicaid funds. By the time the Democratic bill passes the House, current Texas governor Greg Abbott has rallied more than 20 states, including North Carolina, Missouri, and Arizona, for a new version of the Health Care Compact. He also has the support of two prominent senators, Ted Cruz and Majority Whip John Cornyn. Republicans who had promised for nearly a decade to repeal and replace Obamacare can finally deliver on the promise — for 40 percent of the country.The president sees opportunity, too. While running for president, Donald Trump called himself “Mr. Brexit,” a boast tied to his apocryphal claim of having accurately predicted the British vote to leave the European Union. Now he’s convinced, thanks largely to a Fox & Friends chyron reading BIGGER THAN BREXIT?, that an even more significant world-historical accomplishment is within reach. Trump lobbies Pelosi and Mitch McConnell to combine their bills. Trump beams at the Rose Garden signing ceremony, calling it “the biggest deal ever” as he goads Pelosi and McConnell into an awkward handshake. Historians will later mark it as the first step in our nation’s slow breakup, the conscious uncoupling of these United States.Let’s just admit that this arranged marriage isn’t really working anymore, is it? The partisan dynamic in Washington may have changed, but our dysfunctional, codependent relationship is still the same. The midterm results have shown that Democrats have become even more a party of cities and upscale suburbs whose votes are inefficiently packed into dense geographies, Republicans one of exurbs and rural areas overrepresented in the Senate. The new Congress will be more ideologically divided than any before it, according to a scoring system developed by Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica: the Republicans more conservative, the Democrats more liberal.Come January, we are likely to find that we’ve simply shifted to another gear of a perpetual deadlock unlikely to satisfy either side. For the past eight years, there has been no movement toward goals with broad bipartisan support: to fund new infrastructure projects, or for basic gun-control measures like background checks or limits on bump stocks. Divided party control of Capitol Hill will make other advances even less likely. For the near future, the boldest policy proposals are likely to be rollbacks: Democrats angling to revert to a pre-Trump tax code, Republicans to repeal Obama’s health-care law. By December 7, Congress will have to pass spending bills to avoid a government shutdown. Next March looms another deadline to raise the debt ceiling.Meanwhile, we have discovered that too many of our good-governance guardrails, from avoidance of nepotism to transparency around candidates’ finances, have been affixed by adhesion to norms rather than force of law. The breadth and depth of the dysfunction has even Establishmentarian figures ready to concede that our current system of governance is fatally broken. Some have entertained radical process reforms that would have once been unthinkable. Prominent legal academics on both the left and the right have endorsed proposals to expand the Supreme Court or abolish lifetime tenure for its members, the latter of which has been embraced by Justice Stephen Breyer. Republican senators including Cruz and Mike Lee have pushed to end direct election of senators, which they say strengthens the federal government at the expense of states’ interests.Policy wonks across the spectrum are starting to rethink the federal compact altogether, allowing local governments to capture previously unforeseen responsibilities. Yuval Levin, a policy adviser close to both Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio, wrote in 2016 that “the absence of easy answers is precisely a reason to empower a multiplicity of problem-solvers throughout our society, rather than hoping that one problem-solver in Washington gets it right.” In a recent book, The New Localism, center-left urbanists Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak exalt such local policy innovation specifically as a counterweight to the populism that now dominates national politics across the Americas and Europe.Even if they don’t use the term, states’ rights has become a cause for those on the left hoping to do more than the federal government will. Both Jacobin and The Nation have praised what the latter calls “Progressive Federalism.” San Francisco city attorney Dennis Herrera has called it “the New New Federalism,” a callback to Ronald Reagan’s first-term promise to reduce Washington’s influence over local government. “All of us need to be reminded that the federal government did not create the states; the states created the federal government,” Reagan said in his 1981 inaugural address. At the time, Democrats interpreted New Federalism as high-minded cover for a strategy of dismantling New Deal and Great Society programs. Now they see it as their last best hope for a just society.Some states have attempted to enforce their own citizenship policies, with a dozen permitting undocumented immigrants to acquire driver’s licenses and nearly twice as many to allow them to qualify for in-state tuition. Seven states, along with a slew of municipal governments, have adopted “sanctuary” policies of official noncooperation with federal immigration enforcement. Many governors, including Republicans in Massachusetts and Maryland, have refused to deploy National Guard troops to support Trump’s border policies, and California has sued the federal government to block construction of a wall along the Mexican frontier. After the Trump administration stopped defending an Obama-era Labor Department rule to expand the share of workers entitled to overtime pay, Washington State announced it would enforce its own version of the rule and advised its peers to do the same. “It is now up to states to fortify workers through strong overtime protections,” Washington governor Jay Inslee wrote last week.In California, officials who regularly boast of overseeing the world’s fifth-largest economy have begun to talk of advancing their own foreign policy. After Trump withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, Governor Jerry Brown — he has said “we are a separate nation in our own minds” — crossed the Pacific to negotiate a bilateral carbon-emissions pact with Chinese president Xi Jinping. “It’s true I didn’t come to Washington, I came to Beijing,” said Brown, who is often received like a head of state when he travels abroad. Around the same time, Brown promised a gathering of climate scientists that the federal government couldn’t entirely kill off their access to research data. “If Trump turns off the satellites,” he said, “California will launch its own damn satellite.”Brown’s successor Newsom comes to office just as Californians may be forced to reckon with how much farther they are willing to take this ethic of self-reliance. Since 2015, a group of California activists have been circulating petitions to give citizens a direct vote on whether they want to turn California into “a free, sovereign and independent country,” which could trigger a binding 2021 referendum on the question already being called “Calexit.”During the Obama years, it was conservatives who’d previously talked of states’ rights who began toying with the idea of starting their own countries. “We’ve got a great union. There is absolutely no reason to dissolve it,” Rick Perry said at a tea-party rally in 2009, before adding: “But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what may come out of that?” Perry’s lieutenant governor, David Dewhurst, met with members of the Texas Nationalist Movement on the opening day of a legislative session. Right after this year’s midterms, the would-be leaders of the breakaway republics of Texas and California met at a secessionist conference in Dallas.In 2012, the White House website received secession petitions from all 50 states; Texas’s was the most popular, with more than 125,000 signatures. (A counterpetition demanded that any citizen who signed one of the secession petitions be deported.) Two years later, Reuters found that nearly one-quarter of Americans said they supported the idea of their states breaking away, a position most popular among Republicans and rural westerners.Liberal regions have tended to go bigger with their secession fantasies: Why spin off one’s own state when you could split the whole country and gain the resources and manpower of like-minded compatriots? After John Kerry’s loss in the 2004 election, a homemade digital graphic migrated across the pre-social internet. On it, the states that had cast their electoral votes for Kerry were labeled “the United States of Canada”; George W. Bush’s became “Jesusland.” After Trump’s victory, those memes graduated into op-eds, including from others who would have to acquiesce in the fantasy. “Is it time for Canada to annex Blue America?” a columnist in the Canadian news magazine Maclean’s asked last year.The fact that anyone with Photoshop can cogently cleave the country in two is a credit to the hardening of a once-fluid political map. Over half the states have cast their Electoral College votes consistently for one party in every presidential election since 2000. In 2016, those states all picked Senate winners from the same party as their presidential picks as well. But as three British geographers concluded in a 2016 article about spatial polarization, that’s not just a feature of the Electoral College map. Whether measured by county, state, or region, the partisan divide has grown since Bill Clinton’s first election: Red places have grown redder (at least in their presidential votes), blue places bluer. In 1992, 38 percent of Americans lived in “landslide counties,” which went for a presidential candidate by a margin of 20 percentage points or more, the Times has reported; in 2016, the number reached 60 percent.This partisan homogeneity is shaping state governments too. Thirty-six capitals are now dominated by a single party that controls the governorship along with both houses of a legislature; for the first time in more than a century, only one state legislature in the country, Minnesota’s, will be split between two parties. If we are already living in two political geographies, why not generate a system of government to match?Or so goes the fantasy. There’s no real groundswell of support for shrinking the United States. Surveys have shown that two-thirds of Californians oppose independence, and not only because the Calexit movement’s lefty critiques of Trump do not align with its righty origins. (A co-founder of the California Independence Campaign, Louis Marinelli, is a former anti-gay-marriage activist who last year sought permanent residence in Russia.) When a candidate from the Alaskan Independence Party, which had been founded with secessionist ambitions, actually won the governorship in 1990, he turned out to be tepid on the question of sovereignty. (Sarah Palin once attended an AIP conference, and her husband, Todd, became a member.) Local movements elsewhere, whether the left-leaning Second Vermont Republic or South Carolina’s right-leaning Third Palmetto Republic, have never transcended stunt. Among institutions, only the Libertarian Party has ever endorsed the position that states should be freely able to secede.History gives us few examples of successful peaceful secessions. In the ones we do have, national identity rather than ideological differences seem to be at the root of the fissure. (The Confederate States of America would have been a notable anomaly.) When states split in the 20th century, the Australia-based scholars Peter Radan and Aleksandar Pavkovic have pointed out, there were always deep underlying fault lines of language, religion, or ethnicity. None of the three multinational states created between the two world wars — the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, or Czechoslovakia — survived until the end of the 20th century.Even with widespread fatalism about the American project, there is not an obvious way to dissolve our union. Rewriting the Constitution’s balance of power would require levels of political coordination that seem far beyond the country’s existing leadership. Chances of a civil war are remote, and it is hard to visualize a series of events that could prompt a peaceable dissolution of the union. After the Civil War, the Supreme Court ruled that states have no right to unilaterally secede. The U.N. Charter recognizes the “self-determination of peoples,” but clearly intends the latter to mean well-defined racial or ethnic groups and not, say, a collection of persons who want stronger gun-control measures. Other countries might be wary of recognizing spinoff American states for fear of the precedent. Would China vote to admit California to the United Nations if it set up Tibet or Taiwan to demand the same treatment?And yet, if the desire to secede were to grow, recent votes in Scotland and Quebec have modeled the way that secession in a developed country during years of peace can become just another political question — one debated relatively civilly, voted on democratically, without attendant allegations of treason or sedition. (Spain’s government has been less forgiving of what it calls an unconstitutional independence referendum held last year in Catalonia.)There is at least one mechanism by which a sort of soft breakup may be imaginable — and it’s already found within the Constitution. The document introduces the prospect of one state entering into a compact with another. States have created interstate compacts to maintain common standards, like the Driver’s License Compact that 47 DMVs use to exchange knowledge on traffic scofflaws. Most have been used for neighboring jurisdictions to handle common resources, like the Atlantic Salmon Compact that permits New England states to manage fish stocks in the Connecticut River Basin. (Eleven states have signed on to a National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, to disregard the Electoral College, but it would require a number equal to 270 electoral votes to take effect.)Interstate compacts have rarely been applied to controversial topics. Yet to a paralyzed Congress, and a president without any deeply held views about state-federal relations, they could prove an appealing vehicle to restless factions on both the left and the right. It may be time to take the country apart and put it back together, into a shape that better aligns with the divergent, and increasingly irreconcilable, political preferences of its people — or at least to consider what such a future might look like, if for no other reason than to test our own resolve. An imagined trial separation, if you will. Or perhaps in contemplating a future apart we might stumble upon a few ideas for some new way to live together after all.So let’s return to our hypothetical spring of 2019. After Governor Newsom’s successful health-care deal, lobbyists and think tanks promote compacts for all their pet issues, and Congress — which would be unable to find bicameral majorities for any other substantive legislation — obliges. The Public Lands and Environmental Compact Act gives the states huge leeway to set environmental regulations and manage national parks on their lands, and the Labor and Workplace Compact Act permits states to draft new workplace and employment standards. There’s a Housing Compact Act, an Immigration Compact Act, and an Agriculture Compact Act, which allows the states to take all the money that would come to their citizens as farm subsidies and food stamps as block grants with the ability to set their own rules. Trump giddily signs them all.While the states could generate new partnerships for each policy area, they choose to harden their alliances. As they link their safety nets, the Newsom-led states agree to fully synchronize their tax codes so that they could end a race-to-the-bottom competition for residents and companies. Once they do, Nevada pulls out from the compact, unwilling to implement an income tax on its citizens. Washington, on the other hand, quickly amends its state constitution to permit an income tax for the first time.Seeking his own symbol of integration, Abbott unveils the new Free States Open-Carry Permit, along with new laws ensuring the right to bear arms in schools, churches, and government buildings across his alliance. Newsom and Abbott jointly lobby Congress to grant them the right to manage the Social Security funds generated by workers in their regions. Abbott wants to allow citizens to control their retirement portfolio, while Newsom wants to experiment with moving some trust-fund money from the Treasury bonds to new public-investment vehicles that will support climate-friendly technology.To kick off the Federation Era, the two governors meet on the steps of the United States Supreme Court for a photo op. Shaking hands, the men and their attorneys general pledge not to support any legal challenge to the other’s authority for two decades. All sides have an interest in permitting their new experiment to play out for a while without any unnecessary uncertainty from the courts. The states can’t stop others from suing over the constitutionality of their moves, but they want to send a message to a conservative Supreme Court that state officials are channeling the political will of 250 million Americans, all with Congress’s express consent.The most vocal opposition comes from fixtures of the Washington, D.C., Establishment and permanent bureaucracy, which fear a permanent loss of power. Both Fox News and MSNBC, on the other hand, herald the New Era of Good Feelings. For the first time ever, Gallup records three in four Americans declaring themselves satisfied with the way things are going in the United States — a supermajority that cuts across partisan and demographic divides.Over the first two decades of the Federation Era, the alliances remained relatively stable, with only occasional changes in state status. Virginia quit the Progressive Federation of America early because it felt it would lose leverage to defend the interests of the federal employees who live there. Montana nearly pulled out of the Alliance of Free States when it looked like it might be forced to abandon its closed-shop work rules to match its right-to-work sister states. Florida’s internal politics are driven by perpetual debate over whether the state stood to benefit by joining either federation; Alaska no longer has a Democratic Party and Republican Party but has entirely realigned along a Pro-Fed and Anti-Fed axis.The states that did not join a federation remained governed by Washington, where largely status-quo policies from the early-21st-century remain in place. Some are in the neutral zone, as it is known, owing to principled independent-mindedness (New Hampshire), some by ideological paralysis (Wisconsin), and some because they are happy setting their own rules (Delaware). Power, however, resides in the neutral zone. Since each of the two federations cast Electoral College votes as a bloc, by tacit understanding, any viable national candidate has to hail from the unaffiliated states. (After producing four in a row, Maine changed its official slogan to “Mother of Vice-Presidents.”) Yet with the Legislative and Executive branches largely hobbled from policy-making for much of the country, this offers minor satisfaction. It is said to be a bleak joke around the White House that the only job of the president in peacetime is to inquire daily about the health of the Supreme Court’s oldest member.By 2038, the Progressive Federation of America is being run from a former administrative building on the campus of the University of New Mexico. The federation was initially governed by commissioners appointed by governors and state legislatures. To avoid establishing a permanent bureaucracy, the governors refused to establish a dedicated base, instead rotating its chairmanship across the members for a year at a time. Lobbyists loved having the capital in San Francisco, were less enthused when New York decided it could boost the local economy by chairing its meetings in Buffalo.The abandoned campus in Albuquerque is an inadvertent monument to one of the Blue Fed’s earliest successes. The federation’s state universities initially integrated to secure basic economies of scope and scale: linking their library collections and banding together in search of greater buying power for their energy needs. After a few years, the states agreed to set in-Fed tuition for all public universities to zero. New Mexico took the boldest step. It dismantled its public-university system after determining it was more efficient to cover travel expenses for New Mexicans studying in California or Colorado than to manage its own schools, even continuing to pay lifetime salaries for its tenured professors when they were placed in jobs at new sister schools. The New Mexico regents decided to deplete the remainder of the university’s $450 million endowment to dramatically increase teacher pay for the state’s primary-school teachers. New Mexico’s public high schools are now seen as some of the country’s finest.At first, the task of the Federation commissioners was framed as simple technocracy, implementing the will of state governments. They strengthened regulations to protect workers and set a uniform $18 minimum wage across the zone, with some cost-of-living adjustments to raise the sum in New York, San Francisco, and Boston. Federation taxes have steadily risen as federal rates fell to cover its reduced obligations. Many wealthy Blue Fed residents now pay more in annual taxes to the federation than to Washington. The high-quality cradle-to-grave services those taxes fund have come to define existence across the Blue Fed, from guaranteed public preschool to lifelong medical coverage with no co-pays or deductibles, and have incubated a highly skilled workforce and some of the most impressive life-expectancy rates in the world. (Dental care continues to depend on a system of private insurance.) It was a source of pride when the Blue Fed’s generous higher-education system started drawing large numbers of middle-class families to leave southern cities for northern ones.As soon as one crosses the border into the Alliance of Free States, whether over the Wabash River from Illinois to Indiana, or the grasslands that stretch across the Iowa-Missouri border, the difference between the two federations’ sense of identity becomes immediately visible. A popular decal showing an outline of the Red Fed’s borders — with a column of prairie states rising like an extended middle finger from the clenched fist of Texas — resides on bumpers and car windows as a defiant declaration of a newly defined region’s honor.Over the first decade of its existence, Red Fed leaders found their purpose unwinding the domestic reforms of Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Barack Obama and with them much of the 20th-century regulatory state. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, and Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration all saw their staffs gutted, left incapable of enforcing whatever rules did remain on the books. An alphabet soup of government agencies, Bill Kristol tweeted, had become a savory bone broth.The National Labor Relations Board withered in the Red Fed, along with New Deal rules that blocked companies from interfering in employee efforts to win collective-bargaining power. The shift set off a return to the fierce business-labor battles of the Gilded Age, most visible in the emergence of new firms founded by Blackwater and Black Cube alumni, known as the Blackertons, that specialize in aggressive digital surveillance and online-misinformation campaigns against union organizers.The effective elimination of most environmental and employment regulations proved irresistible to manufacturers. Boeing announced it would stop making capital investments in its Seattle-area factory and begin to shift jet assembly to a new plant in Covington, Kentucky. Factories relocated from China to be closer to the American consumer market and avoid import tariffs. Unemployment in parts of the Red Fed fell below 2 percent and the region briefly reached 5 percent growth — each several times better than Blue Fed indicators — leading conservative economists to praise the Red Miracle.It was not just manufacturing and resource extraction that boomed in the Red Fed. As soon as the Blue Fed established its single-payer system, medical specialists began taking their practices to states where they wouldn’t be subject to the Regional Health Service’s price controls or rationing. Sloan Kettering now treats New York as little more than an administrative base; the majority of its hospital rooms are in Texas. Johns Hopkins considered closing its medical school when nearly half the faculty decamped en masse to Baylor. Wealthy Blue Fed residents willing to pay out of pocket now invariably travel to Houston when they want an immediate appointment with a specialist of their choice. The arrivals area at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport is packed with chauffeurs from van services run by clinics supported by specializing in such medical tourism.Auctions of public lands across the interior west, along with the privatization of the Tennessee Valley Authority, generated a quick gusher of cash. Vowing not to let the new government wealth create more bureaucracy, Red Fed leaders deposited it all in a Free States Energy Trust Fund that would pay out an annual dividend to every adult and child in the region — a no-strings-attached cash transfer of hundreds of dollars per year. The Southern Baptist Convention encouraged its members to tithe their dividend checks directly into new aid societies to help the least fortunate. The most popular charitable cause has been a relief society to aid religious conservatives in the Blue Fed seeking to migrate to the Red Fed.The boom in manufacturing and energy jobs on one side of the border and the guarantee of free government-sponsored education and medical care on the other created an incentive for families to split — with one spouse working (and paying taxes) in the Red Fed and the other, usually with children in tow, collecting benefits in the Blue Fed. (Remo, which pitched its app to investors as “Venmo for remittances,” became the fastest-growing tech company on the Fortune 500.) Sociologists are starting to worry that what they call the “split-family phenomenon” will become a hallmark of 21st-century life in North America, with its effects growing more pronounced as federation policies continue to diverge.Reaction to Blue Fed culture drives much Red Fed governance. When the Blue Fed opened a gleaming new visitor center at Yosemite, the Red Fed moved to privatize all the concessions at Yellowstone. The Blue Fed’s expansive affirmative-action protocols inspired the Red Fed to abolish all HBCU-specific education programs so that primarily white institutions could compete equally for the funds. After Illinois led a Blue Fed initiative to upgrade its rail service, the Red Fed ended all cooperation with Amtrak, even adjusting gauge size along the Mississippi River to prevent passage of passenger trains from one side to another. As a backlash to the Blue Fed’s net-neutrality rule, the Red Fed imposed the Online Fairness Doctrine, which permits internet providers to slow upload and download speeds for content they determined was in violation of “community standards” or that offends a company’s religious beliefs. Across large swaths of the Red Fed, the only way to log into Grindr is via VPN.These culture-war skirmishes instilled a strong sense of Red Fed identity, and the economy was doing so well that few noticed the slow exodus of tech entrepreneurs and high-skilled creative professionals who had once clustered in Austin and North Carolina’s Research Triangle. Only when the Supreme Court ruled that a compact-wide abortion ban did not place an undue burden on reproductive freedom because Red Fed residents could travel for free services in the Blue Fed did it become evident that conservative social policy would impede efforts to diversify the Red Fed economy beyond natural resources and heavy manufacturing. Amazon’s list of candidate cities to house its HQ14 did not include a single one in the Red Fed.Each federation is the other’s largest trading partner, but they increasingly assume the posture of rivals. When the Blue Fed imposed a controversial excise tax on all products or services generated by companies that could not prove they paid their employees at least $18 per hour, the Red Fed saw it as a de facto tariff on its goods. It retaliated by placing its own excise tax on domestic wine, which led the Red Fed to deepen its trade ties with Chile and Argentina. That was a short-term diversion, but prompted a deeper examination of how economically dependent one federation had grown on the other’s internal policies. A Blue Fed requirement that certain freight classes travel only by all-electric truck fleets had nearly doubled the cost of transporting products to the interior west. Frequent work stoppages by West Coast longshoremen emboldened by their labor-friendly administration affirmed a strategy agreed to by titans of Red Fed industry: They needed their own Pacific port.Red Fed leaders negotiated a deal with Mexican authorities for operating control of the Port of Lázaro Cárdenas, in Michoacán state, investing some of its energy trust funds. A new terminal, staffed by American Customs officials, connects directly with a spur of the Kansas City Southern railroad. There, nonunion laborers load ships with minerals mined through the American West, including lithium and soda ash, heading largely to East Asia, and unload bananas and smartphones from Ecuador and China heading for the landlocked states of the Red Fed without ever once passing through Blue Fed territory.And then came the first humanitarian crisis. When the families of West Virginia workers started overloading schools and hospitals across the border in Hagerstown, Maryland, the Blue Fed began to impose residence requirements for many of its social services. That didn’t stop the migrants, but it led them to cluster in border towns as they waited out the six months required for eligibility. The conditions were often dire. Tent cities around Palm Springs saw the first American measles outbreak in a generation, and in the Spokane bidonvilles, dozens of children froze to death during a harsh winter.Those tragedies set off a reckoning that has prompted an identity crisis for the Blue Fed’s leaders and citizens. On one side, fiscal experts say the Nordic-style welfare state that the Blue Fed has established is unsustainable if it just ends up as an unchecked provider of services to some of the Red Fed’s neediest cases. On the other side, some of the progressive activists who played crucial roles building early support for the health-care compact argue that the Blue Fed has an obligation to promote its values even beyond its borders. The debate rages across the region: What obligation do they have to other Americans who have democratically chosen to pursue a very different way of life?The federations had a gentlemen’s agreement not to drag federal authorities into their disagreements, but the nature of their conflicts made that impossible. Once the Blue Fed declared itself a “sanctuary region” and invited undocumented immigrants elsewhere in the United States to seek refuge, Red Fed leaders threatened to erect internal border controls on state lines. The Blue Fed backed down, publicly revoking its invitation, but only after the Red Fed agreed to jointly lobby Congress to create a series of regionally restricted work visas.The federal government remains the enforcer of the country’s citizenship laws, agent of its foreign affairs, controller of its national defense, and manager of its monetary policy. But it grew increasingly impossible to perform any of those roles neutrally, and many of the country’s democratic institutions were not designed to balance the competing interests of two geopolitical rivals.When the Federal Reserve raised interest rates to stop the Red Fed’s economy from overheating, it pushed the rest of the country into recession, prompting the Great Lakes to lead the first successful campaign to have the Federal Reserve Board removed from office. When Hurricane Rigoberto came through the Gulf of Mexico, leaving large portions of Houston underwater for months — the first trillion-dollar natural disaster, at least when the cost of the subsequent malaria outbreak is included — the Red Fed demanded a bailout from the federal government. Blue Fed politicians said it would be “moral hazard” to do so, given that most of the damage was traced to a Red Fed decision to privatize the Houston Ship Channel and entrust the buyer, a Qatari sovereign-wealth fund, with upkeep of the Galveston Seawall and the levee networks of surrounding southeastern Texas counties.The Pentagon lost its authority to act as a nonaligned arbiter of the national interest. Once cartels seized control of the Red Fed’s Mexican container port, taking hostage 17 retired Texas Rangers working on a private security force, the Defense secretary mobilized West Coast National Guard units to support an Army Rapid Deployment Force, along with Marines and Navy seals. Oregon’s governor balked, announcing that he would not permit his troops to “be used as muscle for the Red Fed’s imperial adventures.” The Supreme Court ruled that National Guard units had to follow the commander-in-chief’s orders, and the Oregon guardsmen headed south, but the incident polarized foreign-policy positions in new ways. When, months later, intelligence agencies issued a report pinning the crash of the western renewable-energy grid on a North Korean cyberattack, Red Fed cities saw some of their largest mass protests in years, all against a rush to war. Nearly 100,000 people gathered in Indianapolis’s Monument Circle, chanting “No blood for solar.” By the time of the South China Sea Crisis, Congress had grown so paralyzed along federation lines that it was impossible to assemble a majority in favor of any declaration of war.Leaders overseas have become eager to exploit what they see as the United States’s political weakness. As concerns about climate change have grown more dire, other countries have become intent on punishing dissenters from the international order, and the Red Fed is now a global villain. The European Union agreed to pre-clear for entry all crops produced under the Blue Fed’s GMO-free agriculture policy, while Red Fed imports are subjected to a lengthy and costly quarantine. China announced most-favored-region trade policies that would give Blue Fed exporters an advantage over domestic rivals when selling into the Chinese market.These trade-related conflicts squeeze Illinois, which wants to export Caterpillar tractors to China under favorable conditions but lags behind West Coast and New England states in transitioning to GMO-free agriculture. Although a founding member of the Blue Fed, Illinois at times felt geographically isolated, surrounded by Red Fed or neutral states. Illinois withdrew from the Blue Fed and helped to form the Great Lakes Federation, which stretches from Philadelphia to Des Moines and up to Duluth, with a permanent capital in Chicago. As the 20-year judicial truce is about to expire, the Midwest controls the balance of power in a Congress that may be forced by the Supreme Court to revisit some of its earliest assumptions about returning power to the states.There is another real-life contemporary example of a semi-secession: Brexit. It, too, began as little more than a thought experiment. What if we could reject a far-off governing structure that no longer seems responsive to our interests in favor of local authority that can more closely match our aspirations and sense of identity as a people? There must have been something thrilling about getting to cast a vote for self-determination.Yet those who are now forced to make that reverie real are pulling back from their former self-confidence about it. Just last week, the Tory official serving as Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union admitted he “hadn’t quite understood the full extent” to which British commerce was “particularly reliant on the Dover-Calais crossing,” and that new trade barriers could impact the availability of consumer goods in stores. Instead of just leaving Europe, as he encouraged his compatriots to do during the 2016 campaign, Dominic Raab now insists on “a bespoke arrangement on goods which recognizes the peculiar, frankly, geographic, economic entity that is the United Kingdom.”As it was for a majority of Britons, it is easier to imagine breaking up the United States than figuring out how to make it work — whether through bold new policies or merely a functioning version of consensus politics. The seeming inelasticity of our system of governance also guarantees a security and predictability that we take for granted. Some of the lessons Europe is being taught under the stress of the Brexit crisis — that a single currency requires a unified economy, or that a lack of internal borders can’t work if no one can agree on what should happen at the outer one — are ones Americans might better learn from fantasy than from experience.