Hey Liberals, Let's Secede (and Get Less Sensitive)
Part I: Secession
Our best chance against right-wing tyranny.
I’m an American liberal, and I want to bring some things to an end. Two things in particular—the American republic and the reign of wokeness in liberal culture. I’m not sure which of those will prove more controversial, but I hope you’ll give me time to make my case.
Let’s start with America. What I want has been called a lot of things—national divorce, blue-state secession, treason—but the overall meaning is the same. I want the United States to be partitioned into two new countries: one for liberals, the other for conservatives. I intend to achieve a mandate for secession through a national referendum, and to help liberals migrate from conservative areas during the separation that follows.
The second pillar of this movement is opposition to leftist extremism on social justice. The politics of wokeness are rooted in liberals’ sensitivity to other people’s pain. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing, but sensitivity becomes toxic when we allow it to overwhelm us. Take the rioting that erupted during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. The empathetic response, we were told, was to let our cities burn and excuse the people who lit them on fire. The CDC pushed mask mandates long after the COVID vaccine came out, because our blind fear made any risk seem intolerable.
Wokeness creates a world of misery, because it undermines our principles in a futile effort to eliminate inequality and pain. But I’ll get into our inner demons in Part II. Part I is about our external demon—the American right.
My desire for secession is motivated by the threat of conservative extremism. The right’s descent into madness is plain to see. It’s harder for us to acknowledge how paralyzed we’ve been in the face of it. We’ve watched our country fall apart while continuing to play by the rules, and I think most of us know it’s not enough. We’re stuck in quicksand and sinking fast; I’m going to argue that secession is our best chance to get free.
Before I continue, a brief note about myself. I’m writing anonymously to shield myself from professional repercussions, but I know online strangers don’t have the best reputation. For now, I’ll justify myself through my ideas. I’m the only person in our political discourse saying anything like this. If I have your attention, I hope you’ll hear me out. I will come forward once I build a platform large enough to protect me from serious financial consequences. Anyway, back to the argument.
Here’s the current situation for the left:
The Electoral College and the Senate allow Republicans to achieve dominance without winning the popular vote. These advantages have enabled their takeover of the Supreme Court. Our society is volatile enough that the right can run insane candidates and still have a chance. When they win, they make it harder for us to retake power through gerrymandering and voter suppression. When we win, the results could be threatened by election deniers and political violence. Even worse, our legislative majorities are never large enough to fully address the inequalities exploited by the right.
So, we have lots of reasons to be depressed. But you knew that. The question is why we should commit to secession in spite of the challenges that come with it.
There is no moderate way to escape a crisis. Every option we have creates unprecedented challenges. The best we can do is review our choices and decide which one inspires the most confidence.
I see three plausible strategies. The first is appealing to conservatives’ better angels, convincing them to moderate through calls for bipartisanship and unity. The second involves finding a way to win big in spite of our electoral disadvantages; if we punish the right with thumping defeats, we can motivate them to change. The third strategy, of course, is secession. We all know what I want, but let’s talk about why.
I’ll start with better angels. An entire parade of Democrats has taken office with appeals to unity and failed to achieve it. Crises that would have brought people together in a functioning society—COVID, Jan. 6—only drove us further apart. Recent history has made it clear that impassioned pleading won’t be enough to deradicalize the right.
Strategy 2 is a little less fantastical; it assumes we could find a political elixir powerful enough to deliver us major victories in a biased system. This boils down to stuff pundits allege the Democrats have been too stupid to try.
Suggestions include less identity politics, anti-racist canvassing, centrist policies, a socialist revolution, wooing Black voters, Latinos, the White working class, or some combination of the above. None of these theories has been successful enough to overrule the others, which tells you something. These endless discussions are premised on a faulty assumption—that our branding is the primary reason for our political difficulties.
This idea has gained traction because it makes us feel less helpless, not because the evidence bears it out. Every election in recent years has been hugely influenced by polarization and economic factors beyond our control. Our actions can guide us to narrow victories, but those aren’t enough to tame the right or create systemic change. For the elixir theory to work, we have to deploy campaign strategies powerful enough to reshape the entire landscape. There is no good reason to believe any strategy of ours could have that impact.
Next to these options, secession is far from a reckless choice. It’s a long shot, but we live in a world where long shots come true—an orange Twitter troll got elected president, and a virus brought our society to its knees. This is a moment in which revolutionary change can happen, but not within the confines of our crumbling institutions.
The conventional strategies aren’t dominant because they inspire hope, but because they feel safer than taking a risk. I want more for our lives than that kind of resignation. Put differently, all we’re doing now is waiting on a miracle. That’s our only chance of success if we pursue inadequate strategies in a broken system. Secession is a miracle we create for ourselves. Our success depends on our ability to create a path outside the establishment and build something new. For all my criticisms of the left, I would still take that bet.
Wokeness is all we hear from every media outlet, professor, and celebrity, but the party line doesn’t reflect who we are. Our deranged new normal is the result of a fringe minority pressuring the rest into silence, and that’s hardly a sustainable arrangement. Underneath the extremism is something worth saving—a coalition that cares about every kind of injustice. This community gave me sanctuary when I needed it, as it has for millions of us. There’s enough potential in that shared history to fuel a renaissance. I trust our bond more than anything else in this broken situation; I see no wiser course than to build our future on its strength.
I view both of my fights—for secession and against wokeness—as part of a common struggle to protect a community I love. We face an uphill climb, but that doesn’t have to make us afraid. My work is fueled by hope that we can create something better than what we were given. As long as that hope persists, we have something to fight for. I don’t want to lose everything we’ve built to right-wing tyranny or our own excesses. If you feel the same way, I think you’ll see why this leap is worth taking, fear be damned.
Part II: Liberal Sensitivity
Or, why our pain is eating us alive.
How sensitivity became our undoing
The greatest test of our morality isn’t how fiercely we fight our enemies, but how capable we are of recognizing darkness within ourselves. Over the past few years, we haven’t been very good at it. I’m writing this because I know we can do better.
In Part II, I’m going to argue that wokeness has eroded our moral strength as liberals. Most of us were drawn to the left because we’re highly sensitive to other people’s pain. We feel the horror of inequality more deeply than most, and it motivates us to fight back. But any positive quality can lead us into toxic behavior under the right circumstances. In this case, our sensitivity has been poisoned by the political climate.
Our country has become more extreme, and we’ve become more aware of injustice in our society—a combination that means we feel more than we can handle. Consumed by our emotions, we’ve made inequality the sole focus of our lives. We can’t stand knowing how helpless we are, and that pain is intense enough to keep us from seeing anything else. All other moral concerns have been eclipsed by our anguish.
This is why we pursue our ideals into extremism. COVID safety measures resulted in endless masking and school closures. Police reform has been replaced by prison abolition. Questioning any part of transgender ideology makes you a fascist. At this point, we no longer care about the ethics and consequences of our actions. We pride ourselves on being the good guys, but we’ve sacrificed our morality to fuel an all-consuming rage.
We don’t have to accept the dominance of our pain. I want to propose a moral framework that gives us a way out. The first step is understanding how we got here.
The need for restraint
There’s a difference between being sensitive and making sensitivity the center of your moral compass. As liberals, we’ve chosen the latter. We believe that decency is defined by how much you care. Our bleeding hearts make us feel like good people, so we imagine it must be true. I see things differently. Kind intentions don’t make you a good person—your ability to restrain yourself does.
I define restraint as the discipline of keeping control over your feelings. It is the most powerful tool we have for staying anchored to our morality during difficult circumstances.
The need for restraint comes from our own monstrosity. People aren’t all bad, but all of us break under the right circumstances. Human beings at their worst are terrifying creatures. We’re destructive enough that our most urgent moral duty is fighting off our own impulses. Restraint empowers us to accomplish that.
Our emotions are the key to our corruption. Our worst decisions happen when we’re so consumed by our feelings, we no longer care about what’s right. All we can see are our desires and urges, burning to be fulfilled. Practicing self-control is our best chance to stop our emotions from overwhelming us. Restraint gives us the strength to conquer our darkest instincts, which makes it our highest moral obligation.
In contrast, embracing sensitivity ultimately brings us unhappiness. If your primary focus is how much you feel for others or yourself, your emotions rule your mind. When your feelings are more powerful than reason or morality, they will overwhelm you during hard times.
This allows your wounds to poison your soul. No part of your mind is strong enough to hold back your emotions, so pain can consume you entirely. Without a bigger picture beyond your wounds, you become numb to every other part of your life. You lose yourself in that numbness, and your self-destruction turns into destruction of the world around you. No one should have to fall so far.
This is where we find ourselves now. As liberals, we’ve placed our feelings at the forefront of our identity. When we faced trials like Trump and COVID, nothing kept us from being eaten alive by our pain. We’ve always thought caring was an unambiguously good thing because it stems from kind intentions. The truth is that liberal sensitivity is a feeling, and our feelings have nothing to do with the moral character of our actions.
Being sensitive to someone’s pain can motivate any number of things—excusing their sins, smothering them, abusing anyone seen as a threat. Caring about someone doesn’t mean you’ll do right by them or the rest of the world—acting on principle does. We achieve decency by making choices that align with our morals rather than our feelings.
This is the other side to restraint; controlling our emotions gives us the presence of mind to follow a moral compass. I’d like to introduce one here. I call it the MIRRORS framework.
Introducing MIRRORS
MIRRORS is an acronym, with each letter representing a value that we’ve lost to wokeness. These values, taken together, reflect that living an upright life is more nuanced than it seems. There’s a lot more to doing the right thing than being concerned about inequality. Every principle of MIRRORS is a part of our humanity, and we lose something sacred if we abandon these values for social justice. My hope is that this framework will give us the strength to live through pain without losing ourselves in it.
The letters in MIRRORS stand for the following: M—Morality, I—Individualism, R—Risk, R—Resilience, O—Observance, R—Restraint, S—Surrender. I’ll begin with the first three values, which form a foundation for achieving justice in our society.
M+I+R: Preserving human dignity
As liberals, we seek more than anything to create a just world. Morality, individualism, and risk reflect how we’re doomed to failure if we disregard our principles out of anger. Each of these values is crucial to preserving human dignity; without it, our dreams of justice will remain permanently out of reach. I’ll begin my argument with morality.
We’ve abandoned morality as an ideal on the left—what you do is no longer as important as your circumstances. The “privileged” are viciously attacked for any sin, no matter how imaginary. When people are seen as sufficiently oppressed, everything is forgiven. They’re in pain, so how could we possibly hold them to any standards?
Conserving a moral code means that our actions must have consequences. These include facing punishment, judgment, and the anger of people we’ve hurt. What’s important is that no one deserves a free pass for cruelty because they feel bad about it afterwards.
If a person’s humanity is sacred, mistreating them should come with a cost. The gravity of that cost makes our moral commitment real. We honor the importance of every person’s pain through the strength of that commitment. When we enforce moral norms in society, we use the power of our collective voice to honor our fellow citizens’ pain. This is the justice all of us deserve. Morality also offers dignity to perpetrators by facilitating redemption. The only way someone can fully own the weight of their sin is by accepting that they deserve to pay for it.
Our morality is undermined by prison abolition, liberal eagerness to justify BLM riots, and all other efforts to eliminate consequences for misconduct. We’ll never build a just society until we value a person’s actions more highly than their identity.
Individualism looks at that same idea from a different perspective. It involves defining people by their character as individuals rather than the groups they belong to. Under woke culture, every person’s worth is determined by factors outside their control. If someone hasn’t suffered enough for our liking, we judge them as “privileged.” We treat the “privileged” with suspicion and contempt; they become punching bags for people looking to vent their anger about inequality. This is pathetic and betrays our most cherished principles.
As liberals, our best quality is our belief in the equal worth of every individual. Who are we without it? Our obsession with privilege has obscured the truth—your circumstances don’t make you more or less human than anyone else. This should be what determines status in our community. If we’re all equally human, we deserve an equal chance to prove ourselves based on character. No one should be denied the dignity of earning respect for who they are. Giving every person that opportunity uplifts humanity and brings us closer to justice.
Individualism is an antidote to cancel culture and the obsession with identity that grips liberal spaces. Risk, the last value of this section, pertains to COVID. It’s a topic you can’t miss on a grand tour of liberal overreach. This one is particularly charged, so let’s get into it.
We will never be able to give ourselves a life of guaranteed safety. We’re all more helpless than we’d like to think, and we can’t control what the world takes from us. That’s an unavoidable part of being human, and acknowledging it doesn’t have to be crippling.
Experiences like COVID force us to face our own vulnerability, but our lives are made up of more than that. Even when we’re scared, we still have our agency. By using it to create happiness for ourselves, we can find redeeming features in the worst of times. The pursuit of happiness is never without risk, which brings us to our current predicament. Taking risks in a dangerous world is hard, but it’s how we build a life with enough joy to outshine the darkness. Living memorably is the only thing that outweighs the pain of what we can’t control.
Our unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness is grounded in risk tolerance. That right is weakened when people reduce our world to its dangers, fueling panic. Life shouldn’t be overshadowed by fear, and anyone magnifying the latter is unworthy of your trust.
R+O: Overcoming adversity
The fourth and fifth MIRRORS values, resilience and observance, allow us to stop adversity from defining our lives. Both involve altering our perspective during moments when darkness threatens to overwhelm us. These qualities represent an alternative to the fatalism that dominates liberal culture.
We’re desperate to be sensitive to others’ plight, so we treat pain as an all-powerful force. We’ve decided the only acceptable response to pain is validation, which makes it impossible to say that anything matters more. This is why we allow victimhood to override our morals, and why we act more depressed than people living in developing countries.
Resilience allows us to weaken pain’s hold by reframing our view of reality—our suffering doesn’t have to define us. We believe otherwise, because pain is so searing that it distorts every aspect of our lives. The good parts seem less than real, and the awful parts confirm our worst suspicions. None of them are true. Your wounds don’t reflect how good life can make you feel, because the world contains much more than what hurt you.
The key to resilience is keeping hold of that, even in the grips of sadness. This allows you to start appreciating good things again, rather than discounting them. Once you learn to see beyond your pain, it can’t define you. Cultivating this skill isn’t easy; we can start by building a culture around resilience rather than the all-powerful nature of pain.
Observance helps us cope with the uncertainty we face after a painful experience. I define this principle as a secular faith in the presence of goodness in the world. Hardship makes us question if things can ever be good again; it’s not easy to believe when everything around you suggests otherwise. Goodness might be uncertain, but it is a real part of the human experience. Joy can visit us as easily as pain, so our faith deserves all the strength of our fears.
Words like observance and faith are the best way I can describe trusting in something greater than yourself without guarantees. We need that kind of trust to keep from getting mired in darkness. When you’re going through a hard time, observance gives you something to fight for. It allows you to see your pain within the larger context that things can change.
Modern-day liberalism is marked by its faithlessness. We don’t believe in anything higher than our own outrage, so darkness is all we see in the world. That hopelessness fuels the extremism of woke zealots; morals don’t matter when you think you have nothing to lose. As liberals, we deserve better than a cult mentality pulling us into a downward spiral. Observance empowers us to find our way out.
R+S: Resisting sensitivity
The last MIRRORS values, restraint and surrender, address how our sensitivity to injustice can drive us towards extremism. Restraint is an old friend of ours. It helps us control our emotions, because we forget about right and wrong when feelings overload our senses. Surrender gives us the courage to face hard truths about things we can’t change.
Inequality is a concrete, undeniable part of our present. That means our institutions will inevitably reflect gaps between demographic groups. The only way to eliminate that problem immediately is to destroy our institutions, and that’s exactly what woke activists want. You can see it in their attacks on the SAT and every other indicator of merit in our schools. Our education system isn’t worthy of that name if we no longer care what our kids know. The militants are unconcerned, too busy lauding themselves for making the world more equal.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen assaults of this kind on all of our institutions. This destructive behavior fundamentally compromises our ability to achieve justice; a hollowed-out, dysfunctional society is incapable of achieving anything that matters.
Surrender reflects the futility of abandoning all other ideals in the name of reducing inequality. We can’t wave a wand and make injustice go away, and we don’t deserve to hold ourselves responsible for it. Surrendering to stubborn realities might feel passive, but I see it quite differently. There is no overstating the relief of freeing yourself from the emotional blackmail that defines liberal culture. Doing so allows you to conserve your agency for the fights that matter most. Acting from that position of strength gives us a chance at achieving justice.
The conclusion! You made it :)
I created the MIRRORS framework to help liberals break away from the woke left. If you’ve made it this far, you’ve probably had misgivings for a while. But doubts aren’t the same as having the courage to end things; it isn’t easy to trust your instincts over propaganda and intense social pressure. My hope is that MIRRORS will provide logical and moral backing for liberals trying to escape this abusive relationship.
Leaving wokeness behind doesn’t mean abandoning our identity as liberals. I believe that liberalism, at its best, is defined by accountability. MIRRORS helps us stay true to that by ensuring we don’t disregard principles for identity. It doesn’t excuse casual bigotry, men acting like pigs, or any of the other vices that flourished under pre-woke liberalism.
What MIRRORS represents, along with secession, is a chance to create options for ourselves that this society hasn’t given us. We don’t have to play by the rules of a broken political system. We don’t have to choose between Trumpism and wokeness. Knowing we have that power makes hope a real thing. I believe we can create a left-wing society grounded in MIRRORS. It would be my greatest honor if you gave me your faith.