It's Time for Americans to Start Talking About "Soft Secession"

[mwooldri]

66. If you want to talk about a soft secession....

... then looking at why Brexit happened can teach some lessons to those hoping for such a secession.

While people can say Russian interference played a part, I'd argue that personal identity also played a big part. Many English Brits didn't think of themselves as European - British first, English second, European last. If there was a stronger sense of European identity in the UK, then Brexit may well not have happened. Or even come up in the first place.

While building parallel institutions is helpful, there has to be cultural changes too. The population of any given state would need to identify themselves by the state first, USA second.

I suppose the ultimate in soft secession would be the establishment of a state central bank with a state issued currency with actual physical banknotes. Each State Dollar would initially equal one US Fed Dollar and be backed $ for $. States could then build up gold reserves. Doing this can be a hedge against inflation - if the federal reserve starts printing money and the US $ depreciates significantly then the state dollar can be decoupled and revalued against the US dollar. I bet folks would rather use a state dollar backed by gold or something like that in a case like this.