There was no talk of blue-state secession on Election Night 2024, as there was so prevalently in 2016, when #Calexit trended on Twitter (fueled, it later turned out, by Russian bots), and a sitting California congresswoman said that “rational people, not the fringe” were looking at breaking up the union in response to Donald Trump’s election. Few “rational” people are looking at that now, partly because the past eight years have made it abundantly clear that our divisions do not map neatly onto state borders or even regions. Rural-urban divides, ideological fractures within communities, and polarized personal relationships complicate the idea of secession in a way that wasn’t nearly as true during previous national crises, like the Civil War. We live with and among one another, intricately—and for now, inextricably—entangled.

Given that, secession does not seem like a productive strategy for dealing with Trump’s return. The last thing we need is a Trump ennobled by the chance to play at being Abraham Lincoln. That would only give him exactly what he wants: an excuse to use federal troops against “the enemy within.” There are innumerable items of higher priority—safeguarding what little remains of constitutional limits on the presidency, organizing to protect vulnerable populations, reenvisioning and rebuilding the Democratic Party from the ground up.

But when things start to get ugly—as we should have no doubt they will, despite Trump’s muted tone on election night—state resistance to the abuse of federal power needs to be an option on the table, both theorized and executed in more than the scattershot way that defined the response of Democratic state leaders to the first Trump presidency. Consider the darkest days of spring 2020, when the Trump Administration abdicated its responsibility to mount an organized response to the pandemic and a handful of Democratic governors formed multistate alliances to coordinate the purchase of personal protective equipment and the institution of lockdown policies. Absent direction from the federal government, it made sense for like-minded states to work together rather than go it alone. Some even resorted to smuggling medical masks and gloves into the country to avoid confiscation by federal authorities. These alliances, though temporary and informal, could come in handy when another crisis hits and the states need to compensate for the vacuum in national leadership—or even directly confront abuses of federal power. It makes sense to start building such partnerships now.

I suspect secession will define the left’s reaction to the new Trump era in a different way, and that is what we might call personal secession—withdrawal from the noise pollution of national politics, renewed commitment to tending one’s garden. Rather than a physical withdrawal, we might witness a more internal, psychological withdrawal from the very ideals of national unity or patriotism that once felt so central to American identity. People may reject national narratives that feel hollow or no longer resonate with their lived realities. This kind of secession could mean investing more energy in community-building, local organizing, or initiatives that improve life close to home, bypassing any reliance on federal intervention or approval.

There is a rich tradition behind such a move. In his essay on civil disobedience, written during the Mexican-American War, Henry David Thoreau asked why so many of his fellow Massachusetts residents, appalled by the federal government’s efforts to expand slavery, were “petitioning the State to dissolve the Union.” Thoreau thought that was unnecessary: “Why do they not dissolve it themselves—the union between themselves and the State—and refuse to pay their quota into the treasury?”

Shortly after Trump’s first inauguration, the writer Kevin Baker proposed in The New Republic a blue-state tax boycott: an organized refusal by Democratic states, which contribute far more to federal coffers than Republican states, to prop up a federal system that feels unresponsive or even antagonistic to liberal values. While an organized boycott never gained traction, there are other ways for individuals to dissolve the union between themselves and the state or the nation. Some form of personal secession may end up being the left’s most viable response, not in opposition to the union itself, but as a recommitment to remaking American society one neighborhood at a time. We will not be able to reclaim or rescue the country as a whole anytime soon. It might be that the best we can do is make our own streets and cities a little better, gentler, more caring, cooperative, and connected than they were before. The old-time Resistance has clearly run its course. Whatever takes its place will not be broadcast on MSNBC. The most effective resistance might be investing in things that Trump’s rhetoric tries to delegitimize: community solidarity, mutual aid, and bottom-up organizing. As each initiative grows, as each local success is carved out from the chaos, it represents another step away from the old illusions of a united country and toward something more stable, grounded, and real.

We would also do well to let go once and for all of the smarmy depiction of American history boosted by the feel-good rhetoric that accompanied Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign, a success that sowed unreasonable expectations and left a high we are now paying for with a long national hangover. The rah-rah take on the national past has never rung hollower than it did on the morning after Trump’s reelection. “We are a nation that has always emerged from a crucible with its ideals intact and often toughened and sharpened,” The New York Times editorialized. It is a sentence impossible to gloss, with not a single word bearing a concrete and stable meaning, the whole immediately contradicted by the summoning up of any particular example. Is that what happened after the Civil War? After Vietnam? Trump’s first term? It is not clear to me what such a blinkered account is supposed to do, how it is supposed to help.

2016 was disorienting. 2024 is clarifying. Trump’s loss in the popular vote the first time around staved off the kind of true national reckoning his ascension ought to have provoked. We were at liberty to treat him as an outlier, a usurper. We can no longer harbor illusions about what kind of country we have, what debasements a majority of its voters are willing to countenance. Now America is “going to go through some things,” as Trump once said of an underling who refused to do his bidding. It will be a long four years, but I’m trying to see this moment as an opportunity—an invitation to abandon the wish to awaken from the nightmare that is history.