The New York Times ran a long feature this month on Americans who want out. Anna Griffin, the paper’s Pacific Northwest bureau chief, walked through movements stretching across the country and into Canada: a progressive Cascadia effort in the Northwest, the Greater Idaho campaign, Alberta’s coming referendum, and activists in Texas, California, and New Mexico. Her framing was straightforward. The conversation is real now, it runs across the usual left-right divide, and the people in it feel unrepresented enough to talk openly about redrawing the map.
That a paper of record treated the subject as a serious, live question is its own kind of news. The more telling moment came when someone outside the movement sat down to react to it.
Brion McClanahan is a historian who writes on the Constitution and federalism and serves as president of the Abbeville Institute. He hosts a daily show built on one instruction: think locally, act locally. When the Times piece landed, he spent the better part of an hour working through it on air, paragraph by paragraph. And when he reached for the cleanest way to frame the whole debate, he reached for a question Daniel Miller has been asking for years.
His words: “I love the fact that Daniel Miller. One of the questions that he asks people is, hey look, everything you know now, would you join the United States today? … Most people say, no, I wouldn’t join the United States now. So why are we suffering? Why are we tolerating it? It’s the question.”
He called it the question, with the definite article, after working through movements that ran clear across the political spectrum. A credentialed historian, on his own, told a national audience that the Texas reframe is the one that cuts to the center of it.
Here is the question as Miller actually poses it, in full:
“If your state were already a self-governing independent nation in every respect, with control over your own border and immigration, your own monetary and taxation policy, your own military and defense, everything that 200 other self-governing nations control, and instead of talking about withdrawing you were being asked whether you wanted to give up that control and join the union, knowing everything you know about the federal government today, would you vote to join? And if the answer is no, then why would you tolerate staying one second longer than you have to?”
The framing matters because it removes an inherited assumption, that the current arrangement is the natural and permanent one. It asks Texans to look at the federal government as it actually operates today and decide whether they would choose to join it. The burden lands on the status quo, where it belongs. Most people, asked the question honestly, give the same answer. They would not sign up for this.
The mention was not arranged. The Texas Nationalist Movement did not place the Times feature, and no one wrote McClanahan’s script. He picked the Texas argument from a union-wide field on his own because it is the sharpest version available. Texas has been making this case in plain language for years, while much of the country was still debating whether the subject was even permitted in polite company. Now the conversation is catching up, and the people catching up keep arriving at the question Texas has been asking the whole time.
So consider it directly. Knowing everything you know about the federal government today, would you vote to join the union right now? Watch the full episode above and sit with it. If your honest answer is the one most people land on, it is time to be counted.
