Published
Texas will become an independent nation, the historian and podcaster Brion McClanahan told his audience this week, and the people organizing for it have already done the hardest part of the work. On the August 25 episode of his show, McClanahan pointed to the effort underway in Texas as the reason a future break could come without upheaval.
“This is why I admire the people in Texas who are really working to try to get the mechanisms in place, the apparatus in place,” McClanahan said. “So when Texas does at some point become independent, because I think it will at some point, they already have it set. They don’t have to go through real disruption.”
The remark came in the middle of a larger argument. McClanahan was reading from a New York Times essay by Michelle Goldberg, “Why Do We Keep Imagining a New Civil War?”, and from two recent novels it discusses, Kurt Andersen’s “The Breakup” and Emily St. John Mandel’s “Exit Party,” each imagining the United States coming peacefully apart. What caught his attention was who is writing this now. For years, he said, the fiction imagining the future came from people who wanted power gathered in one place. The novels now picturing a peaceful separation, and treating it as something other than a disaster, are coming from the left.
Fiction tends to run ahead of politics, McClanahan argued, surfacing what a society is starting to feel before its politics catch up. He reads the current wave as a sign that the idea of a peaceful separation has moved from the fringe into the mainstream imagination. He rejected the essay’s verdict that a split would be unworkable. “It’s not unworkable,” he said. “We have states, and states can go.”
None of this is new ground for the Texas Nationalist Movement. When Alex Garland’s film “Civil War,” one of the disunion stories McClanahan cites, reached theaters in 2024, the movement’s president, Daniel Miller, devoted a Texas News podcast episode to it, “Civil War” on Screen: A TEXIT Perspective, and read the moment the same way McClanahan reads it now. He had been tracking the pattern longer still. His 2018 book TEXIT gave the idea’s long life in popular culture its own section, from novels to the 2006 television series Jericho to the 2017 film Bushwick. What McClanahan is reacting to is the newest wave of something the movement catalogued years ago.
McClanahan did not name an organization when he praised the work being done in Texas. But the mechanisms he described, the machinery that lets a state leave without chaos, are what the movement has spent two decades building: the model legislation, the party planks, and the public case that turn independence from a slogan into a plan a state could carry out. It read the culture early, and it has spent the years since preparing for the moment. This week a historian, watching from the outside, arrived at the same place.
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