America B didn’t want to secede territorially from the United States. Rather, it wanted to deconstruct federal power. As a result, the United States pushed the rewind button and, in some sense, went all the way back to 1781. The Trump administration began to undo the ties that bound the country together, and we very quickly became less than the sum of our parts. The so-called red states, unshackled from federal requirements, went their own way. Liberal East Coast and West Coast states, appalled by the hijacking of federal authority for the ultimate purpose of undermining federal authority, tried to hold onto constitutional values as they understood them. It didn’t take long— in fact, the pundits regularly commented on the blinding speed of the process—for the failure of the larger project of integration to become self-evident. By 2022, the United States existed in name only (and an increasingly ironic one at that).

John Feffer, “The Deconstruction of America, 2016–2050”