Joel Thrasymachus Dahl

Authorities have no idea how many deer the Berry family and their associates illegally killed in the fields and forests of southern Missouri over the past decade, but the details of their poaching operation would make any animal lover’s stomach turn.

Over nearly nine years, David Berry and his two sons, David Berry Jr. and Kyle Berry, killed the deer, mostly at night, then cut off their heads and antlers — leaving the bodies to rot where they fell.

There was financial motivation in the carnage, but authorities said collecting the deer heads was mostly about ego.

“Taking just the heads is their version of obtaining a ‘trophy’ and leaving the carcass behind is merely an afterthought," Randy Doman, division chief of the Missouri Department of Conservation, told the Springfield News-Leader. "While there are some cases where poachers go after the antlers for profit, with this bunch it was more about the thrill of the kill itself.”

And so when the Berrys and more than a dozen other poachers were ultimately sentenced, Lawrence County Judge Robert George apparently hoped a little Disney magic would show one of them the error of his ways.

According to court records obtained by the News-Leader, David Berry Jr. “is to view the Walt Disney movie ‘Bambi,’ with the first viewing being on or before December 23, 2018, and at least one such viewing each month thereafter, during Defendant’s incarceration in the Lawrence County Jail.”

Berry Jr. will be in jail for a year.

In a scene that has traumatized generations of children, Bambi’s mother directs him to a patch of new spring grass before a sound startles her.

“Bambi, quick. The thicket,” she urges as the two try to sprint to safety amid the sounds of gunshots. “Faster! Faster, Bambi! Don’t look back! Keep running! Keep running!"

As David Berry Jr. will undoubtedly learn, those are the last words Bambi’s anthropomorphic mother utters.

Although there are restrictions, judges generally have leeway to impose conditions on a sentence, like anger management classes or drug treatment — and sometimes they get creative.

For example, in 2008, a Cleveland Housing Court judge ordered a landlord convicted of multiple violations to serve house arrest in one of his own dilapidated units. Two people who vandalized a nativity scene in an Ohio town were ordered to walk through the streets of Fairport Harbor with a donkey and a sign reading “Sorry for the jackass offense.”

It is unclear why Berry Jr. was singled out to watch the 76-year-old Disney movie ad nauseam. In total, the other co-conspirators faced a litany of charges and paid nearly $200,000 in bonds and fines and served 33 days in jail, according to the Department of Conservation.

All the Berrys had their hunting, fishing and trapping privileges revoked for life.

Berry Jr.'s family members have also been accused of catching fish by hand, an often illegal process that can be dangerous to both fishermen and fish populations.

If a judge decides to get creative with those sentences, there are many, many options from which to choose.

Read more:

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Baby bison dies after Yellowstone tourists put it in their car because it looked cold

The year is 2019. California’s new governor, Gavin Newsom, recently elected on a platform that included support for the creation of a single-payer health-care system, now must figure out how to enact it. A prior nonpartisan analysis priced it at $400 billion per year — twice the state’s current budget. There appears to be no way to finance such a plan without staggering new taxes, making California a magnet for those with chronic illnesses just as its tax rates send younger, healthier Californians house-hunting in Nevada and big tech employers consider leaving the state.

But Newsom is not alone. Other governors have made similar promises, and Newsom calls together the executives of the most ideologically like-minded states — Oregon, Washington, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland. What if they banded to create a sole unified single-payer health-care system, spreading risk around a much larger pool of potential patients while creating uniformity across some of the country’s wealthiest states?

Fifteen end up forming an interstate compact, a well-established mechanism for working together, explicitly introduced in the Constitution. They sketch out the contours of a common health-care market: a unified single-payer regime with start-up costs funded in part by the largest issue ever to hit the municipal-bond market. The governors agree, as well, on a uniform payroll tax and a new tax on millionaires and corporations set to the same rate with revenues earmarked for health-care costs. The Trump administration has already proved willing to grant waivers to states looking to experiment beyond the Affordable Care Act’s standards — primarily for the benefit of those seeking to offer plans on their exchanges with skimpier coverage. But the states can’t act unilaterally: The Supreme Court has ruled that Congress must approve establishment of any compact claiming authority that previously resided with the federal government.

Newsom pressures his friend House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi to introduce a bill that would give the compact all federal money that flows into its constituent states for health-care costs. Pelosi’s members from Arizona and Florida balk at the proposal, which they fear would enable their states’ Republican governors to gut Obamacare protections. But there are scores more from states looking to join the compact, and their governors marshal Democratic House delegations into a bloc. The bill passes the House, with the support of tea-party Republicans eager to strike a blow against federal power.

When it reaches the Senate, the initiative comes from Republicans. In 2011, then–Texas governor Rick Perry championed a Health Care Compact Alliance, joined by eight other states seeking a “regulatory shield” against the Affordable Care Act and full control over their Medicare and Medicaid funds. By the time the Democratic bill passes the House, current Texas governor Greg Abbott has rallied more than 20 states, including North Carolina, Missouri, and Arizona, for a new version of the Health Care Compact. He also has the support of two prominent senators, Ted Cruz and Majority Whip John Cornyn. Republicans who had promised for nearly a decade to repeal and replace Obamacare can finally deliver on the promise — for 40 percent of the country.

The president sees opportunity, too. While running for president, Donald Trump called himself “Mr. Brexit,” a boast tied to his apocryphal claim of having accurately predicted the British vote to leave the European Union. Now he’s convinced, thanks largely to a Fox & Friends chyron reading BIGGER THAN BREXIT?, that an even more significant world-historical accomplishment is within reach. Trump lobbies Pelosi and Mitch McConnell to combine their bills. Trump beams at the Rose Garden signing ceremony, calling it “the biggest deal ever” as he goads Pelosi and McConnell into an awkward handshake. Historians will later mark it as the first step in our nation’s slow breakup, the conscious uncoupling of these United States.

Let’s just admit that this arranged marriage isn’t really working anymore, is it? The partisan dynamic in Washington may have changed, but our dysfunctional, codependent relationship is still the same. The midterm results have shown that Democrats have become even more a party of cities and upscale suburbs whose votes are inefficiently packed into dense geographies, Republicans one of exurbs and rural areas overrepresented in the Senate. The new Congress will be more ideologically divided than any before it, according to a scoring system developed by Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica: the Republicans more conservative, the Democrats more liberal.

Come January, we are likely to find that we’ve simply shifted to another gear of a perpetual deadlock unlikely to satisfy either side. For the past eight years, there has been no movement toward goals with broad bipartisan support: to fund new infrastructure projects, or for basic gun-control measures like background checks or limits on bump stocks. Divided party control of Capitol Hill will make other advances even less likely. For the near future, the boldest policy proposals are likely to be rollbacks: Democrats angling to revert to a pre-Trump tax code, Republicans to repeal Obama’s health-care law. By December 7, Congress will have to pass spending bills to avoid a government shutdown. Next March looms another deadline to raise the debt ceiling.

Meanwhile, we have discovered that too many of our good-governance guardrails, from avoidance of nepotism to transparency around candidates’ finances, have been affixed by adhesion to norms rather than force of law. The breadth and depth of the dysfunction has even Establishmentarian figures ready to concede that our current system of governance is fatally broken. Some have entertained radical process reforms that would have once been unthinkable. Prominent legal academics on both the left and the right have endorsed proposals to expand the Supreme Court or abolish lifetime tenure for its members, the latter of which has been embraced by Justice Stephen Breyer. Republican senators including Cruz and Mike Lee have pushed to end direct election of senators, which they say strengthens the federal government at the expense of states’ interests.

Policy wonks across the spectrum are starting to rethink the federal compact altogether, allowing local governments to capture previously unforeseen responsibilities. Yuval Levin, a policy adviser close to both Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio, wrote in 2016 that “the absence of easy answers is precisely a reason to empower a multiplicity of problem-solvers throughout our society, rather than hoping that one problem-solver in Washington gets it right.” In a recent book, The New Localism, center-left urbanists Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak exalt such local policy innovation specifically as a counterweight to the populism that now dominates national politics across the Americas and Europe.

Even if they don’t use the term, states’ rights has become a cause for those on the left hoping to do more than the federal government will. Both Jacobin and The Nation have praised what the latter calls “Progressive Federalism.” San Francisco city attorney Dennis Herrera has called it “the New New Federalism,” a callback to Ronald Reagan’s first-term promise to reduce Washington’s influence over local government. “All of us need to be reminded that the federal government did not create the states; the states created the federal government,” Reagan said in his 1981 inaugural address. At the time, Democrats interpreted New Federalism as high-minded cover for a strategy of dismantling New Deal and Great Society programs. Now they see it as their last best hope for a just society.

Some states have attempted to enforce their own citizenship policies, with a dozen permitting undocumented immigrants to acquire driver’s licenses and nearly twice as many to allow them to qualify for in-state tuition. Seven states, along with a slew of municipal governments, have adopted “sanctuary” policies of official noncooperation with federal immigration enforcement. Many governors, including Republicans in Massachusetts and Maryland, have refused to deploy National Guard troops to support Trump’s border policies, and California has sued the federal government to block construction of a wall along the Mexican frontier. After the Trump administration stopped defending an Obama-era Labor Department rule to expand the share of workers entitled to overtime pay, Washington State announced it would enforce its own version of the rule and advised its peers to do the same. “It is now up to states to fortify workers through strong overtime protections,” Washington governor Jay Inslee wrote last week.

In California, officials who regularly boast of overseeing the world’s fifth-largest economy have begun to talk of advancing their own foreign policy. After Trump withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, Governor Jerry Brown — he has said “we are a separate nation in our own minds” — crossed the Pacific to negotiate a bilateral carbon-emissions pact with Chinese president Xi Jinping. “It’s true I didn’t come to Washington, I came to Beijing,” said Brown, who is often received like a head of state when he travels abroad. Around the same time, Brown promised a gathering of climate scientists that the federal government couldn’t entirely kill off their access to research data. “If Trump turns off the satellites,” he said, “California will launch its own damn satellite.”

Brown’s successor Newsom comes to office just as Californians may be forced to reckon with how much farther they are willing to take this ethic of self-reliance. Since 2015, a group of California activists have been circulating petitions to give citizens a direct vote on whether they want to turn California into “a free, sovereign and independent country,” which could trigger a binding 2021 referendum on the question already being called “Calexit.”

During the Obama years, it was conservatives who’d previously talked of states’ rights who began toying with the idea of starting their own countries. “We’ve got a great union. There is absolutely no reason to dissolve it,” Rick Perry said at a tea-party rally in 2009, before adding: “But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what may come out of that?” Perry’s lieutenant governor, David Dewhurst, met with members of the Texas Nationalist Movement on the opening day of a legislative session. Right after this year’s midterms, the would-be leaders of the breakaway republics of Texas and California met at a secessionist conference in Dallas.

In 2012, the White House website received secession petitions from all 50 states; Texas’s was the most popular, with more than 125,000 signatures. (A counterpetition demanded that any citizen who signed one of the secession petitions be deported.) Two years later, Reuters found that nearly one-quarter of Americans said they supported the idea of their states breaking away, a position most popular among Republicans and rural westerners.

If we are already living in two political geographies, why not generate a system of government to match?

Liberal regions have tended to go bigger with their secession fantasies: Why spin off one’s own state when you could split the whole country and gain the resources and manpower of like-minded compatriots? After John Kerry’s loss in the 2004 election, a homemade digital graphic migrated across the pre-social internet. On it, the states that had cast their electoral votes for Kerry were labeled “the United States of Canada”; George W. Bush’s became “Jesusland.” After Trump’s victory, those memes graduated into op-eds, including from others who would have to acquiesce in the fantasy. “Is it time for Canada to annex Blue America?” a columnist in the Canadian news magazine Maclean’s asked last year.

The fact that anyone with Photoshop can cogently cleave the country in two is a credit to the hardening of a once-fluid political map. Over half the states have cast their Electoral College votes consistently for one party in every presidential election since 2000. In 2016, those states all picked Senate winners from the same party as their presidential picks as well. But as three British geographers concluded in a 2016 article about spatial polarization, that’s not just a feature of the Electoral College map. Whether measured by county, state, or region, the partisan divide has grown since Bill Clinton’s first election: Red places have grown redder (at least in their presidential votes), blue places bluer. In 1992, 38 percent of Americans lived in “landslide counties,” which went for a presidential candidate by a margin of 20 percentage points or more, the Times has reported; in 2016, the number reached 60 percent.

This partisan homogeneity is shaping state governments too. Thirty-six capitals are now dominated by a single party that controls the governorship along with both houses of a legislature; for the first time in more than a century, only one state legislature in the country, Minnesota’s, will be split between two parties. If we are already living in two political geographies, why not generate a system of government to match?

Or so goes the fantasy. There’s no real groundswell of support for shrinking the United States. Surveys have shown that two-thirds of Californians oppose independence, and not only because the Calexit movement’s lefty critiques of Trump do not align with its righty origins. (A co-founder of the California Independence Campaign, Louis Marinelli, is a former anti-gay-marriage activist who last year sought permanent residence in Russia.) When a candidate from the Alaskan Independence Party, which had been founded with secessionist ambitions, actually won the governorship in 1990, he turned out to be tepid on the question of sovereignty. (Sarah Palin once attended an AIP conference, and her husband, Todd, became a member.) Local movements elsewhere, whether the left-leaning Second Vermont Republic or South Carolina’s right-leaning Third Palmetto Republic, have never transcended stunt. Among institutions, only the Libertarian Party has ever endorsed the position that states should be freely able to secede.

History gives us few examples of successful peaceful secessions. In the ones we do have, national identity rather than ideological differences seem to be at the root of the fissure. (The Confederate States of America would have been a notable anomaly.) When states split in the 20th century, the Australia-based scholars Peter Radan and Aleksandar Pavkovic have pointed out, there were always deep underlying fault lines of language, religion, or ethnicity. None of the three multinational states created between the two world wars — the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, or Czechoslovakia — survived until the end of the 20th century.

Recent votes in Scotland and Quebec have modeled the way that secession in a developed country during years of peace can become just another political question.

Even with widespread fatalism about the American project, there is not an obvious way to dissolve our union. Rewriting the Constitution’s balance of power would require levels of political coordination that seem far beyond the country’s existing leadership. Chances of a civil war are remote, and it is hard to visualize a series of events that could prompt a peaceable dissolution of the union. After the Civil War, the Supreme Court ruled that states have no right to unilaterally secede. The U.N. Charter recognizes the “self-determination of peoples,” but clearly intends the latter to mean well-defined racial or ethnic groups and not, say, a collection of persons who want stronger gun-control measures. Other countries might be wary of recognizing spinoff American states for fear of the precedent. Would China vote to admit California to the United Nations if it set up Tibet or Taiwan to demand the same treatment?

And yet, if the desire to secede were to grow, recent votes in Scotland and Quebec have modeled the way that secession in a developed country during years of peace can become just another political question — one debated relatively civilly, voted on democratically, without attendant allegations of treason or sedition. (Spain’s government has been less forgiving of what it calls an unconstitutional independence referendum held last year in Catalonia.)

There is at least one mechanism by which a sort of soft breakup may be imaginable — and it’s already found within the Constitution. The document introduces the prospect of one state entering into a compact with another. States have created interstate compacts to maintain common standards, like the Driver’s License Compact that 47 DMVs use to exchange knowledge on traffic scofflaws. Most have been used for neighboring jurisdictions to handle common resources, like the Atlantic Salmon Compact that permits New England states to manage fish stocks in the Connecticut River Basin. (Eleven states have signed on to a National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, to disregard the Electoral College, but it would require a number equal to 270 electoral votes to take effect.)

Interstate compacts have rarely been applied to controversial topics. Yet to a paralyzed Congress, and a president without any deeply held views about state-federal relations, they could prove an appealing vehicle to restless factions on both the left and the right. It may be time to take the country apart and put it back together, into a shape that better aligns with the divergent, and increasingly irreconcilable, political preferences of its people — or at least to consider what such a future might look like, if for no other reason than to test our own resolve. An imagined trial separation, if you will. Or perhaps in contemplating a future apart we might stumble upon a few ideas for some new way to live together after all.

So let’s return to our hypothetical spring of 2019. After Governor Newsom’s successful health-care deal, lobbyists and think tanks promote compacts for all their pet issues, and Congress — which would be unable to find bicameral majorities for any other substantive legislation — obliges. The Public Lands and Environmental Compact Act gives the states huge leeway to set environmental regulations and manage national parks on their lands, and the Labor and Workplace Compact Act permits states to draft new workplace and employment standards. There’s a Housing Compact Act, an Immigration Compact Act, and an Agriculture Compact Act, which allows the states to take all the money that would come to their citizens as farm subsidies and food stamps as block grants with the ability to set their own rules. Trump giddily signs them all.

While the states could generate new partnerships for each policy area, they choose to harden their alliances. As they link their safety nets, the Newsom-led states agree to fully synchronize their tax codes so that they could end a race-to-the-bottom competition for residents and companies. Once they do, Nevada pulls out from the compact, unwilling to implement an income tax on its citizens. Washington, on the other hand, quickly amends its state constitution to permit an income tax for the first time.

Seeking his own symbol of integration, Abbott unveils the new Free States Open-Carry Permit, along with new laws ensuring the right to bear arms in schools, churches, and government buildings across his alliance. Newsom and Abbott jointly lobby Congress to grant them the right to manage the Social Security funds generated by workers in their regions. Abbott wants to allow citizens to control their retirement portfolio, while Newsom wants to experiment with moving some trust-fund money from the Treasury bonds to new public-investment vehicles that will support climate-friendly technology.

To kick off the Federation Era, the two governors meet on the steps of the United States Supreme Court for a photo op. Shaking hands, the men and their attorneys general pledge not to support any legal challenge to the other’s authority for two decades. All sides have an interest in permitting their new experiment to play out for a while without any unnecessary uncertainty from the courts. The states can’t stop others from suing over the constitutionality of their moves, but they want to send a message to a conservative Supreme Court that state officials are channeling the political will of 250 million Americans, all with Congress’s express consent.

The most vocal opposition comes from fixtures of the Washington, D.C., Establishment and permanent bureaucracy, which fear a permanent loss of power. Both Fox News and MSNBC, on the other hand, herald the New Era of Good Feelings. For the first time ever, Gallup records three in four Americans declaring themselves satisfied with the way things are going in the United States — a supermajority that cuts across partisan and demographic divides.

Over the first two decades of the Federation Era, the alliances remained relatively stable, with only occasional changes in state status. Virginia quit the Progressive Federation of America early because it felt it would lose leverage to defend the interests of the federal employees who live there. Montana nearly pulled out of the Alliance of Free States when it looked like it might be forced to abandon its closed-shop work rules to match its right-to-work sister states. Florida’s internal politics are driven by perpetual debate over whether the state stood to benefit by joining either federation; Alaska no longer has a Democratic Party and Republican Party but has entirely realigned along a Pro-Fed and Anti-Fed axis.

The states that did not join a federation remained governed by Washington, where largely status-quo policies from the early-21st-century remain in place. Some are in the neutral zone, as it is known, owing to principled independent-mindedness (New Hampshire), some by ideological paralysis (Wisconsin), and some because they are happy setting their own rules (Delaware). Power, however, resides in the neutral zone. Since each of the two federations cast Electoral College votes as a bloc, by tacit understanding, any viable national candidate has to hail from the unaffiliated states. (After producing four in a row, Maine changed its official slogan to “Mother of Vice-Presidents.”) Yet with the Legislative and Executive branches largely hobbled from policy-making for much of the country, this offers minor satisfaction. It is said to be a bleak joke around the White House that the only job of the president in peacetime is to inquire daily about the health of the Supreme Court’s oldest member.

By 2038, the Progressive Federation of America is being run from a former administrative building on the campus of the University of New Mexico. The federation was initially governed by commissioners appointed by governors and state legislatures. To avoid establishing a permanent bureaucracy, the governors refused to establish a dedicated base, instead rotating its chairmanship across the members for a year at a time. Lobbyists loved having the capital in San Francisco, were less enthused when New York decided it could boost the local economy by chairing its meetings in Buffalo.

The abandoned campus in Albuquerque is an inadvertent monument to one of the Blue Fed’s earliest successes. The federation’s state universities initially integrated to secure basic economies of scope and scale: linking their library collections and banding together in search of greater buying power for their energy needs. After a few years, the states agreed to set in-Fed tuition for all public universities to zero. New Mexico took the boldest step. It dismantled its public-university system after determining it was more efficient to cover travel expenses for New Mexicans studying in California or Colorado than to manage its own schools, even continuing to pay lifetime salaries for its tenured professors when they were placed in jobs at new sister schools. The New Mexico regents decided to deplete the remainder of the university’s $450 million endowment to dramatically increase teacher pay for the state’s primary-school teachers. New Mexico’s public high schools are now seen as some of the country’s finest.

At first, the task of the Federation commissioners was framed as simple technocracy, implementing the will of state governments. They strengthened regulations to protect workers and set a uniform $18 minimum wage across the zone, with some cost-of-living adjustments to raise the sum in New York, San Francisco, and Boston. Federation taxes have steadily risen as federal rates fell to cover its reduced obligations. Many wealthy Blue Fed residents now pay more in annual taxes to the federation than to Washington. The high-quality cradle-to-grave services those taxes fund have come to define existence across the Blue Fed, from guaranteed public preschool to lifelong medical coverage with no co-pays or deductibles, and have incubated a highly skilled workforce and some of the most impressive life-expectancy rates in the world. (Dental care continues to depend on a system of private insurance.) It was a source of pride when the Blue Fed’s generous higher-education system started drawing large numbers of middle-class families to leave southern cities for northern ones.

As soon as one crosses the border into the Alliance of Free States, whether over the Wabash River from Illinois to Indiana, or the grasslands that stretch across the Iowa-Missouri border, the difference between the two federations’ sense of identity becomes immediately visible. A popular decal showing an outline of the Red Fed’s borders — with a column of prairie states rising like an extended middle finger from the clenched fist of Texas — resides on bumpers and car windows as a defiant declaration of a newly defined region’s honor.

Over the first decade of its existence, Red Fed leaders found their purpose unwinding the domestic reforms of Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Barack Obama and with them much of the 20th-century regulatory state. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, and Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration all saw their staffs gutted, left incapable of enforcing whatever rules did remain on the books. An alphabet soup of government agencies, Bill Kristol tweeted, had become a savory bone broth.

The National Labor Relations Board withered in the Red Fed, along with New Deal rules that blocked companies from interfering in employee efforts to win collective-bargaining power. The shift set off a return to the fierce business-labor battles of the Gilded Age, most visible in the emergence of new firms founded by Blackwater and Black Cube alumni, known as the Blackertons, that specialize in aggressive digital surveillance and online-misinformation campaigns against union organizers.

The effective elimination of most environmental and employment regulations proved irresistible to manufacturers. Boeing announced it would stop making capital investments in its Seattle-area factory and begin to shift jet assembly to a new plant in Covington, Kentucky. Factories relocated from China to be closer to the American consumer market and avoid import tariffs. Unemployment in parts of the Red Fed fell below 2 percent and the region briefly reached 5 percent growth — each several times better than Blue Fed indicators — leading conservative economists to praise the Red Miracle.

It was not just manufacturing and resource extraction that boomed in the Red Fed. As soon as the Blue Fed established its single-payer system, medical specialists began taking their practices to states where they wouldn’t be subject to the Regional Health Service’s price controls or rationing. Sloan Kettering now treats New York as little more than an administrative base; the majority of its hospital rooms are in Texas. Johns Hopkins considered closing its medical school when nearly half the faculty decamped en masse to Baylor. Wealthy Blue Fed residents willing to pay out of pocket now invariably travel to Houston when they want an immediate appointment with a specialist of their choice. The arrivals area at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport is packed with chauffeurs from van services run by clinics supported by specializing in such medical tourism.

Auctions of public lands across the interior west, along with the privatization of the Tennessee Valley Authority, generated a quick gusher of cash. Vowing not to let the new government wealth create more bureaucracy, Red Fed leaders deposited it all in a Free States Energy Trust Fund that would pay out an annual dividend to every adult and child in the region — a no-strings-attached cash transfer of hundreds of dollars per year. The Southern Baptist Convention encouraged its members to tithe their dividend checks directly into new aid societies to help the least fortunate. The most popular charitable cause has been a relief society to aid religious conservatives in the Blue Fed seeking to migrate to the Red Fed.

The boom in manufacturing and energy jobs on one side of the border and the guarantee of free government-sponsored education and medical care on the other created an incentive for families to split — with one spouse working (and paying taxes) in the Red Fed and the other, usually with children in tow, collecting benefits in the Blue Fed. (Remo, which pitched its app to investors as “Venmo for remittances,” became the fastest-growing tech company on the Fortune 500.) Sociologists are starting to worry that what they call the “split-family phenomenon” will become a hallmark of 21st-century life in North America, with its effects growing more pronounced as federation policies continue to diverge.

Reaction to Blue Fed culture drives much Red Fed governance. When the Blue Fed opened a gleaming new visitor center at Yosemite, the Red Fed moved to privatize all the concessions at Yellowstone. The Blue Fed’s expansive affirmative-action protocols inspired the Red Fed to abolish all HBCU-specific education programs so that primarily white institutions could compete equally for the funds. After Illinois led a Blue Fed initiative to upgrade its rail service, the Red Fed ended all cooperation with Amtrak, even adjusting gauge size along the Mississippi River to prevent passage of passenger trains from one side to another. As a backlash to the Blue Fed’s net-neutrality rule, the Red Fed imposed the Online Fairness Doctrine, which permits internet providers to slow upload and download speeds for content they determined was in violation of “community standards” or that offends a company’s religious beliefs. Across large swaths of the Red Fed, the only way to log into Grindr is via VPN.

These culture-war skirmishes instilled a strong sense of Red Fed identity, and the economy was doing so well that few noticed the slow exodus of tech entrepreneurs and high-skilled creative professionals who had once clustered in Austin and North Carolina’s Research Triangle. Only when the Supreme Court ruled that a compact-wide abortion ban did not place an undue burden on reproductive freedom because Red Fed residents could travel for free services in the Blue Fed did it become evident that conservative social policy would impede efforts to diversify the Red Fed economy beyond natural resources and heavy manufacturing. Amazon’s list of candidate cities to house its HQ14 did not include a single one in the Red Fed.

Each federation is the other’s largest trading partner, but they increasingly assume the posture of rivals. When the Blue Fed imposed a controversial excise tax on all products or services generated by companies that could not prove they paid their employees at least $18 per hour, the Red Fed saw it as a de facto tariff on its goods. It retaliated by placing its own excise tax on domestic wine, which led the Red Fed to deepen its trade ties with Chile and Argentina. That was a short-term diversion, but prompted a deeper examination of how economically dependent one federation had grown on the other’s internal policies. A Blue Fed requirement that certain freight classes travel only by all-electric truck fleets had nearly doubled the cost of transporting products to the interior west. Frequent work stoppages by West Coast longshoremen emboldened by their labor-friendly administration affirmed a strategy agreed to by titans of Red Fed industry: They needed their own Pacific port.

Red Fed leaders negotiated a deal with Mexican authorities for operating control of the Port of Lázaro Cárdenas, in Michoacán state, investing some of its energy trust funds. A new terminal, staffed by American Customs officials, connects directly with a spur of the Kansas City Southern railroad. There, nonunion laborers load ships with minerals mined through the American West, including lithium and soda ash, heading largely to East Asia, and unload bananas and smartphones from Ecuador and China heading for the landlocked states of the Red Fed without ever once passing through Blue Fed territory.

And then came the first humanitarian crisis. When the families of West Virginia workers started overloading schools and hospitals across the border in Hagerstown, Maryland, the Blue Fed began to impose residence requirements for many of its social services. That didn’t stop the migrants, but it led them to cluster in border towns as they waited out the six months required for eligibility. The conditions were often dire. Tent cities around Palm Springs saw the first American measles outbreak in a generation, and in the Spokane bidonvilles, dozens of children froze to death during a harsh winter.

Those tragedies set off a reckoning that has prompted an identity crisis for the Blue Fed’s leaders and citizens. On one side, fiscal experts say the Nordic-style welfare state that the Blue Fed has established is unsustainable if it just ends up as an unchecked provider of services to some of the Red Fed’s neediest cases. On the other side, some of the progressive activists who played crucial roles building early support for the health-care compact argue that the Blue Fed has an obligation to promote its values even beyond its borders. The debate rages across the region: What obligation do they have to other Americans who have democratically chosen to pursue a very different way of life?

The federations had a gentlemen’s agreement not to drag federal authorities into their disagreements, but the nature of their conflicts made that impossible. Once the Blue Fed declared itself a “sanctuary region” and invited undocumented immigrants elsewhere in the United States to seek refuge, Red Fed leaders threatened to erect internal border controls on state lines. The Blue Fed backed down, publicly revoking its invitation, but only after the Red Fed agreed to jointly lobby Congress to create a series of regionally restricted work visas.

The federal government remains the enforcer of the country’s citizenship laws, agent of its foreign affairs, controller of its national defense, and manager of its monetary policy. But it grew increasingly impossible to perform any of those roles neutrally, and many of the country’s democratic institutions were not designed to balance the competing interests of two geopolitical rivals.

When the Federal Reserve raised interest rates to stop the Red Fed’s economy from overheating, it pushed the rest of the country into recession, prompting the Great Lakes to lead the first successful campaign to have the Federal Reserve Board removed from office. When Hurricane Rigoberto came through the Gulf of Mexico, leaving large portions of Houston underwater for months — the first trillion-dollar natural disaster, at least when the cost of the subsequent malaria outbreak is included — the Red Fed demanded a bailout from the federal government. Blue Fed politicians said it would be “moral hazard” to do so, given that most of the damage was traced to a Red Fed decision to privatize the Houston Ship Channel and entrust the buyer, a Qatari sovereign-wealth fund, with upkeep of the Galveston Seawall and the levee networks of surrounding southeastern Texas counties.

The Pentagon lost its authority to act as a nonaligned arbiter of the national interest. Once cartels seized control of the Red Fed’s Mexican container port, taking hostage 17 retired Texas Rangers working on a private security force, the Defense secretary mobilized West Coast National Guard units to support an Army Rapid Deployment Force, along with Marines and Navy seals. Oregon’s governor balked, announcing that he would not permit his troops to “be used as muscle for the Red Fed’s imperial adventures.” The Supreme Court ruled that National Guard units had to follow the commander-in-chief’s orders, and the Oregon guardsmen headed south, but the incident polarized foreign-policy positions in new ways. When, months later, intelligence agencies issued a report pinning the crash of the western renewable-energy grid on a North Korean cyberattack, Red Fed cities saw some of their largest mass protests in years, all against a rush to war. Nearly 100,000 people gathered in Indianapolis’s Monument Circle, chanting “No blood for solar.” By the time of the South China Sea Crisis, Congress had grown so paralyzed along federation lines that it was impossible to assemble a majority in favor of any declaration of war.

Leaders overseas have become eager to exploit what they see as the United States’s political weakness. As concerns about climate change have grown more dire, other countries have become intent on punishing dissenters from the international order, and the Red Fed is now a global villain. The European Union agreed to pre-clear for entry all crops produced under the Blue Fed’s GMO-free agriculture policy, while Red Fed imports are subjected to a lengthy and costly quarantine. China announced most-favored-region trade policies that would give Blue Fed exporters an advantage over domestic rivals when selling into the Chinese market.

These trade-related conflicts squeeze Illinois, which wants to export Caterpillar tractors to China under favorable conditions but lags behind West Coast and New England states in transitioning to GMO-free agriculture. Although a founding member of the Blue Fed, Illinois at times felt geographically isolated, surrounded by Red Fed or neutral states. Illinois withdrew from the Blue Fed and helped to form the Great Lakes Federation, which stretches from Philadelphia to Des Moines and up to Duluth, with a permanent capital in Chicago. As the 20-year judicial truce is about to expire, the Midwest controls the balance of power in a Congress that may be forced by the Supreme Court to revisit some of its earliest assumptions about returning power to the states.

There is another real-life contemporary example of a semi-secession: Brexit. It, too, began as little more than a thought experiment. What if we could reject a far-off governing structure that no longer seems responsive to our interests in favor of local authority that can more closely match our aspirations and sense of identity as a people? There must have been something thrilling about getting to cast a vote for self-determination.

Yet those who are now forced to make that reverie real are pulling back from their former self-confidence about it. Just last week, the Tory official serving as Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union admitted he “hadn’t quite understood the full extent” to which British commerce was “particularly reliant on the Dover-Calais crossing,” and that new trade barriers could impact the availability of consumer goods in stores. Instead of just leaving Europe, as he encouraged his compatriots to do during the 2016 campaign, Dominic Raab now insists on “a bespoke arrangement on goods which recognizes the peculiar, frankly, geographic, economic entity that is the United Kingdom.”

As it was for a majority of Britons, it is easier to imagine breaking up the United States than figuring out how to make it work — whether through bold new policies or merely a functioning version of consensus politics. The seeming inelasticity of our system of governance also guarantees a security and predictability that we take for granted. Some of the lessons Europe is being taught under the stress of the Brexit crisis — that a single currency requires a unified economy, or that a lack of internal borders can’t work if no one can agree on what should happen at the outer one — are ones Americans might better learn from fantasy than from experience.

*Figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Sentencing Project, and Fortune magazine.

*This article appears in the November 12, 2018, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

Figures in millions, as of Saturday.

By The New York Times | Source: Ballotpedia; Colorado Proposition 112 figures do not add up to the total because of rounding.

Notable ballot initiatives up for a vote in states on Nov. 6.

By The New York Times | Source: Ballotpedia

A woman flying from Houston to Albuquerque on Sunday had just settled into her seat and fallen asleep when she was awoken by an unwanted touch — a hand from behind her grabbing the right side of her breast. And the man authorities say is responsible allegedly cited President Trump’s past lewd language about women.

Federal prosecutors allege that the hand belonged to 49-year-old Bruce Michael Alexander from Tampa, another passenger on the Southwest Airlines flight, who reportedly told authorities after being arrested Sunday that “the President of the United States says it’s ok to grab women by their private parts,” according to a criminal complaint.

Alexander was charged Monday with abusive sexual contact, according to a news release from the U.S. attorney’s office in New Mexico. The charge carries a maximum penalty of two years in jail and a $250,000 fine. A lawyer representing Alexander could not be reached for comment late Monday.

It all began about 15 to 20 minutes after Southwest Airlines Flight 5421 left Houston on Sunday. The woman, identified in the complaint only as C.W., said she was asleep in her window seat when “she felt her clothes move” and fingers start touching her from behind “on her right side at and around her ‘bra line.’ ”

Though she initially assumed “the touching was an accident,” it happened again about 30 minutes later.

The hand, described by the woman as having hairy “thick fingers” and “dirty finger nails,” was more persistent this time, according to the complaint.

“C.W. felt fingers slowly grab the back of her arm, squeezing above the elbow,” the complaint said. Then, “slowly and ‘attentively,’ ” the hand groped her right side “at and around her ribs and ‘bra line.’ ”

The second incident prompted the woman to confront the passenger seated in the window seat directly behind her, whom authorities identified as Alexander. According to the complaint, she told him that “she didn’t know why he thought it was ok [to touch her] and he needed to stop.”

The woman, who asked to be moved to another seat and was relocated to the back of the plane for the rest of the flight, told investigators that Alexander was a “total stranger.”

A Southwest spokesman told The Washington Post in an emailed statement that customer service supervisors and local law enforcement were “requested” to meet the flight “upon arrival . . . due to reports of a Customer’s alleged inappropriate behavior onboard.”

Alexander was arrested by the FBI at Albuquerque International Sunport and was being transported by authorities when he invoked Trump’s words, likely referencing the 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape that captured the president speaking lewdly about women and bragging that when you’re famous “you can do anything,” including grabbing women by their genitals.

Trump’s words have been parroted by other people accused of unsavory acts in recent months. In June, a white woman who accosted a Hispanic man and his mother while they were doing yard work was caught in a now-viral video calling the pair “animals” and “rapists.” The president has referred to undocumented immigrants as “animals,” and in at least two separate instances, has claimed Mexico sends “rapists” to the United States.

More recently, Joseph “Skinny Joey” Merlino, a Philadelphia mob boss, reiterated Trump’s opinion that the use of “flippers” — people who help prosecutors by turning on others for less jail time — “almost ought to be illegal.” Merlino was sentenced to two years in federal prison for illegal betting Wednesday, and prosecutors, as with many organized crime trials, relied on informants to make their case, the Guardian reported. As he was leaving the courthouse, Merlino said that Trump “was right” and that flippers need to be outlawed, according to the Guardian.

In a written statement to federal agents, Alexander said he was asleep for most of the flight and had not been drinking alcohol or taking any sleep aids. He “could not specifically recall getting into his backpack,” which was stowed under the seat in front of him, according to the complaint. Alexander told agents he did remember a woman he was seated behind speaking to him during the flight and then moving seats but could not describe her.

Alexander’s hands, however, matched the description given by the woman, authorities said.

This is not the only recent instance of unwanted contact between passengers on a Southwest Airlines flight.

Just last week, a Texas man flying from Los Angeles to Dallas allegedly did not stop touching the woman seated next to him and attempted to engage her in an unwanted game of “footsies,” according to a criminal complaint. After the woman moved seats, the man went “from zero to sixty in nano-seconds” and started yelling at flight attendants, forcing the plane to be diverted to Albuquerque, where he was arrested.

The Southwest spokesman told The Post that the airline is “continuously reviewing and updating our training as necessary,” but declined to share any specifics.

Alexander made his initial court appearance Monday and will remain in federal custody pending a preliminary hearing and detention hearing, both of which are scheduled for Tuesday, according to the news release from the U.S. attorney’s office.

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The response was immediate — and incendiary — when people learned that students at the University of Southern Maine had been offered course credit if they joined a bus full of people planning to protest Brett M. Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court and lobby Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) to vote against it.

Hundreds of people called the university, including furious alumni, upset students, and prospective students and their parents. Critics saw the class as an outrageous abuse of the public university’s mission, a case of liberal academics trying to indoctrinate students. “It was fierce, ferocious … and threatening,” said Glenn Cummings, the president of the university.

This week, he announced that Susan Feiner, the recently retired longtime faculty member who had offered the one-credit course, would be barred from teaching at USM and any of the state’s other public universities.

University leaders called it a rogue action by a former employee.

Feiner, whose father was the plaintiff in a well-known Supreme Court case after he was arrested for a speech that angered a crowd, saw it very differently. “Hecklers were permitted to shut down what they disagreed with,” she said.

Feiner, who was a tenured professor of economics at USM, had been outspoken as a faculty union leader and an advocate for students who said they had been sexually assaulted. She retired in September. But a National Education Association grant had funded the university’s faculty union for the Frances Perkins Initiative for Social Justice Education, intended to create high-impact pop-up classes for busy students.

After hearing Kavanaugh and a woman who accused him of sexual misconduct testify, Feiner had the idea of getting students on a bus to Washington for a lesson in civic engagement and a chance to witness history.

Cummings told the campus Wednesday that Feiner had been barred from teaching “for her role in listing and promoting an unauthorized class that advanced her personal political agenda. The course was promptly rescinded and university officials took immediate steps to ensure that institutional resources were not … used to support one-sided political activism.”

Feiner said she didn’t think the class was a partisan effort. “Any student from any political perspective at USM would have been welcome on that bus. … I think it was taken as partisan because the Republicans in Maine turned it into something that was partisan."

The executive director of the Maine GOP did not respond to a request for comment. Earlier this month, the party issued a “RED ALERT” on its Facebook page saying USM was offering a free college credit and a free bus ride to Washington to protest Collins, calling it “shocking and unacceptable,” and noting, “The event page goes so far as to ask if STUDENTS are okay with being ARRESTED."

The main organizer of the bus to Washington was Diane Russell, a former Democratic state legislator and gubernatorial candidate in Maine. Everyone on the bus, other than some reporters covering the protest, opposed Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the court, Russell said.

A photo in the Portland Press Herald shows Feiner leaving the bus holding a printed sign aloft: “A sexual predator does not belong on the Supreme Court.”

Russell said the bus was paid for by the Center for Popular Democracy, a liberal advocacy group.

She said USM’s leaders had sent a message to faculty members, and to women, with their decision: “If you’re willing to stand up and fight for social justice ... you will be attacked and vilified.”

Feiner’s father, Irving, gave a speech about civil rights and other political issues in 1949 while he was a student at Syracuse University, said Roy Gutterman, a communications law professor at Syracuse who is writing a book about him. A crowd gathered around Irving Feiner, upset by his words and suspicious he might be a communist sympathizer.

Instead of protecting Irving Feiner from the angry group around him, police arrested him for disorderly conduct. A judge sentenced him to 30 days in jail — which he served after losing his case, Feiner v. New York, before the Supreme Court.

“This was really one of the first of the McCarthy-era free speech cases,” with an official shutting down unpopular ideas because they provoked such an angry reaction, said Gutterman, director of the Tully Center for Free Speech at Syracuse. He said the "heckler’s veto” has been happening lately on college campuses, as at the University of California at Berkeley last year, when protesters upset by a conservative speaker set fires and smashed windows, causing the event to be canceled.

The University of Maine System’s board of trustees — a politically appointed panel that includes Susan Collins’s brother, Samuel Collins — passed a policy this spring that worried some faculty members, who thought it might limit their free speech.

The policy does not ban partisan activity on the campuses, University of Maine System spokesman Dan Demeritt explained in an email, but “makes it clear that our publicly funded institutions are to remain nonpartisan and impartial.” He gave the example of a faculty member who appears in a campaign ad, but with a disclaimer that notes she is speaking as an individual.

Cummings said it has always been clear that professors can discuss political issues in class, but that they should provide a range of perspectives and let students settle on their own opinions.

Feiner has the right to voice her own opinion, he said, but she crossed a significant line when she used the name of the university to promote her political agenda. “That is why we felt the need to be firm,” Cummings said.

USM’s provost, Jeannine Diddle Uzzi, said that when officials heard concerns and began to investigate the class, they learned that there was never a course proposal or committee review of the syllabus, as required.

Feiner isn’t an employee any longer, Uzzi said, and didn’t have a contract to teach the class.

Feiner acknowledged that she didn’t go through the regular process for creating the pop-up class: With things moving quickly in Washington, “I was just bulling through it,” she said. But she said university officials haven’t been straightforward about why they shut it down.

Uzzi and Cummings said they have both known Feiner for many years but have lost trust in her.

“She’s a spitfire,” Cummings said, someone with strong views and a commitment to action. “But you have to use good judgment.”

Poor Elizabeth Warren.

She took President Trump’s bait and submitted to a DNA test to demonstrate her Native American genealogy — and, in so doing, may have doomed her presidential campaign before it began. Now the Massachusetts senator is not only enduring Trump’s “Pocahontas” insults (at least when he’s not calling another woman “Horseface”) but also being disparaged by Indian tribes.

“Senator Warren is undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage,” proclaimed the Cherokee Nation, decrying her “inappropriate and wrong” use of a DNA test, a “mockery” that dishonors “legitimate” tribal citizens.

Ouch. But I can understand why the Cherokees — and indeed all people of good taste — might wish to disavow Warren: It’s the crab mayonnaise.

Among the many unfortunate results of Warren’s recent DNA test suggesting she’s somewhere between 1/64th and 1/1,024th Native American by ethnicity: It inevitably draws attention to her contribution to the ’80s cookbook, “Pow Wow Chow: A Collection of Recipes from Families of the Five Civilized Tribes.” Under “Elizabeth Warren, Cherokee,” it lists five recipes, three of which were apparently cribbed from the New York Times and Better Homes and Gardens.

Worse, one of the recipes she submitted: “Crab with Tomato Mayonnaise Dressing.” A traditional Cherokee dish with mayonnaise, a 19th-century condiment imported by settlers? A crab dish from landlocked Oklahoma? This can mean only one thing: canned crab.

Warren is unfit to lead.

Yet it is difficult not to feel sorry for Warren. Though she doesn’t claim tribal membership, she clearly wants to be embraced. And so I extend an invitation to the senator to join my tribe. Warren should become a Jew. As Trump said when asking for African American votes shortly before praising Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee: “Honor us.”

The Tribes of Israel have little to do with Native American tribes beyond the Yiddish-speaking Indians in Mel Brooks’s “Blazing Saddles.” But no DNA test is required. A stickler might require Warren to ask three times before becoming a Member of the Tribe — “MOT” — but for many, being Jewish is a state of mind, as comic legend Lenny Bruce explained decades ago:

“If you live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish. It doesn’t matter even if you’re Catholic; if you live in New York, you’re Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you’re going to be goyish even if you’re Jewish. Evaporated milk is goyish even if the Jews invented it. Chocolate is Jewish, and fudge is goyish. Spam is goyish, and rye bread is Jewish. Negroes are all Jews. Italians are all Jews. Irishmen who have rejected their religion are Jews. Mouths are very Jewish. And bosoms. Baton-twirling is very goyish.”

The same applies to current politics. If you work in the Trump administration, you are goyish even if you are Jewish. The House is goyish, the Senate is Jewish. Jeff Flake: Jewish. Dianne Feinstein: goyish. Sonia Sotomayor: very Jewish. Steny H. Hoyer: crazy goyish.

Warren would have some work to do. Her demeanor screams white bread and Jell-O molds. But a few adjustments might help: S top calling herself “an Okie to my toes.” (Even Jews who live in Oklahoma are goyish.) And, for heaven’s sake, stop with the crab mayonnaise.

Lest my motive be mistaken for partisan, I also asked House Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s office if he would kibbitz with me after a DNA test found Ryan to be 3 percent Ashkenazi Jew. Ryan shows a flicker of interest: He tweeted a GIF of himself raising a pint of beer, with the message: “Guess I need to start saying ‘L’Chaim’ now, too!” If he does that with a glass of schnapps, we’ll have our first Jewish speaker of the House.

Of course, I don’t actually desire to have Warren, or Ryan, join my “tribe” — which, in any event, is only part of my heritage. Like most in the American melting pot, I’m a mutt: a stew of English and German, western pioneers and sharecroppers, immigrants from the shtetl and a great-great-great-grandfather who died fighting for the Iowa 39th Infantry in the Civil War.

This is why Warren’s DNA stunt was such a blunder: She took Trump’s DNA-test dare and let him divide us — again — by race and ethnicity, just as he did when he goaded President Barack Obama to prove his legitimacy by producing his birth certificate.

It’s sad that the Cherokees responded by noisily rejecting Warren, but that’s their right.

It’s disgusting that the episode has also set off the worst in some, such as Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who joked on Fox News that it would be “terrible” if a DNA test found he had Iranian ethnicity.

No, Senator. What’s “terrible” is that Trump has found a new, high-tech way to stoke tribalism and division. And Warren fell for it.

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