There’s still plenty of distance between the current condition of American politics and potential fracturing of the union. But the notions of secession and separation—led primarily by a Trumpist right that views any non-Trump victories as inherently illegitimate—can no longer be laughed at, or openly dismissed. If anything, it’s that failure of imagination that would make potential secession, and the devastation to follow, even likelier. Given the aftermath of the 2020 election, it’s within the realm of the possible that, should another Democratic candidate win in 2024, the Texas Republican Party will leap fully into the pro-secession fires, all in the name of servicing a base that refuses to recognize the presidential outcome.

Nor is it difficult to imagine the bloodshed that would result. Even if such a Trumpist movement never succeeds in actual territorial fragmentation, the internecine violence would cause shocking levels of bloodletting, all in the service of secession. One potential parallel would be the Troubles in Northern Ireland, a decades-long conflict in a similarly developed democracy (albeit one predicated on actual civil liberties violations). If an American equivalent emerges in the coming decades, and if the casualty rate of the Troubles serves as barometer, America would still see millions of casualties and hundreds of thousands of deaths, in a conflict potentially even more catastrophic than the Civil War.

And as the recent Jan. 6th hearings making clear, we’ve already had a taste of what those American Troubles would look like—and how secession, especially in places like Texas, interplays with such anti-democratic violence. After all, the Texas Republican legislator responsible for authoring last year’s secession referendum bill attended the Jan. 6th insurrection, claiming it was “the most amazing day.” And the pro-Trump insurrectionist photographed on the floor of the Senate Chamber holding zip-ties, Larry Brock, was clear about why he’d broken into the Capitol to target duly elected legislators. As Brock, who lives in Texas, wrote on Facebook before the insurrection, “Our vote was stolen. Time to secede.”