Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Rush Limbaugh also entered the secessionist fray, telling his audience that America is “trending toward secession” and that “there cannot be a peaceful coexistence” between the right and left.

Things have moved surprisingly quickly for a taboo subject that, in the modern era, has never been more than a plaything for cranks and purveyors of self-published race war fantasy fiction.

The Claremont Institute recently hosted an online symposium called “A House Dividing.” The question: Should the union be disbanded? Two pseudonymous authors took up the question. (The Claremont crowd’s use of anonymity is not uncommon, either in their racist poetry or their intellectual calls to arms. Recall that the “Flight 93” essay was originally attributed to a Roman consul because while Michael Anton professed to believe that the literal fate of America was at stake, he’d didn’t believe it enough to risk his high-paying job at a New York finance firm run by liberal Hillary Clinton supporters.)

One contributor to the secession symposium, an “American professor” using the handle “Tom Trenchard,” imagines looking back at December 2020 from a perspective five years into the future. Trenchard tells the story of the end of the United States of America with evident pride, and is quite explicit about the threats of violence and civil war that made it possible…