The first election of Donald Trump, in 2016, accelerated the trend, his return in 2024 in the electoral race will further fan the flames of resentment and division in the United States. A fragile environment where difficulties in dialogue and fear of compromise, coupled with radical and narrow-minded ideological postures, now threaten one of the foundations of the country: the unity of its States.
As she watches her tomatoes grow outside her Lake County home in northern Illinois, GH Merritt, a recent sustainable agriculture graduate, is glad she didn’t decide to grow them elsewhere.
And yet, not so long ago, after two years spent looking for a job in her new field of study, this former management and finance consultant converted to permaculture seriously considered packing up and leaving the Illinois to put its destiny on new tracks, elsewhere in the country.
“It was inevitable,” says Mme Merritt, met a few weeks ago in a small café in the village of Antioch, on the edge of Wisconsin. “Living close to the greater Chicago area, I couldn’t find a job. However, if I had to leave Illinois — where I grew up, where my great-grandfather who came from Montreal started a new life — it was only because of the poor economic condition in which is the state. It was he who forced me to leave, to abandon a place where life was good. And then I had this revelation: I had to separate from Illinois while staying where I was. »
Leave the state without moving! The formula may seem contradictory, but not for GH Merritt, who made it the slogan of a separatist movement born in 2018 with the idea of reshuffling the interior borders of the state to reveal two: Chicago and its large metropolitan area, which would thus become a sort of city-state, and the rest of Illinois, which would then enter the Union as 51e State of the United States under the name “New Illinois”. An idea which, in the American political climate divided by its extremes, finds a favorable echo throughout the State, where two separatist movements are developing: one from the South, under the name of Illinois Separation; the other to the North, called New Illinois.
Distinct, the two groups are however moving in the same direction and have been sowing, county by county, the seeds of their separatist project for several years. They cultivate the frustrations audible in the countryside with the big city whose ideas and policies are often considered too liberal and progressive.
Find a voice
“Chicago’s influence on state policies is too strong and we no longer feel represented,” says GH Merritt, who assures that his movement remains non-partisan, even if it largely benefits from political fault lines and culture wars over issues of abortion, identity and gun control sweeping across the country.
According to her, a malicious cutting of electoral maps – called gerrymandering in the United States — has for years allowed the diluting of the rural vote in more urban and peri-urban areas, thus providing the opportunity for Cook County, which includes the city of Chicago and is home to 40% of the state’s population , to impose its laws on the 60% forming the rest of Illinois.
“The driving force behind our movement is the idea of finding a voice in our own political authorities,” she continues. We also want to remove ourselves not only from the influence of the city, but also from the endemic corruption in our state and the fiscal catastrophe that awaits us if we do not make the right decisions to change the state of things. »
Illinois’ debt has more than doubled since 2000, despite a population that has remained stable. Nationally, the “Land of Lincoln” has the seventh highest tax rate in the nation and ranks first in the Midwest region. “The state is collapsing,” assures Marty Kelly, lawyer and advisor within the movement. “But our local government is too dysfunctional to prevent this collapse. »
“Illinois also has a sad history of corruption, which has produced the highest number of ex-governors sent to prison here,” he continued. Since 1961, four of the state’s ten governors — three Democrats, one Republican — have actually been accused of fraud, perjury, corruption, conspiracy, tax evasion… and thrown behind bars.
“The elected officials of [la capitale] Springfield do not seem to be very aware of the malaise that is being expressed in our movement, because they do not need to,” continues the man with more “libertarian” political allegiances, says- he, and leaning toward the Republican Party. “They are guaranteed the vote and money to stay in power. But this does not prevent a correction from being made to respect the voice of all. And this correction involves the creation of a 51e State. »
Referendum questions
Next November, voters in seven rural counties — Iroquois, Madison, Jersey, Clinton, Calhoun, Greene and Perry — will also have the opportunity to vote on this division plan by answering yes or no to a referendum question. binding added this year to their ballot.
The text proposes the opening of a conversation with all the counties, with the exception of Cook, “to form a new state”. Since 2020, 27 of the state’s 102 counties have already voted on the subject, with significant support for this “secession” varying from 63% to 83% of the vote.
“Some consider us a secessionist movement, but we prefer not to use that word, which is very loaded in the United States,” says M.me Merritt. “Our approach seeks above all to follow a legal and constitutional process which will result in an orderly separation. This is neither a quick nor simple project. But in recent years, the political and social climate has been favorable to us and the movement has been growing. »
The New Illinois movement claims to be in a growth phase, with committees established to date in 33 counties, a database of a thousand members and a community on social networks exceeding 19,000 registrations, summarizes Mme Merritt, who chairs the separatist group’s steering committee.
Sitting in the messy living room of his northern Illinois home, the organization’s treasurer, Dan Juffernbruch, assured that the birth of the new state promoted by the movement would only be “a matter of time.” “I wouldn’t be in it if I didn’t believe there was a chance of success,” says the patent and licensing consultant in his early fifties. “We feel everywhere in the United States a push towards more self-government. This becomes necessary to get out of systems of representation that no longer work, in which part of the population no longer has the possibility of winning elections, which ends up frustrating and dividing people. »
In 2021, a Southern Illinois University study showed that “rural resentment” had indeed taken hold in non-urban parts of the state, where 66% of respondents expressed disillusionment with to the central government while believing that they are not receiving their fair share of state resources.
Complex separation
The last creation of an American state dates back to 1863, when Congress approved the creation of West Virginia, which wanted to live its own destiny detached from the breakaway state of Virginia. A few years earlier, Maine had also emerged from part of the Massachusetts Territory. The divorce began in 1820 and ended with the formation of the 23e State to join the Union in 1842.
To make New Illinois appear, the state’s separatist movements will have to convince all the counties, then obtain the support of the legislative authorities of the state, under a constant Democratic majority since 2003, before the constitution of the new state be submitted to a final vote by Congress in Washington, as required by Section 3 of Article 4 of the United States Constitution.
To date, only one elected official from Illinois, Democratic Rep. Shawn Ford, representing a poor district south of Chicago, has said he is “ready” to debate state separation, without however supporting the movement. .
Last May, the state’s governor, JB Pritzker, a rising star in the Democratic Party, sent a clear message to voters in counties facing a referendum question on state separation this year. “I just want to remind everyone here that we are one Illinois,” he said during his visit to Madison County to inaugurate a public building of the Madison County Transit Authority, reported Spectrum News. “Madison County is just as important to our state as Chicago. It is too easy to let partisanship and regional differences divide us. Instead, let’s all row in the same direction. »
This report was financed thanks to the support of the Transat-International Journalism Fund.
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