I'm seeing a lot of people enthused about signs of west coast secession from the US.

I used to be into Cascadia shit when I was in high school, but I've soured quite a bit on secession as a tactic.

Obviously "pan-secessionism" is a well known crypto-fascist project and there are plenty of secessionist movements that are evil to the bone. We shouldn't support every nazi cult fighting the empire.

But there are also reasons to be critical of secession when led by good people.

"Smaller states" are not the same thing as less oppressive states. Splitting up a brutal mafia into competing brutal mafias often just means more resiliency for the mafia system. Kill one gang and the others either take your territory or pressure you into becoming like them.

Additionally there's a reason that reactionaries are desperate for a return to small closed communities -- that social network topology is conducive to highly reactionary abuse and hierarchies. Part of running a cult is getting a closed off community.

The US empire needs to die, absolutely. But there's a great number of ways to do that (many insurrectionary pathways illegal for me to detail on here) without walling off the most progressive enclaves and leaving the rest to die in reactionary hellworlds.

Cascadian anarchists continually protest that it's not a "nationalist" project. But 1) there's no way it doesn't functionally reproduce nationalism in practice, 2) I've fucking seen the sausage of this movement up close, 3) prioritizing liberation for an "us" is unethical.