Charles Dharapak/AP Photo
The year is 2025. President Ron DeSantis lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College, after Republican election officials flipped results in several states. The United States has a national government that by any measure is illegitimate.
It’s hard to miss the irony. MAGA Republicans convinced themselves that the honest election of 2020 was stolen. So they responded by stealing the next one.
The Republicans now control both houses of Congress. The Senate 52-48 majority (representing 36 percent of the American people) votes to abolish the filibuster for all legislation. Both houses pass a nationwide ban on all abortions from the moment of conception, the bill is signed into law by the president, and the Supreme Court upholds it as constitutional by a 5-4 vote. Doctors are enlisted as agents of the state.
Worse is yet to come, making it even harder to vote and easier to rig election results, locking in a permanent Republican majority.
The abortion vote defies the clear wishes of a 2-to-1 majority of the American people. But a combination of gerrymandering, the overturning of election results, the undemocratic majority in the Senate, a president elected by a minority, and a Supreme Court with one or two perjurers—one justice confirmed after an unprecedented refusal to vote on a nominee for over a year, and another confirmed in a rush just before an election—upholds the result.
Citizens of blue states cannot secede—that option is foreclosed by the Civil War and by the might of the U.S. Army, which will presumably obey the commander in chief.
The Declaration of Independence famously stated that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and that “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.” But when the government is willing to take and keep power ruthlessly, that right is largely academic.
There is, however, one strategy that could become widespread if this horrific future comes to pass: mass civil disobedience in the form of a tax revolt. Tax rebellion has a quintessentially American pedigree. One of the leading sources of revolutionary fervor in 1776, after all, was taxation without representation.
The blue states contribute most of the federal government’s revenue, much of which is spent on the red states. According to the most recent data, the states receiving the most funds from the federal government are Virginia, Florida, Kentucky, Maryland, and North Carolina, and the states paying the most are New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Illinois.
If the residents of the blue states simply stop paying federal taxes, the federal government will collapse for lack of revenues. Borrowing enough is not an option. As part of the revolt, residents of blue states will also refuse to buy Treasury bonds. There are limits to what the Fed can buy, and foreigners will be worried about the risk of default.
The largest source of federal revenue is the personal income tax. Stopping paying taxes is relatively easy. For wages subject to withholding, filling out a form with multiple personal exemptions drastically reduces income withheld. For other income, the solution is simply not to pay estimated taxes and not file a tax return. The government could change the law to compel withholding of wage income regardless of exemptions, but employees could switch to independent-contactor status. Many employers might also join the tax strike, overtly or tacitly.
What would the citizenry demand as a condition of paying taxes? A democratic country.
Failing to file a tax return is illegal, but what can the IRS do? We are talking about a tax revolt by potentially tens of millions of U.S. citizens. The IRS does not have the resources to forcibly collect taxes under these circumstances. The Justice Department lacks the personnel to prosecute millions of Americans for tax fraud. This would be civil disobedience by example, without leaders to prosecute.
Nor can the U.S. Army forcibly collect the taxes. President Washington led the Army to crush Shays’ Rebellion, but that was supported by relatively few citizens. Thoreau was put in jail for refusing to pay taxes to finance slavery and the war with Mexico, but he was also one of very few. The famed tax revolt of California’s Proposition 13 was conducted through a lawful ballot initiative. A massive tax revolt by millions of citizens cannot be overcome by force.
There was just one recent case where widespread civil disobedience led to lawful change, and that was the civil rights protest of the 1960s. And it involved far fewer activists than a mass tax revolt would. However, that civil disobedience soon gained the tacit and then the overt support of the federal government. This revolt would be in opposition. A better analogy might be the mass Vietnam protest, which included both tax resistance and draft resistance, and did change policy.
What would the citizenry demand as a condition of paying taxes? A democratic country. Begin by restoring honest elections. Honor federalism. Revise the Constitution to abolish the Electoral College. Require all the states to draw congressional districts by a bipartisan commission of citizens, and institute term limits for justices of the Supreme Court.
Of course, there is no guarantee that this strategy would succeed. The MAGA Republicans do not believe in legal niceties. A furious response to a tax revolt could escalate the march to a police state.
Todd Gitlin observed that the 1960s radicals, who were fed up with liberals, nonetheless assumed that their adversaries in the Johnson administration would behave as liberals and follow due process of law. And they mostly did. That’s not true of today’s Republicans.
It’s appalling to even have to think in terms of these dread contingencies, but that is the precipice we are on. It would be far better for decent Americans to get mobilized now, and win the 2024 election well beyond the margin of MAGA theft.
