The violence in Democrat-run cities is spiraling out of control. Places like Chicago, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Baltimore have become crime capitals. This is because street criminals aren’t afraid of the police, the law is a suggestion, and even if they do get arrested, toothless prosecutors will likely uphold the cities’ soft-on-crime stance.

One city in particular has allowed the chaos to spread to the suburbs. In Atlanta, the wealthy northern suburb of Buckhead has had enough.

Atlanta is so riddled with lowlifes that earlier this week hoodlums shot up a Subway because an employee “put too much mayonnaise” on their sandwich. Law-abiding people are having to go armed everywhere they go.

Fox News has been tracking the crime surge in Buckhead and found that “rape is up 80% as of June 18, burglaries are up 26%, and robberies are up 8%.” People are afraid to go fill up their cars with gas. Homes are being invaded.

Buckhead City Committee CEO Bill White has declared the suburb’s intention to secede from the city. The biggest reason being that Atlanta’s current and previous mayors are big advocates of “defund the police.” Cops simply don’t want to work in a city where they aren’t supported.

White explained: “We’re short 180 police officers, so what are we supposed to do? They said this has never been done — taking a part of a city out and making its own city from that — but we’re going to do it, and we’re going to absolutely love our police.” White went on to make a promise to the police, saying: “We’re going to pay them. We’re going to give them a take-home car. We’re going to welcome them. We’re going to honor them every day and make up for this dumbest move of the century, this ‘defund the police,’ and turn that on its heels and put the smackdown on the crime here in Buckhead once and for all and have a happy place to live.”

This beleaguered suburb will hopefully get some reprieve by becoming an independent city. But poor Atlanta. It’s a grim testament to the truism, You get what you vote for.

The Buckhead/Atlanta imbroglio is small potatoes in comparison to the state of Oregon, whose eastern counties earlier this year voted to secede from the drug-riddled antifa thugocracy of the coast and join Idaho. Eastern Oregon has declared that the western coast does not represent its interests. Even this act of representative self-government is a small example of an even larger shift in the politics of America.

Elon Musk famously posted a meme on social media illustrating how the Democrat Party has pushed so far to the left so quickly that it has left voters who may have been considered middle-left in 2008 on the conservative side of the political divide. These voters are switching allegiances. According to the Associated Press, more than one million Democrats are switching parties, especially those in the suburbs. Leftist woke policies are making cities unlivable, and the law-abiding are tired of the lack of justice.

As our Nate Jackson so aptly stated: “The real story here is the serious division between conservatives and leftists. Again, despite Biden’s promise to bring ‘unity,’ Democrats have only sown hatred and division for years now. Given that a significant number of residents in one state have decided divorce is better than living under the same ‘roof,’ how much longer can we expect our country to abide its deep divisions?”

Federalism — the deferment of power to the states — may help alleviate these deep divides. It’s no secret that America is pretty divided these days. Much of that has to do with a simple fact: We fight too many political battles at the federal level. This idea of self-rule — where citizens who are invested in the places they live decide the issues at hand — is inherently American.

Secession may be a harsh term, evoking ghosts of the bloody American Civil War. But in reality, it’s an attempt by the people to assert their democratic rights and solve what the federal government is so ill-equipped to do.