National Divorce: The Fantasy That Won't Die
All I can say is, not this s**t again!
I was working on another blog post, when I saw this and decided it needed to be addressed sooner rather than later:
Sigh. All I can say is, not this s**t again!
In case you didn’t know, I don’t see civil war anywhere in our near future. Nor do I see a collapse, though superpower collapse is an entirely different matter. Many troubled days, months, and years lay ahead and our country will be stretched to the breaking point.
But a national divorce? It’s important to understand Taylor-Greene, better-known as “MTG,” is speaking of a peaceful separation, like two spouses deciding, relatively amicably, their marriage no longer serves its intended purpose and decide to go their separate ways. Of course, you couldn’t sell anyone on the idea of separation if it weren’t peaceful, right?
Right off the bat, we have a problem: the presumption that the Regime would ever allow such a thing to take place. If there’s anything America has in common with any other country, it’s that the people in charge don’t like to lose. They’re not going to let the other side walk away peacefully with any part of this country. The last time a serious separatist movement existed in America was in the 1860s. We fought a civil war that cost the lives of over a million. We can debate the necessity of the Civil War into perpetuity, but the point is that countries never break apart easy and almost never without a fight.
Scott Greer addressed the stupidity underlying the belief a peaceful separation could take place on his own blog:
National divorce could only occur if America were weak. As alienated as conservatives may feel, the state today is undeniably strong. America is still the undisputed military and economic power of the world. It has the power to make Europe voluntarily wreck its own economy. The government has imprisoned hundreds of Americans for unauthorized tourism at the Capitol. It will not let its own people peacefully separate over gender-neutral Mr. Potato Head.
Seriously: why would a state this powerful ever agree to it’s own geographic disintegration, even as it actively works towards national disintegration? If only out of ego or spite, nobody likes to relinquish power and nothing speaks to power better than having control of a country the size of continental Europe. Even a weakened U.S. regime would fight tooth and nail against its own dissolution. The viability of the state is, in large part, dictated by it’s ability keep the sum of the parts whole. Throw in cultural and political differences of an existential nature, then you’ve got a recipe for major conflict.
More:
Secessions require insurgents with political and institutional power. National Divorce advocates, unlike antebellum Southerners, have neither. The movement is led by an assortment of podcasters and talking heads. Meanwhile, the establishment controls our military, our economic system, our political infrastructure, federal law enforcement, the courts, the mainstream media, the schools, the universities, the federal purse, organized labor, and pretty much every state government. The only institutions potentially sympathetic to right-wing separation are parts of the Republican Party apparatus and police unions, both of which many national divorce advocates want to abolish--leaving them with no real organizations to champion their cause beyond a few Rumble channels.
This is one of those times you cannot take too seriously the results of polls showing strong secessionist sentiments. It frankly means nothing without the ability to actually pull it off. With the possible exceptions of California and Texas, there are no states capable of sovereign governance and there would be instant buyer’s remorse the moment it took place. For one, how quickly could these individual states raise armies to defend their suddenly undefended borders? How would you deal with the sudden halt to economic activity, as the terms and conditions under which interstate commerce took place previously became null and void? What if businesses decide they want to leave? Are you going to force them to stay? How are you going to manage a tidal wave of anti-secession sentiment certain to arise, especially in MTG’s own state of Georgia? Got enough cops and troops to put them down if it gets violent? What if “Blue America” decides to encroach or support subversive elements in “Red America?” So much for peaceful separation!
We can debate these finer points all day, but the take-away is that the time for a peaceful, national divorce passed long ago. In a superb thread going into the technical reasons why a divorce is virtually impossible today, Twitter account @Thegenrlstaff shows that establishing a country, even out of pre-existing states, is no small task:
It cannot be understated that dreams of national divorce require a suspension of disbelief: that patriotic fervor and the right values are alone enough to establish a new country. No red-blooded, right-wing American wants to admit it, but we depend on this union as much as the Left. Sad, but true.
But… but… what about the Soviet Union? There’s a small, but growing number of folks mostly in the online sphere who think the collapse of the Soviet Union serves as some kind of model for a relatively peaceful break-up of the United States. They even managed to to divvy up their stockpile of weapons of mass destruction! But I’m not sure why anyone thinks it serves as any kind of example. The Soviet Union didn’t even last a third as long as America has. It was a union of what were distinctly ethnic republics, whose own histories went back hundred of years, long predating the history of the U.S. What held the Red Menace together was also of much flimsier stuff than what’s held us together for generations, mainly state terror and oppression. Whatever you think holds America together, it’s not that. Not yet, anyway. Said another way, the Soviet Union collapsed because there was just no way to hold it together even if they tried.
Something that made the break-up of countries like the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia possible in the first place was the fact there were clear geopolitical lines which could be drawn to start. When it comes to the U.S., it’s not clear what those lines would be. Take a look at the results of the 2020 presidential election, broken down by county:
Bear in mind: though red counties outnumber blue counties by an order of magnitude, the blue counties encompass our population centers and are where the majority of Americans live. I’ve said it before - when it comes to preventing the outbreak of civil war, diversity is our strength. We’re not a country divided along ethnic or even sub-national lines. We’re divided by culture and political affiliation, but as this map shows, our cultures and political affiliations cross all sorts of geographic lines. In many ways, the “Red State vs. Blue State” model is obsolete and has been replaced by a “Red County vs. Blue County” model and who knows how long that might last? Even historically right-wing strongholds like MTG’s state of Georgia have a tremendous amount of leftists within their populations.
The lesson is that MTG’s red-blue separation scheme is impossible. Not without a messy realignment, which is highly unlikely to occur without violence and the whole idea behind MTG’s proposal is that it’s possible to go our separate ways without coming to blows. Many on the Right think they’re ready to go to war over this, but they’re not. I think they’ll find very few people standing beside them when they show up to fight.
What bothers me most about calls for national divorce is what it implies. Imagine being so dissatisfied and under siege from the other side, your best response is, what? To voluntarily cede parts of the country to them? Namely, the population centers where most capital and economic activity is concentrated? That’ll sure teach them!
It’s ironic that the Left, on the other hand, held this country in such contempt, they instead mounted a generations-long offensive to demoralize and destabilize it (to apply the Yuri Bezmenov model), took control of the country’s largest political party (the Democrats), overwhelmed and took command of all our institutions at all levels of society, and are now just years away from single-party rule in this country. Objectively, that’s impressive. That’s power. And they managed to do it without a civil war and while keeping most Americans completely unaware as to the realignment that has occurred and continues as we speak.
Meanwhile, elements of the Right think we ought to just unravel this whole thing. I’m repeating myself, but it bears repeating: why would “Blue America” agree to any of this? They have the power! Does MTG think if she screams and shouts loud enough, they’ll manage to come to terms? How dumb does a person need to be to believe the people holding the high ground would simply relinquish it? Or not even put up a fight? It doesn’t make any sense, because national divorce isn’t a serious proposal. It’s an emotional response and its proponents are making a moral argument. It’s not a political argument.
Someone who’s serious about delivering this country from its spiral of self-destruction would first accept the reality of our predicament: Blue America has all but achieved total victory. They are now establishing a new “normal,” a new reality for what it means to be American. They’re a few years away from achieving single-party rule, which certainly sounds ominous. However, conditions in this country are certain to deteriorate, given geopolitical tumult on the world stage in places like Ukraine and domestic turbulence created by our own social conflict and de-globalization, among other things. I don’t anticipate this period of single-party rule to last relatively long, but we’ll save that topic for another day.
For now, the message I want to get across is this: if it were possible to separate amicably, we wouldn’t need to. The Left didn’t embark on this cultural revolution thinking one day the Right would just split off and take half the country with them. They sought to conquer and that’s what they did. And they’re not going to agree to a divorce. Why undermine everything they worked so hard to achieve? It doesn’t make any sense. It only makes sense if you spend so much time in your own rabbit hole you can’t honestly evaluate the premises undergirding your ideas.
Instead of indulging in silly fantasies, how about this: fight for this country. I don’t mean violently, but instead of always looking upon the other side with derision, understand what they did and how they rose to such commanding heights in America. They certainly didn’t do it by talking about creating their own country.
Most important, unless you believe they have a legitimate claim to it, under no circumstances should a single square mile of this country be relinquished to the other side. This country was brought together with blood, sweat, and tears. It’d be a travesty to have any sort of arrangement where those who worked to destroy what our forebearers bestowed on us are allowed to have any part of it. “American” is just something written on a passport to them. It means nothing to them beyond that and many of them say they struggle with the “burden” of being American. Tell me again, why are we letting them have any part of this country?
I realize I’m starting to sound dramatic. But I believe this with all my heart. I said some posts ago that there are serious problems with the kinds of politicians our system cultivates and MTG is a perfect example. We need people willing to fight for this country, past present, and future. Not come up with unrealistic ideas about how we’re going to get the people who hate us to somehow agree to a split where they get to take half of the country, a place they can never stop running out of things to speak ill of. I can’t say I’m disappointed in MTG since I never expected much from her in the first place. But she is symptomatic of how unserious our leaders can be and how politics really is all kayfabe: professional wrestlers cutting a promo producing a lot of heat, but still ultimately a work of fiction.
I’ll end with this strong rebuke of MTG:
We’re not separating. We’re also not going to give a single inch of this country up. Start talking like patriots, please, or shut up and step aside.
UPDATE: MTG goes into greater depth what she means by “national divorce:”
Read it if you’d like, but there’s not much there. Just boilerplate stuff outlining the differences between “Red America” and “Blue America.” To be certain, I share her sentiments, but I also live in the real world. And like I said before, the idea we’re going to give any inch of this country to those attempting to disintegrate it is utterly offensive to me and to those who came before us. Did they all really bleed and toil so we could give up half the country to those who’ve dismantled it?
Max Remington is a defense, military, and foreign policy writer. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentLoyalist.
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Immediately after Trump's election, there were several "national divorce" opinion pieces written by panicked mainstream pundits. When I see posts decrying secession as un-patriotic, I immediately respond with links to "Bluexit" rants.
When the Cathedral is flexing its strength, a more subtle delegitimization tactic must be used. Like if a leftoid teacher chastises you for wrongthink, you blurt out in front of the class "Alright, what propaganda must I recite in order to pass this B.S. class?" The point is not to wave the civil war threat as an attempt to intimidate the regime into submission but to get its own functionaries to stop believing in each other and in their own leaders.