There are some things we should ALL be able to agree on, left or right. Murder and rape are bad, love and kindness are good, and what happened last Wednesday at the U.S. Capitol should never, ever happen in a democratic society. While conservatives are more than correct to drag the media for downplaying the Black Lives Matter summer of riots, er, love, none of us should fall into the trap of in any way justifying the mob action that took place. It was dangerous, illegal, counter-productive to any intent to help Trump or the cause of election reform, and will and has resulted in a severe overreaction from power-hungry Democrats and Big Tech oligarchs hellbent on curbing even more of our precious liberties.
There. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about a few things left and right CAN’T seem to agree on. Things like liberty, taxation, varying degrees of wokeness, critical race theory, free speech, abortion, self-defense, immigration, the Second Amendment, and, particularly important of late, corona fascism. On these issues and more, left and right aren't just not seeing eye to eye, they are displaying a blazing contempt for each other that makes the bitterest divorce seem tame.
But if there is a solution to all this, what is it? Does a “two-state” solution lie in America’s future, a peaceful split whereby liberty lovers and would-be communists bid each other adieu, then go off and create governments that fit their values and ideas? It actually sort of sounds good, in theory. Truly, the thought of living in a country where I wouldn’t have to worry every election cycle about my liberties being taken away delights me to my soul, and frankly, never having to interact with leftist ingrates would be an added bonus.
But how would that work exactly? If we split somewhere, say, along the Mason-Dixon line, how about newly-minted blue state Georgia? Do we carve off Atlanta and let Hillarystan conduct Berlin airlift-style supply runs? What about New Hampshire, or rural Pennsylvania and New York? There are countless examples like this, and where to "draw the line" gets even more complicated when you consider that different political views are a staple in virtually every American community, workplace, and even most families. Unfortunately, as Tucker Carlson opined Wednesday night, we seem to be “conjoined twins.”
“You may have nothing in common with the people on the other side of the country, but you’re stuck with them,” Carlson said. “The idea that groups of Americans will break off into separate, peaceful nations of like-minded citizens, that’s a fantasy. That will not happen. There is no such thing as a peaceful separation. There never has been and there won’t be. The two hemispheres of this country are inseparably intertwined. They are conjoined twins. Neither can leave without killing the other. That’s the first thing to know. As horrifying as this moment is, we have no option but to make it better, to gut it out.”
Tucker is right, of course. Short of some sort of cataclysmic event none of us would want to happen, forming separate countries based on ideology is going to be off the table for at least most of our lifetimes. However, does that mean the answer is to keep doing what we’re doing? Because judging by the staggering losses conservatives and freedom-lovers have endured over the past year, that hardly seems like the correct path. The truth is, and we all know it, GOP Inc. is not going to help us get where we need to be. One need only look at how quickly the Electoral College challenges were abandoned Wednesday night to see this. Did the need for election reform suddenly disappear because a few hundred Trump supporters jumped the shark? I don’t think so, and yet instead of saving free and fair elections our overlords are now going on about “insurrections” and “coup attempts” while conducting massive-scale deplatforming and making no pretences about their future plans to curb civil liberties. Never let a good crisis go to waste, right?
It’s time to face it. We tried this thing from the top down with Trump and, other than a few key victories here and there, it didn’t work. The bureaucracy is too entrenched, the Deep State too deep, and Trump’s powers, and in some cases his will to use them, in the end weren’t significant enough to drain a flooded basement much less the D.C. swamp. So where do we go from here, from what appears to be pretty close to rock bottom? The answer, I think, is to realize that though we’ve taken a few gut punches, we’re by no means out of the fight. Though the left took 2016 ridiculously hard, they also took it in one way we could take a lesson from. Not only did they #Resist in every possible way, starting with massive grassroots organization, they also went back to their states, run by fellow leftists, and, well, did whatever the hell they wanted to do.
Which leads to the obvious question: Why on earth can’t we do the same thing? Since we seem to be already there, it’s time to start at the bottom, at the local level, and work our way up. Does your county have a mask mandate? Organize! Fight back! Put pressure on your local officials. Run for office yourself or convince someone you know to run, then help them. The good news is conservatives do control a majority of state and local governments. Though most of them have sadly fallen victim to the Branch Covidian mask cult, they are nevertheless vulnerable to pressure from their constituents and will be more likely to resist federal attempts at control when it’s coming from a Biden administration.
Indeed, the answer to dealing with the current political divide without lawlessness or a devastating national separation is built into the Constitution. It’s called federalism. Using the same concept blue states happily did with drug laws, we must rely on state and local governments, and sheriffs, to protect us from the coming federal tyranny. These people live, work, and worship with us, and we must exert the kind of pressure that makes it harder for them to ignore us than it is to obey pressure from nameless, faceless federal bureaucrats. And when that doesn’t work, we must use the courts as best we can to gum up the works, if not sue them into oblivion.
Given the events of the past week, it’s obviously past time to diversify our social networks. To that end, please consider following me on Gab and friending me on MeWe if you are on those platforms.