Sometimes you stay together for the kids, and other times you just have to get out of an abusive and destructive relationship. That’s how a lot of conservatives feel about being stuck with progressives in this relationship we call “America.” They want to pack their Schiff and move out, buy a condo and a Porsche, and hopefully find love again with someone younger, prettier, and less pinko. We’re not perfect, we conservatives, but in this analogy we are Johnny Depp and the Democrats are Amber Heard, right down to her Nadlering the bed.
I talk about what a national divorce might look like at length in a chapter of my new book, We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America, and it’s not a pretty picture.
“Yet, if anything, the last couple decades have taught us that the worst-case scenario can happen. Therefore, let’s examine what it might look like if all these things came to pass and America decided that its next destination was Splitsville.
The basic notion is that the red people would take their part of the community property and the blues their portion and they would go and live in separate parts of the U.S.A. Fortunately, as we all know, divvying up the pot in a divorce is never, ever, ever a giant hassle that becomes an endless, massive battle and ends unsatisfactorily for everyone except the lawyers.
Dividing polities is hard, and there are not too many examples from recent history to look to in order to see how to do it with minimal hassle. You do want to look to the Balkans, but as a cautionary example. Yugoslavia’s breakup devolved into a massive civil war. That mess was still sucking in U.S. forces during the Trump administration when Ric Grenell finally negotiated something like peace between Kosovo and Serbia. If we wished to divorce, we should carefully review how they broke up Josip Tito’s territory and then do the opposite.
The Soviet Union, the Humpty-Dumpty of international communism, had a great fall. Now, of course, all the ex-KGB men are trying to put it back together again. Well, how’s that whole Ukraine thing working out for you, Vlad?”
A national divorce is an idea born of frustration – our frustration with the Democrats being nimrods and the Democrats’ frustration with us not accepting that we are serfs whose purpose is to serve them and obey their whims. It seems superficially easier to just split up with people who are so fundamentally different in how they see the world and our respective places in it – for example, red Americans see themselves being left alone and blue Americans sees us normal people on our backs with the pinkos’ Birkenstocks pressing down on our throats.
Now, there are some National Divorce Lite scenarios out there, like maybe we abolish the Electoral College, or get rid of the Senate. In these scenarios, we red people are not sent away. We are just disenfranchised and neutered, effectively castrated into a nation of submissive Mitts, but fear not – we would still be available to do the labor, soldiering, and tax paying that the left needs from us. We’d be that horse in “Animal Farm” – hardworking, silent, and shipped off to some artisanal glue factory when we stop being useful.
Nah.
But there is no escaping that the red and blue components of America’s citizenry are developing mutually exclusive notions of how to run this joint venture that make our conflicts nearly, if not completely, impossible to solve to everyone’s satisfaction. Our differences are too profound.
The blues believe that it is a good idea to have weirdos, losers, and mutations grooming our kids in the classroom. We disagree.
We reds think America is great, and the blues despise it as well as other Americans.
The blues think we should worship the false pagan weather goddess and sacrifice our freedom and possessions to her by giving these up to them. We think we’ll keep our Silverados, rib-eyes, and liberty, thank you.
The blues think we reds are racist, sexist, and transphobic. We think the blues are extremely tiresome.
We reds think that every real man should own an “assault rifle” or four. The blues dispute that there is such thing as “men” and would be against them if there were. The thought of guns outside the hands of the Democrat criminal constituencies or the left’s corrupt law enforcement flunkies makes them cry.
These are stark and perhaps irreconcilable differences. So what if we did split up? How would it work in practice? As We’ll Be Back observes:
“Red America would likely track the present Constitution, being conservative and all. But there would be alterations. The revised version would do things like modify the Second Amendment to add ‘No, we’re not kidding—everyone gets to pack heat, and that includes assault rifles.’ Maybe they would undo the Seventeenth Amendment and end direct election of senators. Expect that the word ‘abortion’ would finally get into the Constitution, except it would be in the context of banning it starting at the time of the first date.
The Blue America constitution would be a different kind of abortion. The left, which is smarter and wiser and more moral than the dead white slave owners who were the framers—just ask them—would toss out the U.S. Constitution in favor of something written by a bunch of college professors gone wild. Say goodbye to those irritating negative rights that prevent the government from doing stuff to its citizens. Say hi to positive rights about all the things government is going to do for its subjects.
And you will see all the rights the old one had, except to keep and bear arms, of course. You’ll have freedom of speech and of the press and of religion. They will just add a whole bunch of asterisks.”
The fact is that without our influence, the American left would go full Stalin, and you never, ever go full Stalin. With their own country sharing our continent, the blues would turn America into the world’s most oppressive college campus and then would immediately blame their myriad woes on red America. And that is a recipe for trouble. We’re all stuck on the same continent, and that’s too close for comfort. What we need is some constitutional marriage counseling because there’s a big chance that a national divorce would make all our problems a hundred times worse.
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