The other day, former celebrity Kathy Griffin took to posting vaguely worded threats of civil war on her Twitter feed:
Michael Malice, with whom I’m vaguely familiar and frankly wish I wasn’t, responded by demanding a “peaceful divorce” in which Republican- and Democrat-voting states go their own way. (They each split time with Georgia on a week-on, week-off basis, I presume.)
I in turn responded that a “national divorce” is frankly unworkable, considering how the voting population is distributed:
People in turn responded to my point by agreeing that talk of secession and civil war and divorces is just ridiculous fantasizing and then they all went outside to get some fresh air LOL welcome to Twitter:
That’s just a sneak peek. As of this writing the bunfight has been going on for three days and shows no signs of slowing down. Nothing but normal, well-adjusted people on this platform.
As a Canadian I find it kind of amusing when Americans start talking about breaking up the country. By coincidence, there is a province of Canada that’s been threatening secession for many years, has a very unique culture, language and even legal traditions (a “distinct society,” one might say) and would be geographically united if it became a separate country.
And it still hasn’t happened. It’s not even a major issue in the current Quebec provincial election campaign. The Parti Quebecois, which led the independence campaign for decades and held two (losing) referenda on the issue, has been reduced to rump party status and might very well be wiped out.
(The “soft nationalist” - and kind of racist - CAQ will likely win a thumping majority with less than 40% of the vote, while the upstart Conservative Party of Quebec could finish second in popular vote and win no seats at all. Isn’t first-past-the-post voting grand?)
Scotland hasn’t left the UK yet, either, even though they’ve been musing about it for centuries. Even after Brexit (mostly supported by England and Wales, largely opposed by Scotland and Northern Ireland) and Braveheart airing on cable TV for almost three decades, most polls still show a majority of Scots wishing to remain part of the United Kingdom.
But, yes, I’m sure Texit or Calexit or Delawexit is right around the corner.
Okay, maybe I’m wrong and there’s actually a massive groundswell of support for an American “national divorce” that isn’t showing up in the polls. National borders aren’t forever, as Austria-Hungary found out the hard way.
Leaving aside the fact that there’s no way it would be a clean break (even in GOP stronghold states the cities are deep blue, while all five Republicans in California are widely distributed enough to leave a surprising amount of red on the electoral map) the United States splitting into two countries based on political affiliation would be - what’s the word I’m grasping for? - really, really effing stupid.
I’m not a big Rich Lowry fan, but this column calling out right-wing “national divorce” enthusiasts is spot on:
There’s no doubt the country is deeply riven along political, cultural and religious lines. Yet a national divorce has nothing to recommend it. The practical obstacles are insuperable, and the likely effects would be very unwelcome to its proponents. If an insufficient patriotism is one of the ills of contemporary America, national divorce would prescribe arsenic as a cure. It would burn down America to save America, or at least those parts of it considered salvageable.
A disaggregated United States would be instantly less powerful. Indeed, Russia and China would be delighted and presumably believe that we’d deserve to experience the equivalent of the crackup of the Soviet Union or the Qing dynasty, respectively.
The economic consequences could be severe. The United States of America is a continentwide free trade zone, creating a vast domestic market that makes us all better off. Exchanging that for a market Balkanized by state or region would be a major loss.
Finally, the United States foundering on its domestic divisions would be a significant blow to the prestige of liberal democracy. Abraham Lincoln worried about this effect the first time around, and it might be even worse now, with a long-stable republic unable to survive internal dissension.
Then, there’s the question of how this is supposed to work. Lincoln warned of the physical impossibility of secession when the Mason-Dixon Line was a more or less ready line of demarcation. How would it play out now, with conservatives and progressives amply represented in every state in the Union?
If there were to be sovereign pure red and blue places, this wouldn’t look like the relatively neat split of the United States into two in the 1860s, but more like post-Peace of Westphalia Europe, with hundreds of different entities.
[…]
Meanwhile, would red-state secession actually stem the cultural tide? Would the college professors in these places be less woke? Would the newsrooms be more conservative? Would people in the state stop using social media?
The real impetus for the talk of a breakup is despair. It constitutes giving up on convincing our fellow Americans, giving up on our common national project, giving up on our birthright.
This is an impulse to be resisted. Breaking up is hard to do, and quitting on America is — or should be — unforgivable.
It’s a neat trick to say you’re a real patriot unlike those America-hating Dems, while simultaneously demanding that the country break up.
As for left-wingers who say they want a divorce (these online fights always start with them calling the red-state secessionists traitors and then, without missing a beat, musing about how awesome it would be if they had their own country) they argue that blue states economically prop up the red ones, and they’re right.1
But a healthy portion of this comes from rational self-interest - agricultural subsidies (which should be eliminated pretty much everywhere in the world, but that’s another story) to the places that grow most of the food2 they eat, defense spending because it makes more sense to put ICBM silos in North Dakota than on Long Island, federal lands and national parks because the sparsely populated Republican states have quite a bit more of it, medicare and social security for retirees who migrated to Florida and South Carolina.
By and large, rural America has the agriculture and the natural resources, and urban America makes and sells stuff based on these resources. And you’d never know it from reading angry people on the internet, but it’s a system that works pretty well.
You can be a rich country that’s nothing but a big city (Singapore) or one that’s overhwelmingly rural (Liechtenstein) but having both at your disposal makes much more sense.
But let’s assume everything was straightened out and all fifty states started going their own ways. After the dust settles, it would make sense for everyone to join some kind of free-trade agreement, and maybe even visa-free travel, to keep economic and social disruption to a minimum.
My new Twitter friends seem to feel differently, with talk about travel bans and food supplies being cut off and completely unthreatening rhetoric about which side would have more guns. At least this doesn’t go as far as a comment section I once saw discussing this issue, in which someone expressed an apparently sincere concern about red states resorting to actual piracy.
Yes, I remember the breakup of Yugoslavia well, but that involved ethnic and religious divisions that went back for several generations. There’s no reason an American breakup couldn’t be more like the Czech Republic and Slovakia going their separate ways.
Unless people want it to be violent. I figure 99.9% of the people acting tough on social media are poseurs. But even that remaining 0.01%, in a country with as large a population as America’s, could do a lot of damage if they put their minds to it.
Here’s a thought: maybe you shouldn’t publicly fantasize about something with potentially extremely serious consequences if you have no plans to actually see it through. And that applies to much more than secession talk.
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Net recipients of funding from the central government being more open to secession seems to be the norm rather than the exception. Quebec and Scotland receive much more from Ottawa and London, respectively, than they contribute.
“But California is the largest agriculture-producing state,” you respond. True, but good luck living on almonds. More importantly, what makes you so sure these rural - i.e. Republican-voting - regions would remain part of a People’s Republic of California? Or that Austin would quietly accept its fate as part of a Christian Republic of Texas?