Marjorie Taylor Greene wants Americans to get a national divorce, and the only question is who gets custody of Puerto Rico. Actually there are other questions, such as: why the hell are we talking about this again? And: why is a member of the United States House of Representatives advocating breaking up the United States? And: which third party gets to be the divorce lawyer? Because there is no way Canada is telling me how much alimony I have to pay.
For those of you leading normal and productive lives, this latest brain-plague began on Twitter when Congresswoman Greene declared, “We need a national divorce. We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government,” adding, “Everyone I talk to says this.” Apparently not everyone because the comment was furiously denounced by Greene’s colleagues on both sides of the aisle. Republican governor Spencer Cox called the idea “evil,” while Republican senator Mitt Romney called it “insanity.” And that was just the Utah delegation.
A national divorce is one of those ideas that flits around Twitter and occasionally creeps into the real world on nights when we accidentally leave the door to the alternate dimension open. Supported mostly by far-right (and a few far-left) commentators, it goes something like this. The differences between America’s red states and blue states have become irreconcilable. The culture war is determinative and has split us into what are effectively two countries, one favoring traditional values and the other sloshing about in woke fanaticism. There is no hope for rapprochement. The only way out is separation.
Your first sign that a national divorce is a Twitter idea is that it takes place in a historical vacuum. The notion that “red” rural areas and “blue” urban ones are different — cherishing different values, even pursuing different ends — dates back to the advent of the republic, when it was manifested most clearly in the disagreements between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Yet it stretches even further than that: ancient Greek writers like Aristophanes explored the rural/urban divide in their own time, with Attican farmers depicted as growing frustrated with Athens amid the disruptions of the Peloponnesian War.
Social media excels at a kind of hysterical presentism, making us feel like our problems are somehow special. And certainly tensions in America today are running high compared to, say, twenty years ago. But then it’s not all about America today, is it? In Canada, they call it “Western alienation,” the idea that the more conservative and agrarian western provinces are growing apart from Ontario and Québec. In Hungary, it’s “Budapest and the rest,” with the capital city seen as culturally distinct from everywhere else. Here in America, we once threw around another term: “peculiar institution.” Yet somehow we still ended up back together even after slavery drove us into a brutal civil war.
But today things are just so much more awful, aren’t they?
Your second sign that a national divorce is a Twitter idea is that it reduces an immensely complex undertaking to the broad strokes of a hot take. Dividing America into two countries is a bit trickier than copying and pasting an edgy meme. It isn’t even as simple as the last proposed secession — at least in the 1860s you could draw a line on the map between north and south, free and slave, with some messiness to resolve in Maryland and Kentucky. In the case of today’s national divorce, the new border would have to zig and zag between coasts, regions, even individual states.
In Washington State, for example, the deeply progressive western half would have to be carved off from the conservative east. Similarly in my current home of Virginia, where the cerulean suburbs of DC perch atop a Dixie heartland. New England would unquestionably be part of the New Leftistan, with New York and New Jersey lumped in there too (nawt those Jeteh-loving kweeahs!). But not Western New York, which is more conservative, along with central and western Pennsylvania and Ohio. Except then you hit the Upper Midwest, much of which is purple at best, and Chicago is deep blue, so that has to be accommodated.
Then there’s Austin. Austin would presumably try to secede from Texas and join the blue states. Cue Berlin-style airlifts from LA smuggling in Sweetgreen takeout and those annoying “in this house we believe…” signs.
And then one morning I come downstairs only to find border checkpoints in my living room. My wife looks at me forlornly from the foreign country that is my kitchen. We disagree about the child tax credit, and turns out that was the real dividing line.
Polls right now in the UK find significant regret over the decision to leave the European Union; does anyone seriously think that, even if Americans could be persuaded into annulment, they would maintain that support throughout a rocky and painful and expensive separation process? And that’s assuming some kind of sloppy Sykes-Picot arrangement didn’t trigger another civil war, one that, because of our intricate political distribution, would pit neighbors against neighbors.
More likely is that at some point we would remember why the idea of a melting pot came to be in the first place. Despite our undeniable differences, most of us speak the same language, enjoy similar cuisines, harbor that distinctly frank and gregarious American personality, share a loose yet common over-culture, cross between red and blue states all the time, use products made in politically disparate places.
Which is more than you can say about a lot of countries. If you want to know what a real cultural chasm looks like, study the position of Québec in Canada. Or read about the religious sectarianism in Lebanon. And then seal off the portal to Twitter world for good. That’s the real border right there, and we need agents on horseback with whips, stat.
