Secession

Matt McCaw doesn’t want to live anywhere but in Oregon. But during the pandemic he felt like he was living under tyrannical rule imposed by the state’s progressive majority in metro Portland. The school that his six children attended closed for more than a year due to a state mandate — and they received just four hours of online instruction per week. His church was forced to close, and his business selling textbooks suffered because school districts were buying online curricula, not physical books. Mask and vaccine mandates were ubiquitous; McCaw couldn’t even take his wife out to dinner to break the monotony, because all the restaurants were takeout-only. “I thought there would be a huge political backlash against all that,” he says.

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.

Viewed in one light, last week’s overwhelming rejection by the New Hampshire state legislature of a bill to put secession to a vote was a resounding win for unity in a fractious time. But it probably won’t be the last time we see such a proposal in a state house. A fatalistic argument from one of the bill’s thirteen supporters explains why: “National divorce is going to happen. It’s inevitable, and we have a chance to get ahead of this.” He may be right, if polls are to be believed. Last fall, a survey out of the University of Virginia brought the depressing news that 40 to 50 percent of Biden and Trump voters claim “it’s time to split the country.” Commentator David French declared the finding unsurprising, because Democrats and Republicans “loathe each other.

Mom, can you come pick me up? They’re talking about a national divorce again. This time, it’s the Party of Lincoln fantasizing about separation. Marjorie Taylor Greene sparked the latest round of divorce discourse amid speculation about visitation rights for blue-state transplants to red America. She mused that proposals for punitive taxes and a “cooling off period” of suspended voting privileges for new arrivals were “all possible in a National Divorce scenario.” Right on cue, blue-checkmark cholesterol levels shot into the stratosphere. To her credit, Greene clarified that she was “clearly…not in favor of divorce” in a thread she posted the next day. “You know what is necessary about threatening a divorce?

Americans enjoyed a tremendous sense of solidarity in the days following 9/11. People gathered on street corners, at subway stops, holding small candles, and for a time we quite forgot about politics. I had expected something like this to happen now, during the corona pandemic. But it hasn’t, and this has made me think that the country’s breakup is even more likely than I had thought when my book, American Secession, was published in January. One difference, of course, is that we’re not supposed to be together during an pandemic. We’re supposed to be six feet apart, the length of a hockey stick. We don’t do group hugs anymore. If you’re a misanthrope, these are the glory days.

The craziness of our politics makes you wonder what’s round the bend. After the ‘resistance’, the pussy hats, the non-stop crises and the permanent impeachment, what could be the next shoe to drop? The answer is a breakup of the country, as I argue in my new book, American Secession.Americans have never been more divided, and we’re ripe for secession. The bitterness, the gridlock, the growing tolerance of violence, invite us to think that we’d be happier were we two different countries. In all the ways that matter, save for the naked force of law, we are already two nations.And if that’s where we are today, where might we be in an easily imaginable future, where Trump wins reelection and gets a couple more appointments to the Supreme Court.

The United States is ripe for secession. Across the world, established states have divided in two or are staring down secession movements. Great Britain became a wee bit less great with Irish independence, and now the Scots seem to be rethinking the Act of Union (1707). Czechoslovakia is no more and the former Soviet Union is just that: former. Go down the list and there are secession groups in nearly every country. And are we to think that, almost alone in the world, we’re immune from this? Countries threaten to split apart when their people seem hopelessly divided. I’ve seen it already. Before moving to the United States, I lived in a country just as divided, without the kind of fellow feeling required to hold people together.