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A National Divorce Where to Start?
To be clear I really didn’t want to talk about this. It’s a culture war talking point. And fails in the face actual scrutiny. So I’ve been trying to hold my tongue all week, but I can’t.
I’ve failed. So here is my opinion on Marjorie Taylor Green’s President’s Day divorce musings. It’s stupid and shows her lack of critical thinking skills on so many levels.
As I said earlier this is a terrible idea for so many reasons. For one much of the country is supported by so-called ‘blue states.
The reason this is coming up, just like last time, aka the civil war, this is about certain states & the political classes in those states want to impose cultural beliefs that fly in the face of the constitution.
Divorce is an interesting word to use. What Marjorie Taylor Green suggested is not a divorce, it’s not even a sucession, it’s the destruction of the United States. Plain and simple.
When I heard this on President’s Day, yes, the irony abounds I thought about a piece I read in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s first two months in office. Kevin Baker wrote in the ‘The New Republic’ that blue states should “effectively abandon the American national enterprise, as it is currently constituted.”
The piece is rather good, if a bit angry. Though given the time period, I can’t really blame him. This was during the height of Trump’s autocracy attempts, March 2017.
But even he wasn’t calling to separate the states into Red and Blue financially. He at least understood where the money comes from.
In his piece Baker argued that everyone should embrace the state’s rights mantra of the right. That everything will be decided at the local level, but he warned that in doing this the blue states would be turned “into a world-class incubator for progressive programs and policies, a laboratory for a guaranteed income and a high-speed public rail system and free public universities.”
I personally thought that sounded amazing. I still think it does. Not just the policies I agree with, but the potential to be the shining city on a hill that my grandmother came to in the aftermath of World War II.
