(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) Democrats’ righteous indignation last month at Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s calls for a “national divorce” came as no surprise.
It was just the latest in an endless parade of things that the Left was for before it was against, to borrow a catchphrase from consummate waffler John Kerry.
It is hard, in fact, to come up with a position on their current platform where Democrats have not flip-flopped when political opportunism or necessity struck.
And so it was that the only party ever to have seceded from the Union found itself comparing Greene to its own former leader, Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
Jefferson Davis Greene wants a “national divorce” she is a traitor and needs to go to jail for sedition….why isn’t anybody doing anything…. pic.twitter.com/CFnXxkYiV3
— Anthony Fowler (@antfowler30) February 25, 2023
But in fairness to Democrats of yore, while one could armchair-quarterback whether the ends justified the means in eradicating slavery, the provocative actions of radical Republican abolitionists like John Brown—who murdered innocent families, and raped women and children—offered at least some justification to antebellum Southern Democrats.
Their own elected leaders, Democrat presidents Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, had failed to fix the problem of how to phase out the barbaric practice, and the prospect of Republican President Abraham Lincoln effecting a peaceable solution that did not threaten their lives and livelihoods seemed grim, even to the vast majority of Southern families who owned few or no slaves.
The impasse was a lot like the current one that America faces under an extreme Left that, like John Brown, would rather destroy every last shred of civility and compromise than to coexist with the “evil” customs of the status quo.
Instead of slavery, though, the great evil of the modern era is democracy itself.
NO ALTERNATIVES
A system that gives everybody one voice and one vote is, after all, inherently unfair to a party that regards itself as perpetually oppressed and marginalized by the cultural (and political) majority.
That leaves only a limited range of solutions, not unlike those in the classic 1996 movie Independence Day.
Indeed, Greene’s call for a brokered settlement—a conscious uncoupling, if you will, of red- and blue-majority states—may be the only realistic solution that will avert a national strife so horrific that it will make the bloody and violent Civil War feel like the leisurely, guided tours of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by comparison.
Already, President Joe Biden has raised the stakes by warning would-be freedom fighters that it will take more than a few hunting rifles to secure their God-given right to liberty.
If the only glue binding together the union is a threat of military force and unthinkable bloodshed, then it is already lost.
Nonetheless, not everyone is on board yet with the formal terms of Greene’s divorce proposal.
Shockingly, while Democrats would get prime territory from the bargain—including America’s three most populous cities, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, as well as its most desirable coastal real estate—some have scoffed at the idea.
What, after all, is the point of their unrelenting pursuit of wealth and power through Leninist social revolution if, in the end, there is nobody of consequence for them to exert their dominion over?
Or, more cynically, perhaps, maybe their kneejerk aversion to the idea comes by virtue of the fact that Greene said what they, themselves, had secretly been thinking.
And in some cases, as with the unabashedly leftist New York Review, those thoughts were not so secret.
UNITED IN DISUNITY
Just weeks before the 2022 election, as the idea of a red-wave reckoning against the Biden administration was at its fever pitch, leftist academes Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson offered up the very same idea as Greene but seemed to draw none of the performative objections that she did.
“Several commentators have suggested that, historically, radical swings in domestic politics and virulent strains of racism and fascism have in fact been normal in the United States, and that talk of prospective large-scale political violence is therefore overblown,” said the stochastic terrorist duo in their Sept. 22 screed titled “These Disunited States.”
“But the breadth and depth of the present threat to the country seems unprecedented in post–Civil War America,” they continued. “… The US now appears to be in a state of ‘unstable equilibrium’—a term originating in physics to describe a body whose slight displacement will cause other forces to move it even further [sic] away from its original position.”
At times, their thought-piece turned into a farcical clown-show of projectionism, spuriously suggesting that Republicans alone were to blame for refusing to roll over to a radical agenda that the Biden administration lacks any mandate or authority to enact.
“Although Democrats occasionally reveal impulses toward reconciliation, Republicans largely do not,” they whined. “Most have put up implacable resistance to Biden’s efforts” in areas like the economy and the environment where Biden’s policies have proven to be abject failures.
But ultimately, their proposed solution proved that there is one area in which the radical Left and members of the conservative Right, such as Greene, can find common ground.
“The splits between the two halves of the nation—red and blue, right and left—increasingly appear irreconcilable,” they said.
“Today, new state legislation on abortion, LGBTQ rights, gun rights, free speech, and public health is making red and blue states radically different,” they continued—accurately, albeit from the wrong vantage point. “Many Americans have relegated their political adversaries to the category of ‘the other,’ an ominous prelude to the dehumanization that facilitates violence in civil conflict.”
Simon and Stevenson went on to suggest that the threat of right-wing violence just might lead to entirely justifiable left-wing violence, and that the danger of a radical Republican establishment assuming control through the democratic process would be a valid reason for leftists to want to secede, rather than allowing practices they disagree with to become further entrenched.
“Before civil strife acquires critical momentum, Democrats need to embrace a more radical political solution to stave it off,” they decided.
“Purposeful defederalization is one possibility,” they added. “There is a case to be made that the raison d’être for federalism has passed.”
SALVAGING A HOUSE DIVIDED
The ironic juxtaposition of this five-month-old treason treatise with the reaction to Greene’s tweet is, of course, a source for smug amusement for conservatives. But then, pointing out Democrat hypocrisy has grown a bit old and tiresome, like shooting fish in a barrel.
There is a more important point to be gleaned from it, which is that the idea of a separation may be the only way to save a country so dangerously divided that both parties agree a split is necessary.
Achieving such an end will not be easy—and it may take a bipartisan coalition of candidates who actively campaign on negotiating its terms in the same way that the country was forged.
That would allow us to establish a special relationship between the new nations—let’s call them Trumpland and Obamica—recognizing that there will still be more in common between them than any other two countries given their shared cultural history and, presumably, their roots in democratic principles.
Perhaps, at least for a time, there might even be an open-borders agreement to allow those caught in the wrong territory to resettle elsewhere.
Some might argue that dividing the nation in two would weaken its position as a global super-power to counter the occidental alliance of China and Russia.
However, those countries are already exploiting America’s intrinsic ideological differences in order to weaken and distract us. So, to remove the bickering from within should help sharpen our focus on the extrinsic threats.
While it is true, as Lincoln said, that a house divided against itself cannot stand, a house built on a seismic fault-line such as ours is better off relocating altogether.
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/realbensellers.
