A National Divorce; the Only Way to Save Our Liberty — and Our Sanity

It’s rare, but once in awhile my friend Karol Markowicz gets something wrong, and her recent argument against a “national divorce” was one of these blue moon occasions. In response, here are some of my thoughts on why a national divorce isn’t just workable, but is actually the only way to save American liberty … 

The need for depolarizing everyday life couldn’t be clearer. Our lives are being ruined through the nationalization of every conceivable issue, with Americans forever becoming more divided and more angry. (For this week's example: See activists hunting down a Democratic senator in the bathroom and later boasting of it on social media). Our current reality is totally unhealthy and acknowledging this is a badly overdue necessity.

Our founders designed our country specifically to preserve the people’s liberty. Unfortunately progressives broke America, and now our government has become the actual inverse of its original conception; rather than preserving liberty, it incinerates liberty; rather than the states running the federal government, the federal government runs the states. The First Amendment, to take a quick example, was ratified specifically to preserve religious expression, but it’s been supplanted with a false doctrine of “separation of church and state,” which regularly results in federal courts telling local communities they must prevent people from being exposed to religious ideas. The 9th and 10th Amendments were passed to preserve for people and the states, respectively, power that wasn’t otherwise delegated to the federal government. Unfortunately the Supreme Court during the Progressive Era deigned that actually the 14th Amendment inverted the entirety of the Constitution to give federal judges power to strike down state laws. Consequently we have cases like Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges, which have made every divisive social issue into a national debate, and every Supreme Court nomination into a life-or-death battle for control of our social mores. To avoid candidates we hate, voters end up having to sell a part of their soul to support one they hate sightly less; and when that candidate ends up losing, resentment toward the whole system inevitably results (just as Bernie voters who supported Hillary, or conservatives who backed Romney).

The Constitution conceived the United States as a federal republic, not a national democracy, specifically to avoid these problems. There’s no reason why a #BLM-supporting, Greenpeace-donating mom in San Francisco should be losing sleep over how readily abortion is available in Alabama — but that’s become our modern reality. The Founders knew the only way a country as large as the United States could work was if power was concentrated on the local level. But owing to progressives successfully dismantling constitutional bulwarks against nationalization, we now have a system designed to divide, rather than unite.

As every issue these days ends up in Washington, the prospect for average Americans to affect issues that matter in their lives is only ever becoming more impossible. The dismay that entails is stress-inducing. Imagine you're upset your 2-year-old is being forced to wear a face mask. Changing a mask mandate on a local level might be doable, and you may even make friends in the process. Getting the TSA to drop theirs? When do we vote for their new secretary again? As you can see, this trend of inexorable centralization necessarily results in an always unhappier people.

The results speak for themselves. As the quantity of issues being debated is forever growing, Americans are forever fighting, with the country consolidating around two halves. One half looks to Washington to coddle and protect them. Meanwhile the other half just wants to be left alone. These are, to put it plainly, irreconcilable differences. There’s never going to be a way to reform the federal government so long as half the country wants single-payer health care while the other half wants government completely out of health care; when some view gay marriage as an article of faith while others view it as a violation of their faith; when some view global warming as an existential crisis to the planet and the other half views it as a pretty funny joke. Try as they may, no amount of Big Tech censorship, White House bullying, or OSHA mandating is going to convince independently minded Americans to accept Dr. Fauci as their savior, just as progressives will never accept the idea we don't even need the CDC in the first place.

ObamaCare was a wake-up call. Passed against the wishes of the vast majority of Americans, the obviously unconstitutional law was fought by more than 30 states. That a majority of states opposed a piece of legislation that effectively nationalized 20 percent of the economy should have itself been proof that this was no way to run a country. 

But the die has been cast. You’ll never see progressives admitting there’s no constitutional basis for Roe v. Wade and that it’s actually caused far more harm than good. You’ll never hear them say the Biden Administration ought to refrain from attempting their extraconstitutional vaccine mandate, as it creates a precedent that a Republican president could just as easily exploit for purposes progressives find repugnant. With no release valve, the stakes only ever get higher — with each successive presidential election assuming greater control of the psyche of average Americans. People shouldn’t be in therapy over who won an elected office thousands of miles away from their home — but thousands are, and the numbers are growing.

These terrifying trends are only accelerating under Biden. Far from ushering in an era of national healing — or “restoring the soul of America” as he mawkishly put it — America’s left-wing has funneled all of the embitteredness they accumulated during the Trump Era into an extreme overindulgence on raw power. In their quest to remake America in their vision, they endorse violence, demand censorship, and when they hit a roadblock, or when some isolated state somewhere succeeds in moderately reforming its laws in a conservative direction, progressives openly call for scrapping institutions like the Senate and the Supreme Court — anything in that present moment obstructing their envisioned utopia.

In less than a year, the Biden DHS has issued seven separate warnings that conservatives were plotting violent uprisings (of course none turned out to be true). The Democrat-led Congress has hosted a series of hearings where witnesses testified that conservatives are the greatest national security threat the country faces — and advised lawmakers to track and monitor them as they do Islamist terror groups. Just this week, Biden’s DoJ acquiesced to a teacher union demand that parents — who have become increasingly vocal in defiance of public schools’ shift from education to indoctrination — be treated as “domestic terrorists.”

All of this anger and division is being actively stoked by the major media, aka the PR wing of the the Democratic Party, where self-proclaimed journalists use their platforms to catalyze hatred toward their political rivals. Where once the media viewed its mission as “holding the powerful accountable,” today’s media do the opposite, targeting individual Americans to help protect the powerful. The New York Times offered a proposal for a “truth and reconciliation” commission — not the only media outlet to do so — that imagined televised trials for Americans being charged with heresies against the State. In another prototypical example, The Times published a hit piece on a random high school cheerleader for having once — in a private message to friends — used a politically incorrect word. The story was a “success”; the college she had worked so hard to gain admission into retracted her acceptance. Across the media, it’s become commonplace to see stories mocking ordinary Americans who’ve died with COVID because they were Trump voters or supposedly vaccine hesitant. Late night “comedy” shows,  another blue state redoubt, are equally explicit in their attempts at marshaling hatred toward the other half of the country. On “The Daily Show” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” the deaths of red state voters are routinely turned into comedic fodder, even as data clearly prove policies like masking and vax passports have zero impact.

Recent polling shows all of this is having an effect; Democratic voters now view Trump voters as the greatest threat America faces. When almost half of the country views their ostensible compatriots as terrorists and hostile actors, it requires willful delusion to think these problems are going to somehow magically go away. And even if you believe in magic, who's even pretending to suggest solutions? Conservatives would likely settle for a return to real federalism — which means castrating Washington, a starting point progressives could never accept (power is their lifeblood). And on the other side, progressives can only seem to imagine a harmonious America once those guilty of wrongthink graduate from re-education camps. (Seriously!)

I've seen no serious ideas being offered for how to fix the mess we're in. I've only seen people like Karol arguing a national divorce is impractical. She worries that if red and blue states each go their own ways, red state voters will remain in blue states, trapped, and vice versa. She also notes that states evolve with time — Colorado going from solidly red two decades ago to mostly blue today — and that makes America's division of assets even more complex.

I disagree. I'd take these challenges any day over the ones outlined above. A national divorce also immediately dials back the pressure gauge of America's boilerpot. It won't solve every issue, but it at least frees up the vast majority of states to pursue a political vision in line with their respective voters. As for those trapped behind? A few things:

1.  As red states become truly free again, you can expect some blue state conservatives to become motivated to finally make the move; and, on the other side, some blue state voters residing in red states might make the pilgrimage back to states more aligned with their values.

2.  With a dramatically smaller tax base feeding the federal government, and thus states (thanks to more progressive inversions of the Constitution), states like New York will need to be more mindful with their budgeting. Assuming the dollar hasn’t already collapsed by then, it’s hard to imagine the current printing campaign — with its tangential bailouts to the more irresponsibly managed states — continuing much longer. Capitals like Albany will thus need to cater to parts of the state usually given short shrift. It’s actually possible a national divorce will ironically end up helping blue states rein in some of their more reckless behavior.

3. Let's call a national divorce what it actually is: secession. It's more like secession than an actual divorce because I'd imagine every red state will want to return to a loose confederate of states — as the Constitution originally intended — and thus being happy letting blue states keep Washington, D.C. With secession in the air, it’s also possible existing states will break into smaller pieces. Red state voters who've forever lived in the western part of red state New York might initially see how respectful this new political entity is toward their liberty (see No. 2 above), or they could secede and become a new state. There are existing proposals to cut California into 5 smaller states, which would each better represent their local cultures than the behemoth headquartered in Sacramento. Parts of southern Oregon have for years sought to separate from the state. Western Maryland has a secession movement, too, as do many other poorly represented but tightly knit American localities. A proliferation of new political entities would be one of the great moments in American history, as our people would be able to experience a birth of liberty reminiscent of what our forefathers felt in 1776.

The future is ... freedom and decentralization. The longer we resist this reality, the greater our peril becomes; the sooner we accept it, the faster our problems recede. The more countries, the more states, the more small towns, the more culture, the more liberty, the more peace.

Over the last year much of the world has witnessed a complete discrediting of the existing order. Panicky politicians, scared by a virus, tried legislating it out of existence, but ended up destroying the global economy instead. Now they’re trying to make up for it with a Robert Mugabe-style perma-printing campaign. That profligacy is bankrupting us through inflation, just as the shutdown destroyed global supply chains. And it doesn’t help that we keep learning the supposed experts have been lying to us all along. The more we open our eyes, the more we can clearly see that the whole system is broken. Government, the economy, the Federal Reserve, education (especially college), health care, the media, travel, the security state, the FBI, the WHO, the UN … every institution meant to preserve order instead creates disorder.

Ultimately this all speaks to the same problem: too much power is concentrated into too few hands. For over the last 200 years, the world's watched as America blazed the path into the future. Voluntarily, and peacefully, separating states so that they can more effectively manage their affairs, and create new economic growth, would signal to the world that America is once more charting the path forward. And that it’s OK for these empires of the past to accept where trends are take us. Countries in old Europe might likewise finally start allowing their local secession movements to succeed, so these pockets of culture dating back to antiquity can once more give self-determination a go.

Whether you're ready to believe it or not, freedom, decentralization — these are the trends taking us forward.

And on the bright side, if we do divorce … the very worst that could possibly happen is that we end up getting back together again.