There's No Such Thing as a "National Divorce"

We are all in this together, no matter how divided we seem

Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who is responsible for endless numbers of irresponsible statements, recently made headlines again, this time for suggesting that the Red-Blue Divide means we need a “national divorce” where we split up the country. Interestingly, unlike with lots of her opinions, she actually has some common ground with the left on this one— dating all the way back to the Iraq War controversies in the early 2000’s, there’s been a cohort on the Left that says the solution is to let the Red States go their own way.

The first thing to say about this sort of thing is the most obvious: we tried it once, and it led to hundreds of thousands of people, North and South, dying. And while the Civil War point is obvious, it’s worth remembering what led to the Civil War. I have zero sympathy for the white antebellum South and its arguments in favor of slavery and states rights, but from a purely political perspective, the South’s freak-out over Abraham Lincoln’s election was ridiculous. The South had been incredibly successful in ensuring the continuation of slavery over the first 80 years of this country’s history, including getting a balance of new slave and free states admitted to the union, getting pro-slavery Presidents elected, and maintaining strong voting blocs in Congress to vote down anti-slavery legislation. They won a lot of battles, and honestly, only a small percentage of the public was abolitionist going into the 1860 election. What did happen is a larger number of people were finding white southern maximalism ridiculous— for instance, the idea that every time we admitted a new state we’d have this battle over slavery (exemplified by the deaths in “Bleeding Kansas”) was thought to be stupid. The public also saw slavery as essentially a state’s rights issue (partly because it was pitched as such by the South) and therefore resented the Fugitive Slave Act and any sort of notion that Southerners should have the right to take their slaves into free parts of the country and have those local jurisdictions respect their “rights”. Accordingly, the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, which held that a slave who moved into a free jurisdiction remained in bondage, was not popular.

So what happened is something that might sound familiar to modern politics— you had a group of people (white Southerners) who stood in a very strong position if they just asserted basic negative rights claims, but instead chose maximalism and the notion that the rest of the country had to accept their racist and inhumane “peculiar institution”. And when their coalition split allowing Abraham Lincoln, who wasn’t an abolitionist but did think that slavery should be contained to the places that already had it, they completely freaked out and tried to split the country in half, when the white South’s position, however odious it was, would have been secure for a long time to come had they stayed in the union.

Again, this should all sound very familiar, because while there are real political differences and obviously a ton of partisan polarization in modern politics, the reality is that there’s no reason Red States can’t have some of their own institutions in their own states. An obvious example of this is the post-Dobbs landscape on abortion. I think abortion bans are terrible, to be clear, but it’s also clear that there’s a big difference between, say, Alabama banning abortion in Alabama and Alabama trying to prevent California from offering abortions to people within the state of California (some of whom may have come from Alabama). That’s almost a precise parallel to what the rest of the country hated about the Dred Scott case— “we’ll hold our noses and tolerate states doing things that we vehemently disagree with, but we’ll be damned if they try to export their evil institutions into our states”.

The key point though is that you can’t fight a civil war about stuff like this or have a national divorce just because different parts of the country have different values. You have to figure out ways for people to live together with different legal rules in different places.

But there are other problems with a national divorce too. For one thing, despite the rhetorical convenience of Red States and Blue States, we aren’t actually divided that cleanly. Austin, Texas is very liberal, and Bakersfield, California is very conservative. What happens to those people after the divorce? And what happens to the historic Black populations of the rural South? And what happens to purple states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Arizona? What happens to Puerto Rico and Guam?

For everything that was wrong with the Confederacy (and boy there was a lot wrong with it!), one thing that I guess one could say that it was correct about was that there really was a true regional public opinion divide over slavery. It wasn’t like there was a large population of urban sophisticate abolitionists in Atlanta or a bunch of backwards slaveholders on plantations in upstate New York. There was a fairly clean divide with just a few border states that became some of the battle lines in the Civil War. Today’s partisan divides are much more urban-rural and high education-low education than they are regional; it’s just that some of these divides map imperfectly onto the states.

And the “national divorce” is also strikingly ignorant about economics. One of the reasons that the US became such an amazing success as a nation is that we are a gigantic free trade zone. Reinstating harder boundaries among the states will almost surely lead to protectionism; indeed, such protectionism was an important secondary issue in the Civil War (to be clear, again, the Civil War was about slavery, full stop, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t economic debates about protectionism that influenced how people felt about slavery). Ever wonder why the pro-Black civil rights party in the 19th Century was also the pro-business party (totally unlike current politics)? It’s because keeping the country together was very good for free trade and business, whereas tearing it apart was consistent of what we might now call more leftist distrust of big business and big trade.

If we tear the country apart, we will become two weaker countries, economically, politically, and globally. It will impoverish more Americans and dismantle one of the great advantages we have. And for what? Because we have vehement political disagreements? Like a mature country can’t handle those.

But most fundamentally, I do object to the unstated premise behind Rep. Taylor-Greene’s thinking, that we are somehow two nations. We are not. We are all in this together. I know people who live in the South or in the less urban parts of California and voted for Trump. They are still my brothers and sisters in this common project. The fact that we disagree so much is exactly why we should appreciate the merits of a democratic polity where we can channel those disagreements. And we can all watch the fireworks together on the Fourth of July.

We don’t need a national divorce. We need to rekindle the spark in our national marriage.