National Divorce

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who I not-so-affectionately refer to as Marjorie Tinfoil Hat, has proposed a "National Divorce" separating the "red sates" from the "blue states", and shrinking the size of the federal government. Some days her idea sounds a bit like the secession that sparked the Civil War, other times it reads more like a return to the Articles of Confederation. For someone who claims to support The Constitution, it's a pretty unconstitutional plan. 

A lot of the opposition to her idea centers on the fact that red states receive more federal money than they contribute - and it's the opposite for blue states. In my opinion that's all beside the point. 

One thing Greene gets right is that Americans are not of one mind about how this country should be run. There is a great difference of opinion on what is best for the nation as a whole. What she gets wrong is that it's not merely two antagonistic points of view, it's a continuum. Not every conservative is a racist or a Nazi and not every liberal is a far-left radical. (Although I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that today's Republican Party, at least on the national level, seems in thrall to its most extreme members). Most people's political opinions are a combination of self-interest and ideology (which may be in opposition to self-interest), and both of those change according to time and circumstance. 

Even if you can lump all Americans in one of two sharply defined ideological/political camps, the split is cannot be drawn as neatly as the state boundaries on a map. The idea of a red or a blue state comes from how a majority of a state's electorate votes most of the time. For some states, that's pretty consistent, in others, it's more of a tossup. Some states, like Georgia, have sent two Democrats to the Senate, while electing Republicans as Governor as well as other statewide office. In other states the winners prevail by less than 1% of the votes, with half of the state supporting the losing party. In general, states where a majority of the population live in rural areas or small towns tend to vote Republican, while states where the majority cluster in urban areas vote Democratic. But there are always stretches of rural voters in blue states (see New York and California) and pockets of urban blue voters in red states. Does Greene's "divorce" account for the disenfranchisement of rural voters in blue states or urban voters in red states? One of her recent remarks suggested that blue state residents should move to red states, but be prohibited from voting for five years, until they absorb the local values. 

Another thing that Greene is missing is that, while there is a lot that the national government can do, there is plenty of action that state and local government can do as well. Throughout the country Republican governors and legislatures are taking extreme action to push their own agenda, even when they have a razor thin majority, or even when their legislative majority is due to gerrymandering. The federal government is powerless to prevent Florida Governor DeSantis from his push to force his own ideology on all Floridians: taking over education or punishing businesses that criticize him. My own state of Nebraska is well on its way to outlawing abortion, even though recent polls show that a majority of Nebraskans support its legality. On the other side of the coin, many blue states have legalized marijuana, despite it still being illegal nationally. 

Earlier I called Green's rantings "a plan" and "an idea", when it's really neither. It's a provocation, and a poorly thought-through provocation.