[Marjorie Taylor Greene’s idea for America to “separate by red
states and blue states” isn’t just dumb and harmless. It’s also
a window into a dangerous vision that’s ascendent in the Republican
Party.]
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A CALL FOR ONE-PARTY AUTHORITARIAN RULE  
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Matt Ford
February 25, 2023
The New Republic
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_ Marjorie Taylor Greene’s idea for America to “separate by red
states and blue states” isn’t just dumb and harmless. It’s also
a window into a dangerous vision that’s ascendent in the Republican
Party. _

Marjorie Taylor Greene gave President Biden a thumbs-down at the
State of the Union earlier this month, Win McNamee/Getty Images

 

This is a difficult moment for the American republic. More than a
million Americans died in the Covid-19 pandemic. Former President
Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol two years ago in a violent
and deadly coup attempt; he himself may soon face charges for trying
to subvert the election that he lost in 2020. Our political divides
seem more intractable now than at any other time in living memory.

In this grim hour, the nation naturally turns to one of its leading
political thinkers: Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Her
proposed solution is simple. “We need a national divorce,” she
wrote on Twitter
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20. “We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink
the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick
and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the
[Democrats’] traitorous America Last policies, we are done.”

Greene’s call, however, is not a cure for the disease in our body
politic but a symptom of it. Every call for the United States to break
apart or divide itself based on the political factions of the moment
are built on a fantasy. In that fantasy, the proponents get to live in
a world where everything they want comes true, and the perceived
opponents finally get the self-inflicted comeuppance that they and
their ideas deserve. Greene’s vision is not just about realizing
conservative policy ideas—it is an authoritarian rejection of
democratic government itself.

Greene is hardly the first person to call for a “national
divorce.” (Five years ago, a contributor to this magazine
regrettably called
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for a “Bluexit.”) The term is most often used as a sanitized
version of secessionism, one that implies—without guaranteeing—a
more peaceful outcome than the last attempt in 1860. In recent years,
a vocal sect of conservative pundits has been “predicting”
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that another civil war is on the horizon because of the country’s
deep political divides. I say “predicting” because some of these
commentaries read less like urgent warnings to prevent a civil war and
more like thinly veiled wish-casting for one to occur. After all, as
these pundits boast from time to time, they’re the side with all the
guns.

That context means it’s not surprising that most people initially
took “separate by red states and blue states” to mean that Greene
wanted Republican-led states to secede from the Union. The following
day, however, Greene explained
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of Twitter posts that she had something else in mind. A national
divorce, in her view, is “not a civil war but a legal agreement to
separate our ideological and political disagreements by states while
maintaining our legal union.” That sounds like federalism, a thing
that already exists, but apparently she has something more extreme in
mind.

Greene said that she thought the two sides of American politics had
reached the point of “irreconcilable differences” on a variety of
topics. “I’ll speak for the right and say, we are absolutely
disgusted and fed up with the left cramming and forcing their ways on
us and our children with no respect for our religion/faith,
traditional values, and economic & government policy beliefs,”
Greene explained.

Some of her arguments were rooted in fiscal policy, though they were
not clearly explained. She criticized both sides of the political
spectrum for increasing the national debt to what she saw as an
unsustainable level. “A national divorce would require a much
smaller federal government with more power given to the states,” she
claimed. “Hence, we would solve our debt and spending problems
immediately.” What exactly would happen to the existing $34 trillion
debt is unclear.

But Greene’s vision largely pertains to social issues. If
implemented, her plan would result in red states with “varying
degrees of more traditional public education, charter schools,
homeschooling, technical training, and college and universities” and
blue states with “LGBTQ indoctrinating teachers” and “government
controlled gender transition schools.” Red states would “bring
back prayer in school and require every student to stand for the
national anthem and pledge of allegiance,” while blue states would
“likely eliminate the anthem and pledge all together and replace
them with anthems and pledges to identity ideologies like the Trans
flag and BLM.”

“Perhaps some blue states would even likely have government funded
Antifa communists training schools,” Greene added, almost as an
afterthought. “I mean elected Democrats already support Antifa, so
why not.”

The rest of her Twitter thread is a caricature of the modern political
divide. After a national divorce, Greene claimed, red states would be
able to ban transgender people from everyday life, use fossil fuels
whenever possible, throw out ESG requirements for businesses, treat
police officers as “heroes” instead of “racists,” secure the
border, and hold in-person elections without voter fraud. Blue states
could abolish the police, let dead people vote, and eliminate guns and
private property.

How exactly all of this would happen is unsaid. Greene doesn’t
propose an act of Congress or a constitutional amendment that says
“red and blue states do whatever they want.” And she emphasizes
that the U.S. would technically remain one country under her hazy
framework. “Of course interstate trade, travel, and state relations
would continue,” she wrote. “However in red states, they could
have different rules about store product placement on national
[stores’] shelves. In red states, I highly doubt Walmart could place
sex toys next to children’s toothbrushes.” At times, it seems like
she doesn’t even believe her own tale: If the postdivorce blue
states all turned Communist, there would be no Walmarts there.

When I’ve written about calls for secession in the past, such as
when Republicans in Texas and Wyoming floated the idea
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shortly after Biden’s inauguration, I’ve emphasized
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the practical impossibilities of such a task. Secessionists are also
wrong on a moral and civic level
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case is much more demonstrably flawed from recent experience. Brexit
should give anyone pause about breaking up existing political and
economic unions for transitory political gain. Leaving the European
Union helped ossify
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the United Kingdom’s trajectory into a future of political
intransigence, collapsing public services, stagnant wage growth, and
periodic food rationing (this week being one of those periods
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British gross domestic product growth last year was outpaced by every
other major economy in 2022, including sanctions-ravaged Russia.

What matters in Greene’s fantasy is not the prescribed policy
outcome she outlines for each side of the policy divide. It’s not
worth quibbling with her about what Democrats and liberals actually
believe or what Republicans and conservatives really hope to
accomplish. The most important takeaway here is her complete rejection
of the idea that Americans can resolve their political differences
through discussion, persuasion, or compromise. In her preferred
outcome, Greene would never have to convince a single voter that her
policy ideas are better than her opponents’ or that they would be
better off if they elected her. She simply wants to win by default.

A useful window into her anti-democratic thinking came during a media
tour this week about her national divorce comments. On his internet
show, conservative activist Charlie Kirk asked Greene
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how red states could “stop” the left from “trying to invade our
states or our counties.” Greene replied that red states, in her
proposal, could simply “choose ... how they allow people to vote in
their states.”

She continued, “What I think would be something that some red states
could propose is: Well, OK, if Democrat voters choose to flee these
blue states where they cannot tolerate the living conditions, they
don’t want their children taught these horrible things, and they
really change their mind on the types of policies that they support,
well once they move to a red state, guess what, maybe you don’t get
to vote for five years. You can live there, and you can work there,
but you don’t get to bring your values that you basically created in
the blue states you came from by voting for Democrat leaders and
Democrat policies.”

“National divorce,” in other words, is a call for one-party rule.
Its proponents hope to abandon all those pesky democratic processes
and practices so they can simply impose their policy agenda upon
Americans by fiat. Never mind that the states aren’t homogenous,
with plenty of Democrats living in the red states and plenty of
Republicans living in the blue states. Never mind that the idea of
“red states” and “blue states” itself is vague and malleable,
as Greene’s own state of Georgia has shown in the last few election
cycles.

The idea of breaking apart this country over pronouns or climate
change regulations is nonsense. It should not be taken seriously. But
Greene’s underlying idea—that all our perceived national problems
would go away if we stopped trying to resolve our differences through
elections and the democratic process—can’t be ignored. It
demonstrates a dangerous and malignant view of politics in this
country, one that has led to bloodshed and madness everywhere else it
has been tried. The American republic doesn’t exist to make dreams
come true, but to prevent nightmares from becoming reality.

Matt Ford [[link removed]] @fordm
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Matt Ford is a staff writer at _The New Republic._

* Republican Party
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* Fascism
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* Majorie Taylor Greene
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