AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana
Right-wing insurrectionists sack the Capitol building on January 6, 2021.
The United States has reached a strange moment on the strange journey that this country has been on since first Black president stepped off the White House timeline. A loud minority of Americans apparently likes to wallow in the deepest, darkest cesspools of history to glamorize all strains of racial, ethnic and gender animus, not to mention secession and civil war.
If life wasn’t difficult enough with—take your pick—price-gouging plutocrats, substandard health care, endless gun crime, sudden stratospheric warming, superpowers eyeing moves in a European hot war, and, lest we forget, an ongoing pandemic, here comes MAGA mouthpiece Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) spouting off about “national divorce.” Close behind her is a prospective presidential candidate Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina Governor, claiming that Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law doesn’t go far enough to protect young children from conversations about gender. For good measure, Haley’s decade-old comments about secession and her willingness to “talk to” people about their Confederate flag issues have been resurfaced by a national news outlet.
For Republicans parroting disunion, the country has gone off the rails for “regular” Americans, who are usually, but not always, white. They are more than pleased to coo over people who believe “other” people have gummed up the works for them. If only Black history weren’t taught in public schools, if only abortion was completely illegal, if only people who don’t have a gun had two or three, then they and their progeny would somehow be granted, in abundance, the Founders’ promises of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
In fact, however breaking up the United States into what the purveyors of secession believe are more properly constituted red and blue nation-states, free to do red and blue state things, minus the never-ending protests from the other side, is already well underway, and does not bode well for anyone in the long run.
The neo-secessionist movement is ripping federalism into shreds, controlling people’s movement, human reproduction, and thought, to churn up the conditions that set Americans against each other in dangerous ways. On immigration, the Republican governors of Texas and Florida pride themselves on busing beleaguered migrants to big cities with Democratic mayors—which led New York’s mayor to sanction bus trips for people who ended up trying their luck in Canada. Florida has decided to expand its busing efforts, recently passing legislation to finance Gov. Ron DeSantis’s fantasy of rounding up migrants from every corner of the country and sending them to Democratic cities—all in the service of his ambition to ascend to the presidency and transform the country into an authoritarian gangster paradise.
Abortion has become a state-rights battleground over human reproduction. Prohibition-minded lawmakers are contemplating prosecuting doctors and women who cross state lines from anti-abortion to pro-choice jurisdictions to seek abortions. A Trumpist federal district court judge in Texas is poised to rule on whether to rescind FDA approval for mifepristone, which is used in conjunction with misoprostol to terminate pregnancies. On Tuesday, a coalition of 20 Democratic governors drew battle lines, announcing the creation of a Reproductive Freedom Alliance designed to solidify political support for what the Dobbs Supreme Court decision let fly. The alliance, they vowed, will protect health care providers from legal threats from prohibitionist states and will respond to new legal threats.
Prohibitions on teaching African American history and other ethnic and gender studies is a movement with a long lineage in the United States (witness Ibram X. Kendi’s recent comments on the genesis of historian Carter G. Woodson’s Negro History Week as a reaction to events at a Black Oklahoma school in 1925). The current objections to African American history—18 states half of them in the South, have implemented bans or other restrictions—that are designed not only to erase histories of people of color history from curricula and classroom bookshelves, but also to reshape how young Americans think about the strides people of color have made and the barriers they’ve overcome, lessons that bump up against how some groups want to see American history taught.
If the first Civil War is any indication, disunion is not a simple proposition of putting up different “Welcome to” signs and waving what’s-old-is-new-again flags.
The Republican right’s insistence on ignoring the gun violence that Americans are uniquely subjected to inures people to killing and mass murder. Rather than protecting adults and children victimized by gun violence, some members of Congress walk the halls of the U.S. Capitol wearing automatic weapon lapel pins. This is the price we pay for fealty to the far right’s interpretations of the Founders’ original intent. (If only the Founders could rise up and deconstruct comma placement in the Second Amendment.)
These political border-crossing skirmishes contribute to the erosion of the American body politic. But the purveyors of secession forget some very salient political facts. Democratic states are, by and large, the national providers. Wealthier Democratic states send more tax dollars to Washington, which in turn are redistributed to poorer Republican states. Remove Democratic states from the mix and Republican states fall into some interesting groupings.
Utah, Alaska, Arizona, Texas, and Nebraska would be the wealthiest states in a red America. Florida and Ohio would be the most populous states after Texas, but neither are in the top ten in income. High-poverty Southern states with significant populations of people of color would dominate this new confederation, leaving Texas in a California-like position. Would the political and economic interests of the Deep South, the Upper South, the Southwest, and Mountain West, plus Alaska finally sync up? Could they?
Secessionists’ fantasies provide no solutions for what actually ails the U.S. Instead, they offer maker-taker histrionics, tired retorts like “work harder” or finding “good guys with guns.” But their depiction of secession as a painless day in the park runs counter to some of the most basic lessons of history. The Civil War caused more deaths than all the wars that Americans have fought combined. An equivalent conflict today would inch toward 10 million deaths. The January 6 insurrection demonstrated that even small groups of fantasists are ready, willing and able to commit mayhem. (House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s decision this week to turn over close circuit recordings of the insurrection exclusively to Fox News is the latest provocation in the ongoing efforts to gin up political violence.)
The midterms demonstrated the broader electorate’s the lack of appetite for GOP extremism. Despite that, Republican Party leaders and prospective presidential contenders are content to ignore those signals and riff on the rhetorical sputum emanating from its secessionist wing. The loudest Maga Republicans are incapable of coherently discussing any critical national concerns.
Open advocacy for secession is the quiet-ish part finally said out. If the first Civil War is any indication, and it should be, disunion is not a simple proposition of putting up different “Welcome to” signs and waving what’s-old-is-new-again flags. There is no indication that secessionists want a friendly divorce.
