Scott Tibbs
No, we do not need a national divorce
By Scott Tibbs, February 24, 2023
When Marjorie Taylor Greene said
on Twitter that we need a "national divorce" that would "separate by red states and blue states," she generated a lot of attention. Since she Tweeted that, she has doubled down on it and generated even more mainstream media and social media attention for herself.
OK, let's put aside the policy ramifications of a "national divorce" for a moment, and get to the first problem with this Tweet: That it was written at all. Just from a political standpoint, there is no reason to say this. Is Greene going to actually push legislation that has a realistic chance of passing to enact this policy? Are there any concrete plans at all to implement splitting the nation? What are the next steps to actually achieve this policy goal?
This is what happens when a politician acts like a pundit. What you need to be doing is focusing on things you can actually do, not popping off on Twitter about things that you are not going to do, have no intention of doing, and could not accomplish even if you tried to do it. This just creates needless controversy and feces-throwing that distracts from solving problems that can be solved, culturally or legislatively.
With that said, the idea of splitting the nation today is much more complicated than one can explore in a Tweet. This is not the former Soviet republics splitting from Russia after 1991, the Christian-majority South Sudan becoming an independent country from the Muslim-dominated north, or the American colonies seceding from the British Empire. You cannot pull off a clean geographic split in a "national divorce."
Even within "blue states" you have significant populations of "red voters." Most of the counties in Illinois voted for Donald Trump in 2020, but were overwhelmed by Chicago. Trump won most counties in New York as well, despite losing the popular vote. On the opposite end, Trump won Indiana by a huge margin, but Monroe County and Marion County went for Joe Biden by big margins. What do we do with Democratic cities in Republican states, or with Republican counties in Democratic states?
No, what we need is not to split the nation into two (or four, or eight) different nations. What we need is more federalism. Democrats can choose to run their states as they see fit, and Republicans can do the same. Voters who are unhappy with their state governments can move to another state. This was our Founding Fathers' original vision for the nation, and it has served us well for nearly 250 years. We have been abandoning that vision for generations now, and it has led to a great deal of unnecessary conflict and animosity as the stakes for every national election are far too high. We need to reverse that trend.
Finally, conservatives should not be willing to admit that half of the nation cannot be salvaged. We should instead work to enhance federalism and to make the "blue states" better - either by turning them red or by trying to win enough of a sizeable minority that we can stop or even reverse some of the most extreme examples of Leftist policy. Christians need to be praying for a national revival. If our God can call the deeply wicked city of Ninevah to Himself, then He can do the same with these United States. Rather than admitting defeat, we should press on to victory.
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