What a National Divorce Would Actually Mean

It would be so much worse than most people realize

So, I saw this video and thought the woman in it was saying something tens of millions of people on both sides probably also think:

Basically, what this woman is saying is that she doesn’t like conservatives, she holds us in contempt, and she doesn’t want to be part of the same country as us anymore. It sounds like she’s angling for a secession or civil war – and I get it. Not only do I get it, but my guess is that a large number of people in America think something similar.

For example, personally?

Although I enjoy vacationing in New York City and San Francisco, am polite to liberals I meet and have (at this point) a very small number of liberal friends, I view liberalism as evil and think most liberals that are heavily involved with politics are not good people.

In my experience, the majority of liberals that are politically active tend to be mean-spirited, intolerant, entitled, arrogant, obnoxious, cruel, power-hungry, fake victims, mental cases, and incompetents. I agree with them on almost nothing, I don’t think they mean well, I think their behavior is habitually sociopathic, and I think many of them would be okay with doing just about anything to people like me if they thought they could get away with it.

Do I think the average liberal you run into at the supermarket out in flyover country is like this?

No. Absolutely not.

But, I also don’t think they have big problems with the liberals that do think this way, and most of them wouldn’t speak up for someone like me if something did happen because I’m a straight, white, Christian, conservative man, and they just don’t care very much about what happens to people like me.

So, if tens of millions of conservatives think this way about liberals and tens of millions of liberals have similarly negative views of conservatives, where do we go from here?

Well, the most obvious first solution is to geographically sort ourselves into different areas. We’ve been doing that in increasingly large numbers:

In the presidential election of 2004, when incumbent George W. Bush won the popular and electoral vote (the only Republican to do so in the last third of a century), less than 200 of the nation’s 3,100 or so counties (and independent cities) were decided by 80% of the major-party vote. By 2012, when Mitt Romney lost the popular vote to Barack Obama by 4 percentage points — roughly the same margin that Donald J. Trump lost nationwide to Biden in 2020 — the number of “super landslide” counties had crept up to nearly 300. But in 2016, the total of these counties exploded to more than 670, and by 2020 was approaching 700. That translates into 22% of all the nation’s counties.

To be sure, the blowout counties in 2020 cast just 8% of the national two-party vote (11.9 million of 155.5 million). But the trend line has been clear for decades now, with more and more of the country, both territorially and population-wise, living in “sorted” counties.”

Although this is helpful in one sense, it actually makes the overall problem worse because the more people are surrounded by people who agree with them, the more extreme their opinions tend to become.

Of course, this makes perfect sense. If you’re a purple district where you need people in the middle to win, you’re going to end up taking more moderate political opinions than a place where everyone thinks the same thing, and you see no need to to compromise at all.

So, what happens when the representatives to all these “sorted” districts and states arrive in DC? They don’t agree on anything. For example, if you asked what Ted Cruz and Chuck Schumer or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Chip Roy agreed on, they would come up with nothing other than maybe some extremely general principles, pork, and privileges for themselves.

Some people look at all of this and go, “We don’t agree on anything. We don’t like them. They don’t like us. Maybe it’s time for a national divorce.”

I understand that sentiment completely, and if it could be done peacefully, I would probably even support it. In fact, if let’s say California, Oregon, and Washington, or the South as a block wanted to break off from the United States, I would be one of the people urging everyone to peacefully let them go. However, I also wouldn’t kid myself into thinking that I’d be in the majority on that. Most people feel like we settled how we handle the issue of secession in the Civil War – and it’s not with peaceful negotiation.

Other people make the mistake of thinking their side could easily control things. Some conservatives think we’d easily win a fight because “we have all the guns,” just as some liberals think they could rewrite the rules to lock themselves in power and then use the military and police to take the country’s guns, oppress the population, and do their dirty work.

These are both extremely naïve beliefs.

We live in a very large, complex, interconnected country, and if the sort of widespread political violence we’d likely see in a coup, secession, or civil war actually kicked off, the whole system would break down.

You’d likely see assassinations, rapes, massacres, terrorism, armies of political prisoners, and starvation. People would lose the freedom to travel. Power, the Internet, and the supply chain would break down. This would almost certainly last for years and would likely end with some form of non-democratic governance, ruthless suppression of the losing side, and a much-diminished nation.

It’s worth noting all of this because there are an awful lot of people in politics, even people in Congress, who are very blasé about suggesting things that risk destabilizing the whole country.

“Screw the Supreme Court! Trump should run for a third term!”

“Democrats should get rid of the filibuster for legislation in the Senate and stack the Supreme Court!”

It’s very easy for ignorant people and sociopaths to call for these kinds of things, but actually going in this direction could lead to a societal collapse, pits full of corpses, and American cities and rural communities getting turned into Somalia.

You think conservatives are awful people? Great, well, most of us think you’re awful, too. That being said, there are worse things than living in a country that has a lot of people in it that you think are awful, and everyone should spend more time thinking about that before they casually call for policies that could ultimately lead to millions of people dying.

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