A few more thoughts on "national divorce"

I briefly touched upon Marjorie Taylor Greene's asinine idea of a "national divorce" on Monday. But after reading this piece by Joy Ann Reid, I want to dig a bit deeper into it.

Now, first off the bat: As I wrote on Monday, secession, national divorce, whatever you want to call it, is a nonstarter. It's not going to happen. The 14th Amendment and the blessed Union dead settled that question. There's no getting out of the Union, unless those who do turn to arms again as they did in 1861.

Greene says that she doesn't want to resort to that, but she sees it coming unless we have this separation. But what kind of separation is she advocating?

It turns out she's not calling for secession. What she's calling for is a sort of Articles of Confederation II: Electric Boogaloo. The fifty states would remain in a union, but with power almost completely devolved to those states. 

Now, ask yourself this: Why in the hell would blue states want to be tied to a corpse? Because a corpse is what the red states would be. And forget about blue states and red states; the real divide is between blue counties and red counties. And viewing it from that angle, the disadvantages to this national divorce which Greene wants are even starker for her constituency. The Brookings Institute released a report which showed that counties which voted for Joe Biden control 70% of the nation's economic output. Any "national divorce" would only work if it were done this way. And that would be devastating for the Trump-voting counties. The economy of the blue counties would rival or be just behind China's, while red counties would become Third World backwaters. And residents in blue counties would wonder what benefit to them this loose confederation would be. Much better to cut the cord and go their separate ways. Without the protections of the Constitution and all the progress liberals have made over the past fifty years, why would blue counties want to be saddled with a dysfunctional confederation?

Ah, yes, the Constitution. If red states/counties would be unencumbered by the rights guaranteed in the document, and the rights gained through its interpretation by courts, in what moral universe would it be right for blue states/counties to countenance the oppression their red cousins would mete out to their less-favored citizens? Once the bonds of union are broken, self-interest takes over. Economically, politically, and morally, most citizens of blue areas would want to wash their hands of the devilry happening in red areas. If they want to demonize marginalized communities, then they can do it with their own money, not relying on the largesse of the economic powerhouses of the former United States.

At some point in red areas, this would come into play, from Reid's article:

If red America was merely a competitor to other low-wage manufacturing countries, they’d have to continually reduce wages in order to compete.

And based on the way individual red state economies like Mississippi, Kentucky and West Virginia operate now, they would be a nation of largely impoverished workers ruled by a small oligarchy of the very rich, with no health care, scant voting rights, and no autonomy for women.

Now, we all know Lyndon B. Johnson's famous dictum: "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." (And yes, he did say this.) But what happens when evil coastal elites are out of the picture, and you realize you're being oppressed by the same people who sold you on this farcical divorce? Fire and pitchforks come to mind.

And that's another issue with why a national divorce is not in the interest of blue states/counties. Red states would be dysfunctional entities, both politically and economically. And their dysfunction would threaten stability in blue areas. It's the old adage: Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. When 2016 happened, I wrote a few pieces for The People's View about California seceding from this failing Republic. I was wrong. While California is the world's fifth biggest economy, it is only so because it is part of the larger US economy. What people like Greene—and those like her on the left who would be happy to let Texas secede as long as we got to keep hipster Austin—fail to realize is that a dissolution of this Republic would bring untold pain to everyone, even giants like California. And as I've written and commented before, I am in no way willing to abandon my wife's family in Indiana out of ideological pique. Any "divorce" would be much more like Partition in India circa 1947, rather than the "velvet divorce" which separated Czechia from Slovakia in 1992. 

Ideologues like Greene think that they can have their cake and eat it too. That they can have the autonomy to ban drag queen Storytime, but still suck off the teat of blue state economies. Nothing works like that. Once you start on the path of disunion all bets are off. People will be left behind who don't want to be left behind. Either they'll leave, or they'll fight. What's to stop the majority Democratic areas of Texas from seceding from the Lone Star Republic? Or Bakersfield from blue California? Greene, being an idiot blinded by her hatred, doesn't think of these things. She and her like see everything in black and white, when in fact life is a mottled gray. 

One should take Greene seriously to the extent that she represents a growing strain of the right seeking the "freedom" to be awful human beings, abetted by those on the left who are equally myopic and shortsighted. For better or for worse, we are one nation. If that ever ends, woe betide us.