It’s Not a “National Divorce.” It’s a Call for One-Party Authoritarian Rule.
Marjorie Taylor Greene gave President Biden a thumbs-down at the State of the Union earlier this month.
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.
by Matt Ford
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 on February 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 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” 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 in a series 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.