Sheer Fantasy
‘National divorce’ can’t work — and shouldn’t
IS it time for a national divorce? The idea has understandably gained steam — though it can’t possibly work and shouldn’t. In 2018, conservative Jesse Kelly argued that “our political disagreements have become a powder keg” and we should redraw the map. He wasn’t wrong. In fact, things have gotten worse in the three years since, which is why left-leaning comedienne Sarah Silverman recently touted the idea, too.
Fact is, we’re at each other’s throats over every issue. I admit that after nearly 19 months of looking longingly at the sanity of red states in their response to the pandemic and sadly at my 5-year-old masked and required to be socially distanced from friends during school recess outdoors here in New York, I have myself fantasized about a national divorce.
But it’s a fantasy that could never work, even in the short term, much less the long. Say we could bloodlessly divide the states. And, for shorthand, consider a Donald Trump voter as someone opposed to COVID-restriction mania (my own top issue right now), while a Joe Biden voter wants kindergartners to double-mask.
In solidly blue New York, Trump won 3,251,997 votes to
Biden’s 5,244,886 in 2020. Trump’s 3.2 million is more than five times the number of people living in Wyoming, the reddest state in the country, and more than 16 times the votes Trump won there. Do conservatives simply surrender the whole Empire State, and those 3.2 million voters, in the divorce? How would those 3.2 million feel about that?
New York is a sea of red counties outside big cities. Even in deep-blue Gotham, there are pockets of deep red. Visit Brighton Beach and Borough Park in Brooklyn. Howard Beach and Breezy Point in Queens. Throgs Neck in The Bronx. Or pretty much anywhere in Staten Island: There you’ll step into red America, where American flags fly high, police officers are heroes and no one refers to a new mother as a “birthing person.”
It’s not just New York. California’s
Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom survived his recall election in a landslide. But 3.3 million Californians voted to remove him, more than the entire population of the second-mostRepublican state, Utah.
Meanwhile, the nation may already be realigning itself, with conservatives from blue areas moving to red ones. But a formal separation effectively means conservatives lose the big cities, which tend to be heavily liberal.
It’s not just COVID regulations that divide us, of course. There’s much more. But the truth is that electorates change, issues of importance change, demographics change.
A Republican today is not the same as a Republican 20 years ago. A conservative who moved to solidly red Colorado in the late ’90s would be in for a surprise after it failed to vote for a Republican presidential candidate after 2004.
Kids don’t always follow their parents’ ideology. Whole counties and states sometimes switch sides in elections and then switch back again. Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin went for Obama in 2012, Trump in 2016, Biden in 2020. Who gets them in the divorce? Would we constantly have to change boundaries?
Nor are people entirely liberal or conservative. Red states like Florida and Texas worry about an influx of people from blue states fleeing, say, high taxes, but who don’t sign on to any of the rest of a typical conservative ideology. Would states give ideological tests before letting someone in?
OK, so if we can’t formally separate, what then?
We fight it out — peacefully. We find like-minded people in our communities and band together to bring changes we want to see. We don’t surrender because we’re in the minority. Minorities have won before. It wasn’t that long ago that a nonDemocrat was mayor of New York City and a Republican won the California recall. It’s not impossible.
If you’ve had enough and feel you must move, do so. But don’t
expect where you end up to perfectly align with your values. You can easily end up on a blue street in a red neighborhood in a blue county in a red state. Is that a win?
We’re still a very new country; we continue to grow and evolve. The solution isn’t to divide it up so we could be (briefly) better represented. It’s to persuade others to our way of thinking — and voting. And to remember the ideas that forged our national marriage in the first place.