Marjorie Taylor Greene’s ‘divorce’ vision aligns with popular tropes
Marjorie Taylor Greene, now one of the most influential Republicans in the House of Representatives, says it is time for Americans to consider a national divorce.
“Tragically, I think we, the left and right, have reached irreconcilable differences,” Greene wrote a few days ago on Twitter. “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.”
And how will this national divorce work in practice? Greene says “red” states and “blue” states will simply go their separate ways.
On education, for example, “Red states would likely ban all gender lies and confusing theories, Drag Queen story times, and LGBTQ indoctrinating teachers, and China’s money and influence in our education while blue states could have government-controlled gender transition schools.”
On gun policy, in red states, “law abiding gun owners wouldn’t go to jail for shooting an attacker” while in blue states, “the left could achieve their dreams of total and complete lawlessness.”
The federal government would still exist, Greene explains, but it would be a minimal state, devoted to border security and defense — an update, of sorts, of America under the Articles of Confederation. Everything else would be up to the discretion of the states, including voting and elections.
“In red states,” Greene wrote, “they would likely pursue one day elections with paper ballots and require voter ID with only the red state citizens or even red state tax payers voting. And blue states would be free to allow illegal aliens from all over the world to vote freely and frequently in their elections like the D.C. City Council wants. Dead people could still vote. Criminals in jail could vote that is if blue states even have jails or prisons anymore.”
You can probably tell, from the substance of Greene’s comments, that this “national divorce” is more paranoid fantasy than serious proposal. Even so, it rests on a set of ideas and tropes that are in wide circulation in the public at large.
But states are not actually singular political communities. And although states play an important role in the American political system, they are not the autonomous, nearly independent units of Greene’s imagination.
“States possessed interests,” historian Jack Rakove explains in “Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution,” “but these were rooted in the attributes of individuals: in property, occupation, religion, opinion, and the uneven distribution of human faculties. Moreover, since congeries of interests could be found within any state, however small — witness Rhode Island — the principle of unitary corporate representation was further undercut.”
But let’s say you could split each state into its constituent interests, so that majorities would not form against it. Well, then, James Madison says, you would find yourself in the same situation as before: “In the smallest of the fragments, there would soon be added to previous sources of discord a manufacturing and an agricultural class, with the difficulty experienced in adjusting their relative interests, in the regulation of foreign commerce if any, or if none in equalizing the burden of internal improvement and of taxation within them.”
No matter how small you go, in other words, you run into the simple fact that there’s no such thing as a truly homogeneous political community. There will always be differences of belief and interest, and the only way to deal with them in a representative, republican government is through deliberation and majority rule.
What was true in the 18th and 19th centuries is true now. A “national divorce” is possible only if the states represent singular political communities. But they don’t. A conservative, deep “red” state like Oklahoma still has liberal, “blue” cities and suburbs with conflicting interests.
If you tried to separate conservative rural areas from liberal urban ones, you’d quickly find that within those subdivisions lie profound political differences among both individual people and groups of people.