Taking ‘national divorce’ seriously
Here’s a chilling thought for a Sunday morning: What if Vice President Pence had done what Donald Trump demanded and supported his Jan. 6 coup? David French ponders the consequences in The New York Times:
In that moment, American peace and unity depended on the force of will of one single person, a man who stood up to a president, to the lawmakers in his own party who challenged the election, and to the howling mob that was crying out for his head.
Just that is enough to make you pull the covers over your head and go back to sleep.
French critiques Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s proposed “national divorce” in light of the last attempt at one in the 19th century. Yes, it’s unworkable. And yes, it’s insane. But what’s sanity got to do with it?
I’m haunted by James McPherson’s account of the prewar period in his seminal work, “Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era.” Describing the South in the run-up to secession and war, he says it was possessed by an “unreasoning fury.” The immediate cause was Northern celebration of John Brown, the abolitionist who attempted to provoke a slave rebellion by seizing the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry.
In McPherson’s account, Northern support for Brown’s cause “provoked a paroxysm of anger more intense than the original reaction to the raid.” Southern paranoia was so profound that Texas’ secession declaration even included claims that Northern “emissaries” were distributing “poison” to slaves for the purpose of killing white citizens.
The South separated from the North and started a ruinous and futile war not because of calm deliberation, but rather because of hysteria and fear — including hysteria and fear whipped up by the partisan press.
So my question is not “Is divorce reasonable?” but rather, “Are we susceptible to the unreason that triggered war once before?”
Had Pence chosen allegiance to Trump rather than to the Constitution that day, we might have found out.
We still might. The fever that spawned the Jan. 6 insurrection has not ebbed, French writes. CPAC may be a shadow of its former self, but the froth of the authoritarian fanboys remains. The demographic shifts fueling their hatreds is not going away. Greene may be clownish, but the audience for her nonsense is serious.
“Accelerationists” are trying to instigate Civil War 2.0. Digby on Saturday referenced a report by the Anti-Defamation League on the threat posed by right-wing extremism:
“White supremacists who consider themselves accelerationist believe that there’s no way they will ever be able to reform or change society to reflect what white supremacists want [and] the only option really is to actually destroy society and from the ashes, build a new white-dominated or white only society,” said Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the ADL.
French adds:
America is in the grips of a simply staggering amount of partisan animosity. As I wrote in my newsletter last week, overwhelming majorities of Republicans and Democrats believe that their opponents are “hateful,” “racist,” “brainwashed” and “arrogant.” Half of the respondents to a 2022 University of California Davis survey agreed that “in the next several years, there will be civil war in the United States,” and roughly 20 percent agreed that political violence was “at least sometimes justifiable.” A recent Rasmussen Reports poll found that 34 percent of likely voters (including a plurality of Republicans) think red and blue states need a national divorce.
“At this moment in history, there is not a single important cultural, religious, political or social force that is pulling Americans together more than it is pushing us apart,” French wrote in 2020.
Animosity is so entrenched (stoked daily by right-wing media) that I wonder if even an alien invasion could mend our fences. Left and right might just as soon default to accusing the other of being alien collaborators. “Unreasoning fury” that once tore the country apart remains a threat, French warns.
With exceptions, however, hatred seems too strong a word for the culture of grievance infecting our politics. It’s more on the right than the left, if conservative merch and Jan. 6 are any indicators. Personally, I wouldn’t expend the energy on hating even Trump.
People are deluded, misguided, and propagandized. Mostly, the right fears change and loss of social status. Theirs is, Isabel Wilkerson writes, a zero-sum view of the world. For their defined lower caste to rise means loss to the shrinking white majority more deeply personal than economic. Which is why I wince at the “voting against their best interests” dismissal of Republican voters. Equality under law or at all is not an American value the right embraces, no matter what the Declaration and Pledge say.
So it was. So it will be. How the hell do we live together without killing each other?