A national divorce is right around the corner, and always will be
Secession enthusiasists haven't thought this, nor anything else, through.
Q: How do you keep an idiot in suspense?
A: I'll tell you later.
Q: How do you identify the idiot in the 1st place?
A: She's babbling about a "national divorce."
I was somewhat surprised to see the Georgia Wine Mom saying a national divorce is necessary, as I just came back from the United States and saw no signs of the country breaking out into civil war. Mind you, it was Maine, which has the benefit of being next to Canada as a moderating influence.
Utah Governor Spencer Cox, to his credit, smacked down MTG hard for her seditious comments, and I’m sure he’ll be followed by other Republicans who LOL I really had you going there for a moment didn’t I
As usual with this kind of nonsense, there are no Democratic elected officials talking about secession, but there is a very online #resistance clique that appears fired up about “national divorce” in its own right, like this obscure unemployed YouTuber:
(Related: David “Iowahawk” Burge is a bad, bad man.)
Olbermann’s argument is premised on blue states being generally wealthier, net financial contributors to the federal government, while red ones are mostly poorer and net recipients, hence his genius plan to stave Alabama and Oklahoma “into submission.” He does have a point: I suspect many of the people in MTG’s district would not be as gung-ho about secession once their social security cheques and food stamps and medicare benefits stop coming in.
It’s the “starving into submission” part which I’m not sure Olbermann has fully considered, since there is one thing many red states do have a lot of:
If you pressed him on this point, I suspect he’d deem you that day’s Worst Person in the Worldᵀᴹ and retort that maybe you get your food from red states, but he gets his from the supermarket. So there.
Actually, the largest state agricultural economy belongs not to any of these reliably Republican midwestern farm states, but deep-blue California.
“So there,” I hear you saying. Except that…the farms aren’t in Hollywood nor Silicon Valley but in rural areas of the state. Which differ from the urbanized areas in one other way:
As for MTG, she might want to put down the Skinnytaste bottle for a moment and look at the 2020 electoral results from her state:
Georgia also elected two Democratic Senators that year, one of whom was re-elected to a full term in 2022. If MTG gets that “national divorce” she so badly wants, she’s going to be stuck on the Godless Socialist side.
Well, at least until the mass population transfers which I presume would happen on both sides, with the new Confederacy expelling its NPR tote bag owners and the People’s Republic forcing out its F-150 drivers.
Which is why I am once again forced to tap the sign:
In Republican states the cities vote Democratic. In Democratic states the countryside votes Republican. Good luck untangling that into two separate countries, one with plenty of raw materials but cut off from their major markets, and one which suddenly finds its factories idled for lack of power and its store shelves empty because of food shortages.
Even in Quebec, there’s a heated debate over whether some parts of the province - particularly Northern areas populated largely by First Nations people, and a few anglophone enclaves - would be forced to secede along with the rest of Quebec or whether they could choose to remain in Canada. (Separatists who say Canada is an illegitimate colonial anachronism insist that Quebec’s borders were handed down by God Himself and are therefore inviolable. Such is the logic of nationalism.)
Which does kind of get to my final point about why this talk about an American “national divorce” activates my inner rage monster.
We Canadians love to sneer about America’s many problems - guns, health care, James Dolan - but at least you haven’t had the threat of a secession crisis hanging over your politics since that unpleasantness which ended in 1865.
I remember Quebec coming thisclose to voting for independence 130 years later, and while separatism seems to be somewhat dormant at the moment - Quebec Premier Francois Legault seems to have found a way for his province to have its cake and eat it too, demanding autonomy while keeping the federal largesse rolling in, secure in the knowledge that Quebec can get away with policies that would be considered scandalous if Alberta tried them - it’s been pronounced dead several times before only for it to burst out of the coffin.
The distortion of our politics, and the effect on our national psyche - especially in my part of Canada, which would be cut off from the rest of the country if Quebec became independent - has been massive. (And compared to countries with separatist movements that regularly employ violent terrorist tactics, we’re the lucky ones.)
That some irresponsible Americans would very publicly LARP about this beggars belief, and suggests that some people really need a hobby that takes them away from the internet for a while.
You have enough problems, some of which have seeped across our border. You really don’t need to import ours.