Maverick Philosopher

The Political Equivalent of Divorce?

You've heard me say that we need to find the political equivalent of divorce if we are to reduce the animosity that threatens to destroy us as a nation. But the marital analogy limps badly. Although I don't think much of Damon Linker, he talks sense here:

Part of me gravitates to a fantasy of divorce. Maybe both sides would be happier if we just separated and went our separate ways, like unhappy spouses who call it quits after a few-too-many wounding arguments and rounds of couples therapy.

But of course that's delusional. A nation isn't like a marriage — certainly not companionate marriage based on individual choice. But it's not even a more traditional arranged marriage where there is a period of youthful independence before the union is announced and formalized. Unless you're an immigrant, your country is where you find ourselves at birth. It's a given — like a family in which you are born and raised before you even come to complete self-awareness. It shapes your outlook on the world in more ways than you can ever fully grasp.

Families can break up, tear themselves asunder, but it usually isn't pretty. Neither are divorces. But at least a divorce takes places within a legal and moral frame that persists outside the marriage. Certain rules abide and apply to both parties, guiding the division of marital assets and looking out for the welfare of any children, with an impartial judge overseeing and enforcing it all. There is no such external structure when an extended family breaks apart into feuding factions.

Linker ends on this encouraging note:

Do we hate each other? And if we do, what are our viable options as a polity? I don't know how to answer those questions.

Me neither.  There are options, of course, but I don't see any as particularly viable.  Perhaps a long hot civil war that spills an ocean of blood might bring leftists to their senses, but the prospect of a couple of decades of extreme civil disorder is not an appetizing one.

Coronavirus and Secession

F. H. Buckley maintains that the first could hasten the second. 

We might have hoped that the pandemic would give us a respite from the nastiness of our politics, but not a bit of it. There’s a mild Trump bounce, as the president takes charge of leading the nation through the crisis, but the Trump paranoia continues unabated. Sec. Azar declared a public health emergency on January 31 and announced travel restrictions to and from China. At the time no one had a clue about how serious a problem it would be, and Joe Biden put the travel ban down to xenophobia and fear-mongering.

Xenophobia! What a senile idiot that Biden is! (Lately senile, he was always an idiot.) Does he know what the word means?

Apart from the White House, the coronavirus was on no one’s mind. Instead, impeachment took up all the air in the room. The House had voted articles of impeachment on December 18, 2019, and this dominated the news until Trump’s acquittal on February 5. Obviously, other issues such as the coronavirus took up less of the president’s time than would otherwise have been the case, but if you thought he might have been cut some slack you’d be wrong. Instead, Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff want to impanel a Coronavirus Response Commission to investigate the president.

Last Wednesday the New York Times provided a map showing the places where people traveled as the virus spread. In the North people stopped moving around by March 24, but in the former Confederate states people continued to travel more than two miles from home. Since infection rates are far lower in those areas, that’s not surprising. The Times also failed to mention that people also have a greater reason to travel in the Deep South, where stores are further apart. The story was thus a gratuitous swipe at a region that the paper’s readers could be expected to hate.

We used to be better than this. But since Donald Trump’s election a poison has entered America’s soul. It’s driven us apart and made the idea of a breakup more inviting. Non sumus qualis eramus.

F.H. Buckley is a professor at Scalia Law School and the author of American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup

I agree, except for the penultimate sentence. The poison has been present for a long time in the American soul. Trump has merely made its presence more evident by standing up and fighting for the conservative cause, something that milque-toast Mitt and his ilk were unwilling and incapable of doing.  Trump hasn't driven us apart; we already were apart. But by taking up the fight in earnest, Trump has driven the Left mad and forced them to show their true colors.  

The Latin sentence translates as "We are not as we were." It is Buckley's adaptation of Non sum qualis eram.