The Threat of Another War Of The (MAGA) Posers

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Now that the House Republicans are entrenched in Congress, the crazy talk has gotten worse. The fearmongers among the MAGA caucus are openly talking "National Divorce" to separate the Red States from the Blue States. Where Marjorie Taylor Greene (aka MTG (or Empty G)) is happily pushing the idea that there should be permanent division between the states, even as we try to pretend to still be a United States of America as a nation.

There are layers to this bullshit. For the most part, this is Greene basically virtue vice signaling to her insurrectionist MAGA allies that their Culture War "owning the libs" is ongoing. Actual secession - as I and others have noted already - is a goddamn pipe dream that could never work.

But on the other hand, Greene is treading on dangerous ground: She is openly calling for an act of national division that historically leads to violence - every civil war that humanity ever inflicted on itself regardless of nation - and will likely trigger bloodshed no matter how she and her cohorts try to shill this.

Tom Sullivan over at Hullaballoo references what David French at the New York Times thinks of what Greene is calling for, and Sullivan takes a closer look to what the Far Right wingnuts are doing with their rhetoric of division:

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...?

Sullivan quotes French directly:

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?”

This is where the decades of Far Right Media - hello, Fox Not-News! - actively misinforming and fearmongering towards their conservative audiences, building up the mindset not only that Americans are divided by Left and Right but also the divisions are unreconcilable. Back to Sullivan:

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...

Animosity is so entrenched (stoked daily by right-wing media) that I wonder if even an alien invasion could mend our fences...

Just look at how our nation is responding to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Most Americans actually support Ukrainians' efforts to repel Putin's war of empire-building; but the Far Right leadership and media outlets in America are siding with Russia, claiming Ukraine is at fault, and accusing Biden and Western Europe (NATO) of using the conflict as a proxy war to push global liberalism. If the aliens from Independence Day 1996 showed up, the Far Right media would likely call on the aliens to blow up the White House while Biden was still inside it.

This Republican-pushed Culture War is one not based on facts: It is a war based on grievance of privileges lost (or about to lose), based on fear determined by racism and sexism towards ethnic minorities and women. It's a war based on fantasies derived from Atlas Shrugged and Turner Diaries, where "manly Christian men" rise up against emasculating Godless librul elites to destroy the corrupt world in order to build a new Utopia on the ashes of the old.

You can see it in the "Alpha Male" social media bullshit, in the never-ending ragefests at their conservative confabs, in the nightly railings of Far Right pundits shilling nightmare stories based on rumor and conjecture and not a lick of fact.

If there's any good news, it's that a majority of Americans - regardless of the Red or Blue states where they reside - will not succumb to the calls of violence and secession that the Far Right are making. Whatever fantasy MTG has about a "National Divorce," it will not be a clean split by state because even the deepest Red State (okay, maybe not Wyoming) has a Blue urban metropolis (Texas and Florida have several) that would resist and secede themselves to stay with a Blue United States (Think what will happen when Texas tries to leave only to have Houston, San Antonio/Austin, Dallas/Ft. Worth, and El Paso - four of their major tax bases - refuse and demand their own statehoods with the USA).

As the recent poor showing at the CPAC convention this weekend proves, there's not a sustainable audience for Far Right outrage (It didn't help that scandal with the organizers scared half the GOP leadership away). While millions may have voted for donald trump in 2020, only mere thousands showed up for his January 6th Insurrection. Most Americans do not have the desire to inflict violence against their neighbors.

That's the good news. The bad news is that there ARE enough Americans among us who ARE willing to be violent towards their neighbors. As every mass shooting teaches us - almost every day now - all it takes is one wingnut Angry Guy with a military-grade assault rifle to break (or worse, destroy) a community.

This is not going to end well. At best, we need to remove the insurrectionists and secessionists from office as soon as possible. We still need to prepare ourselves for the violence that's sure to follow when those secessionist decide to make their bloody fantasy their reality.

Gods help us.