Will we have a disunion? Yes, maybe, or somewhere in-between, with plenty of caveats. Sounds indefinite, as most sober projections of this nature should be.
Well, I’ll have to admit that some sort of disunion is taking place. All the evidence is pointing that way. Will it be a hard or soft disunion? A “hard” one would be some kind of constitutional restructure, or a complete break like the old Czechoslovakia into the Czech and Slovak Republics. The “soft” variety entails some kind of unofficial consensual agreement to live and let live. I’m of a mind to reject the former, but the latter raises some interesting possibilities.
Even more, is the talk of disunion part of a passing phase? All of this could be meaningless chatter. That’s an even more interesting possibility.
Evidence of disunion is all about, though. Some saw it coming at the dawn of the new millennium. Terry Teachout and Gertrude Himmelfarb back then wrote of it as “Republican Nation, Democratic Nation” (Teachout) or “one nation, two cultures” (Himmelfarb). Then, Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing crowned the idea four years later in their book, The Big Sort. Bishop and Cushing noticed that in-migration data showed like-minded people seek to live around other like-minded people. Are you paying attention New York and California?
The hard left turn of the Democratic Party is driving the talk. No, it’s not because the right has suddenly resuscitated Mussolini’s Black Shirts. Policies, laws, and actions in deep blue urban areas and states are forcing many people to make a choice between the comfort of their place of birth and desire to escape the one-party cultural revolution of the chic cliques that dominate their state or municipality.
At root in these havens of the ruling revolutionary thought is a set of prejudices about others not so willing to adopt the hedonism and its concomitant authoritarian rule, people who are loosely defined as traditionally inclined. The libertinism shows as a rejection of standards: traditional morality, the physical determinants of nature (DNA, chromosomes, biological limits, etc.), the elements of merit, etc. Oxymoronically, lying next to this idea of the free-floating individual is the ready submission to the aristocracy of sheepskin-wielding “experts”. Not all “experts”, mind you, just those who feed the libertines’ prejudices. It’s a terribly selective cadre of gurus.
It’s not as if the cool exponents of the philosophy actually live what they preach. The urban professional types, and the uber-rich that rose from their ranks, that dominate the ruling pack, get married and instill self-discipline in their young as Charles Murray so clearly observed in his research. They carry on like Horatio Alger even as they denounce the guy, which proves that consistency is not a readily observable human quality.
When they’re spouting “It’s good for thee but not for me”, they may be onto something. That something is the intuition that at least they and their children can’t prosper under anything goes. The public schools must keep their monopoly at all costs, as their votes and campaign donations proclaim, as long as elite prep schools are open for their young scions. The result is a descent into chaos for many inner-city schools, which matches the chaos in the surrounding neighborhoods that was engineered by bountiful entitlements and a pervasive ridicule of law and order.
It’s starting to ooze out: neither they, nor can anyone live this way. Yet, their indulged offspring fill the ranks of BLM and Antifa to make everyone else’s life a living hell. Their political activism produces permissive DA’s who won’t enforce quality-of-life crimes so the quality-of-life rots. Simple things like roads and the electrical grid crumble as their leaders pursue crusades against the chimerical “systemic racism” and for a greenie utopia. Urban landscapes each day look more like something out of Mad Max or John Carpenter’s “Escape from New York”. Indeed, many New Yorkers have already joined Snake Plissken (Russell) in the flight from hell. Florida, here we come! Life imitates art.
Where are they heading? It’s to more than Florida. The refugees are going to places where gun ownership isn’t treated as a mental illness, where churches have tendency to be full on Sunday, and where taxes are low, housing is cheap, and jobs aplenty. Sure, some may regret not having a beach nearby, but those boardwalks are beginning to take on the look of the rest of the dystopia anyway. The escapees won’t be missing much.
Some commentators have devoted much ink on extremists at the fringe of both sides. In their reading of the political landscape, the left has its Antifa/BLM to go along with the dynamic duo of Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi with their critical-race-theory/systemic racism sermonizing. The right has the ill-defined QAnon and Arian Nation look-alikes. But the two fringes aren’t anywhere near equivalent; the right deserves a 10-handicap. The DiAngelo/Kendi crowd and their Antifa and BLM militias are much more deeply entrenched in our critical institutions than the QAnon devotees and Proud Boys ever were. The lefty militias are perfumed into respectability, DiAngleo and Kendi get rich, and nearly every other large and powerful organization has their own offshoot of the ministry of propaganda. It’s an egregious false equivalence and an affront to sound reason to pretend otherwise.
No other words describe our current divide than revolution (left) and counterrevolution (right), a classic civil war. The two stances are deeply divided into mutually exclusive sets of values. A commissariat-driven holy war to impose equality of result for fashionable identities versus a legal regime of equal opportunity is only part of the story. Another angle is the vague spirituality of my “personal truth” versus the certainties of altar and hearth. Still another one is the exaltation of two n’s – narcissism and nihilism – versus self-restraint and our heritage of compassion. Still another one is the impulse to tear it all down and build anew according to someone’s fanciful conception of heaven on earth versus the inclination to build upon the glories of the past. These approaches are mutually exclusive. Where is there room for compromise if one side, the Left, is hell-bent on forcibly foisting their worldview on the other?
Don’t take solace in the natural live-and-let-live of federalism. The Left from its perch on the cultural commanding heights is feverishly trying to centralize power in DC. Centralization will bury subsidiarity. The principle of subsidiarity embraces the value of local and regional control as the most efficacious form of governance. It holds that on most matters the more local, the better. Well, that’s on the chopping block in a host of ways.
Will sufficient numbers of people push back? That’ll be hard to achieve once the Left’s dream of legitimizing vote fraud is rigidly imposed on the entire country. At this point, elections as the corrective will be effectively neutered. Opposition will be forced into submission or the various lanes of disobedience, civil or violent. When elections seem to have no meaning, eruptions of less palatable methods of opposition will be more frequent. History is littered with examples.
Watch that space on HR1, the Left’s grab bag of “reforms” making its way through Congress to remove vote fraud from the category of a crime and reconfigure it as a legitimate get-out-the-vote strategy. If it passes, those storm clouds from Mordor will have reached your home.
RogerG