An American divorce will not be peaceful

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has once more tweeted that America needs “a peaceful national divorce.” According to Greene, the disparate responses to Charlie Kirk’s assassination has shown that the “country is too far gone and too far divided, and it’s no longer safe for any of us.”

Her pronouncement highlights a growing sentiment: the belief that red America and blue America can no longer live together. The solution, which 20 percent of Americans support according to one poll, is to divorce and go their separate ways.

But an American divorce will not be peaceful. There is no way to separate the country into a Redland and Blueland without tremendous violence. America needs a solution to our worsening polarization, but a national divorce is no solution at all.

The core argument for a national divorce is that red and blue America has irreconcilable differences. The two sides have grown further and further apart on nearly every issue: climate change, healthcare, public education, gay and transgender rights, immigration, gun control and more. 

The resulting governmental dysfunction is so great and intractable, that it would be far better to let the two sides separate and secede from one another.

It is an argument made by members of the CALEXIT movement, the Red-State Secessionists and the Texas Nationalist Movement, among others. These are not radical positions for those who have lost faith in their government.

The problem is that those who call for national divorce have a limited understanding of how secession works.

Historically, most secessionist projects have failed, and roughly half of them have turned violent. The American Civil War was a secessionist effort fueled by rampant polarization, and more than 600,000 died.

When it does turn out peacefully, as with Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Divorce, it is almost always because there is a nationally distinct and regionally concentrated population that possesses an internal border and some special administrative status that can be used to justify their demand for independence. None of these characteristics hold in contemporary America.

The fact is that red and blue America are intricately intermixed. Blue California has millions of Republicans just as red Texas possesses millions of Democrats.

At a granular level, most of America is actually quite purple. There are political divisions cutting through neighborhoods and even households. And many Americans are independent.

There are many ways in which the analogy with marital divorce fails. In a marriage, there are two people, not 340 million. Whereas marital divorce is governed by law, there is no police force or set of guidelines for managing secession. How should the state be divided? Who gets the weapons and who inherits the debt?

The truth is that a national divorce would require a dangerous unmixing and re-sorting of Americans. Imagine trying to draw a new map that is coherent yet still satisfies the greatest number of people. 

In a hyper-polarized environment, there would be security dilemmas, stranded populations and refugees on the run. Each side would strive to get what assets they could, and there would be no law or police force to stop them.

Americans are right to worry about the country’s increasing polarization and political violence. In the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s murder, concerns over civil war spiked in the national consciousness. And the antagonism is worsened when political leaders take a partisan position on the violence and blame the other side.

The only workable solution is to take action that mitigates this growing schism. That things will get worse is not a foregone conclusion, and the potential for reversing course is not only possible but necessary. 

It’s important to remember that Americans have more in common than they may realize. The term affective polarization underscores this phenomenon, where individuals on the political wings tend to perceive their differences as far greater than they are in reality. 

One poll showed that most conservatives and liberals agree on the same core values such as fairness, personal responsibility and mutual respect. And yet in the survey it was shown that only one-third in each group thought the other group cared about those same values.

The truth is that it is America’s political leadership that is more polarized than the general population. Simply put, our leaders don’t currently provide a balanced ideological representation of the country, and they seem unable or unwilling to fix problems that are increasingly driving us apart. 

We are in desperate need of responsible leaders who are willing to take moderate positions, work together and denounce political violence in all its ugly forms. If left unchecked, the polarization in America will get worse and energize the demand for a national divorce, which would inevitably turn violent. 

America needs to fix the problems that divide us. The answer is not divorce but a search for common ground.

Ryan D. Griffiths is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. He is the author of “The Disunited States: Threats of Secession in Red and Blue America and Why They Won’t Work.”