The following is a rebuttal I wrote last month to a post appearing on The Federalist on “American divorce”- rehashed secessionist thinking that seems to have purchase in some corners of conservative thought. A busy school schedule plus a social media fast kept me from publishing it until now. With apologies, I hope you enjoy the reading.
There’re silly ideas and then there’s Jesse Kelly’s bizarro idea of an American “divorce.” Maybe he’s trolling, maybe he’s not (many of the 2,000+ commenters don’t seem to think so), so I’m erring on the side of “people will take this seriously” to offer a rebuttal.
Flawless logic
First the argument itself. I’ll get into the details as I go, but it’s helpful to note the basic logic:
- Red and Blue America have irreconcilable differences
- An amicable divorce is possible
- Therefore we should do it, here’s how.
To be completely fair to Kelly, the deductive logic of the argument is valid. However, it’s valid in the way a Sophist can argue for gravity being an illusion. Just because it’s a valid syllogism doesn’t mean it’s true because the premises don’t offer an accurate assessment of reality.
America has always had “irreconcilable” differences
During the Revolutionary War, the American public remained very divided on the issue of independence. In fact, whole regiments of Loyalist Americans fought for the British in a prequel to the American Civil War.
Speaking of the Civil War, Kelly grossly mischaracterizes it as a one issue conflict between mostly similar people, but this is demonstrably false. The timeline of secession alone demonstrates that Southern states left the Union for different reasons. For those whom slavery was the issue, they left as soon as Lincoln was elected. But other states like Virginia only seceded once Lincoln called for troops to respond to the attack on Sumter (Fun fact: Virginia’s Secession Ordinance doesn’t even mention slavery).
Even when Virginia seceded, it’s northwestern counties remained true to the Union. Forming the state of West Virginia (an ugly divorce), ensuring the Shenandoah Valley became one of the most bitterly contested plots of land in the war.
Additionally, Kelly assumes that families North and South were relatively the same. This ignores the vast differences between classes in the South (plantation owners and poor farmers, which predated slavery), and classes and ethnicities in the North (my Irish forebears were all too familiar with these distinctions).
Overgeneralization =/= Irreconcilable differences
But what about now? Are Democrats the un-American, anti Judeo-Christian values, anti-limited federal government party that Kelly asserts? Yes and no. I’d be interested to hear Kelly’s take on Conor Lamb’s red white and blue appeal to voters in the Pennsylvania 18th. I know that might just be an outlier, but it does suggest that Kelly paints with too broad a brush.
I’m OK saying the current Democratic party is by and large anti-Christian, but they retain many Judeo-Christian values (equality, individualism, etc.). Granted, they emphasize and define those values differently, but the values are still there so let’s not look upon the Democratic Party as an alien life form. Disagreeable family, perhaps, but not alien.
Bottom line, America has never been a monolith. It’s always been a raucous family with loud disagreements. We’re hardly living in unique times. Certainly not so unique as to necessitate a national divorce.
Countries rarely divorce quietly
Kelly’s second premise is worse than the first, mostly because he has almost no real evidence to support his point. A broad appeal to look at the morphing map of Europe through modern history glosses over the bloodiest wars in Western history (The 30 Years War, World Wars I and II) that marked those border changes. That rather obvious fact aside, we should look more specifically at instances in which countries attempted to split via referendums and negotiations:
- 1945: East and West Germany
- 1921: Northern Ireland and Ireland
- 1947: Pakistan and India
- 1947: Israel and Palestine
- 1948: North and South Korea
- 1990s: Yugoslavia
- 2011: Sudan and South Sudan
A cursory glance at that list will show that only in one example was all out war avoided: East and West Germany. Not only were those countries being supported by powers trying to avoid a war, but they were also eventually reunited. Hardly the type of divorce I think Kelly is suggesting.
The rest of those examples all had their pre and post-divorce histories marked by war and internal turmoil. In short, separation failed to solve anything.
Why? One reason is the artificial nature of boundaries, not unlike the lines Kelly draws on his map. Demarcating such boundaries is fraught with diplomatic pitfalls and traps, which, as Kelly rightly implies, are rarely agreed upon and leave few happy.
I’m sure Kelly has reason for drawing the map as he does, but the mere fact that it retains state boundaries means that it ignores the local-level reality of states being divided between blue and red counties. Such a reality would certainly create conditions of local disturbance and “domestic upheaval” that he warns will happen if we don’t divide the country. To believe otherwise is wishful thinking in the extreme.
The generational effects of an “American divorce”
The argument itself is silly, but the metaphor of divorce is instructive. Let’s carry forward the divorce metaphor. No one likes it and it’s painful, Kelly is right about that. However, he ignores the very well established fact that the effects of a divorce are generational.
Even if one wins through with an “amicable” split (such a delusional description!), that is no guarantee that future generations will not build their respective national cultures on blaming of the other side for the split in the first place.
Ultimately, the reason Kelly’s scheme will fail is not because of it’s shoddy reasoning, or artificiality. Nations have survived such poorly thought out policies.
This scheme will fail because it traffics in destructive forces that tear down societies and marriages alike: fear, animosity, anger, bitterness. You cannot build successful societies on these vices. You can look to examples of “divorcing” nations in history for specific examples of where such a path leads. Spoiler alert, it’s a high body count.
Kelly builds his argument on highly flawed premises growing out of an overly narrow view of history and seen through the highly mediated lens of the current media landscape. If such is the sum total of any conservatives’ reality glasses, I’d suggest a new prescription.