Occam's Razor

It all feels so inevitable because this is a play we’ve been watching unfold for decades. Republicans have known that long that demographics are against them. For conservatives, it’s largely always been that way because they stacked the deck so that if they lose, it won’t be very often.

Assembling this country we call the United States involved enormous compromise, mostly by Northerners to bring in the Southern states. Since the constitution was ratified, southern states have been granted disproportionate federal influence. Slaves counted as three fifths of a person for electoral voting purposes, despite having no legal rights. This allowed Southern states to mostly control the Electoral College and the presidency for our first hundred years.

In fact, the Fugitive Act in the 19^th century resembled Texas’s latest anti-abortion law in that it allowed private individuals to recapture slaves in the North and bring them back to the South, usually for a nice bounty from slaveholders. To elect Abraham Lincoln, it effectively took the Southern states to secede. Some of our most progressive constitutional amendments, including the 13^th, 14^th and 15^th were possible only because Southern states were temporarily not part of government.

So the November 2020 election should not have been much of a surprise, nor the insurrection that occurred on January 6. We’ve been leading up to it for decades, but Donald Trump became the perfect poster child for the movement. It amounts to a refusal to follow the law and constitution when it gets too inconvenient.

It’s getting too inconvenient for Southern states. Joe Biden decisively defeated Donald Trump, despite extreme gerrymandering, despite extreme voter suppression and flipped a number of reliably red states like Georgia. Our republic just barely held it together on Inauguration Day. Lately, Republicans have refused to govern. Just yesterday they refused to a person to extend our debt limit, a limit they happily agreed to ignore for a few years when Donald Trump was president because they wanted those sweet tax cuts. Red states are trying hard to find more creative ways to ensure the 2020 election never happens again. In some states they’ve given the legislature permission to appoint different electors if they don’t like the way their citizens voted.

Some of their crazies are angling for a new civil war and are praying for a nice right-wing dictator to do away with our constitutional democracy, which is clearly hanging by a thread. In short, they seem to want to end our republic. They can’t abide with the idea of majority rule unless they are in the majority.

It’s all quite naked and dispiriting. Increasingly, I ask myself if there’s a way we could just have a nice, civil divorce. But I can’t see something like a gentleman’s agreement along the lines of Czechoslovakia splitting into the Czech and Slovak Republics. Southern states aren’t that civilized. Their idea of a civil divorce would be if they get everything, like all the nukes and armed forces. They would leave Blue states bankrupt. And that’s the best scenario.

It’s like trying to negotiate with a terrorist. That’s increasingly what these Southern states resemble. They believe in Barry Goldwater’s maxim that extremism in the defense of “liberty” is not a vice. Only their idea of liberty does not extend to non-whites, and increasingly not to women, at least over their reproductive rights.

The irony in all this is that if Democrats had sufficient backbone they probably could solve a lot of this problem, or at least put it in abeyance. Consider what could happen if two Democratic senators put the filibuster in abeyance just to pass a civil rights bill that ensured equal access to the vote to all citizens and impartially drawn congressional districts. But that of course would allow all voters to be equally enfranchised, something Senators Sinema and Machin don’t seem to want to do. At best they are naive. At worst they are acting as Republicans.

I do know I am tired of it and scared for our future. I have a feeling that ten years from now our nation will resemble nothing like what it resembles now, and it’s plenty bad now. It’s going to get much, much worse. I can feel it. So if there was a way to do a quickie divorce on states like Texas, Alabama and Mississippi, I’d be all for it. The “leaders” in these states are incorrigible,