ABORTION, REBELLION, SECESSION
This is how the “Disunited States” might look if it broke up into distinct culture blocs.
This will be, may be, or could be the week that determines whether the nation stays together…or breaks in two or more pieces. The Supreme Court is said to be taking up the Texas abortion law, though Mississippi’s tougher anti-abortion law is scheduled for a December hearing. A ban on abortion from either case would shake the nation to its creaky foundations.
Also said to be on tap is Senate passage of President Biden’s Build Back Better bill—perhaps by Thanksgiving. Really? Has Nancy Pelosi really converted hold-outs Manchin and Sinema to the Democratic Party? Or are the Dems just hitting the bong again? In any case, failure to pass it will doom the Democrats in next year’s elections, according to our pundits in Washington. That outcome would also end the House investigation into the January 6 Insurrection, likely pushing us to the brink of breaking up into angry, sectional culture blocs, probably attended by bloodshed or full-out civil war.
Surely we can all agree that such violence should be avoided at all costs. We should also agree that culture gaps that separate us have widened to chasms since 2000, when the Supreme Court “settled” Bush vs. Gore and Justice Antonin Scalia told us to “get over it.” We haven’t gotten over it… not out on the deep blue Pacific Coast. California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii haven’t registered a single Red electoral vote for president since 1988. (That’s the year laggard California joined the other three on the Blue bandwagon and the Left Coast became solidly Democratic, politically and culturally.) Ever since, we’ve been the political weight that has kept the so-called “union” centered…or is that paralyzed, dysfunctional? It’s past time that the Pacific states break away and try to save democracy on their own. Frankly, we are tired of being dealt four cards in a game of five-card stud.
Contrary to the beliefs of many liberals, the impetus for breaking up has come primarily from the Republican party, which believes in power but not in governing, which claims to want small government unless they can have their own autocracy, which believes in “Anglo-Saxon” values (read “superiority”), not democracy. A Bright Line Watch/YouGov poll conducted this June found that 66% of southern Republicans favor secession, as do 58% of Texans and 55% of Californians. The alarming trend is confirmed by the University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball; in a July poll of 2012 voters he found “deep, wide and dangerous divides” between Trump and Biden voters. Some 52% of Trump voters wanted out to hook up with other Red states. Among Democrats, 41% wished to be with their own kind.
For recent signs of the times and the breadth of our cultural divide, consider the results of the three gubernatorial elections of incumbent Democrats this year: in Virginia Republicans took over by a 51-49 margin; in deep blue New Jersey a popular Democrat hung on to win by a 51-48 margin; by contrast California’s Newsom thrashed his red rival by a 62-38 margin—a 24 point margin rather typical on the Pacific blue Left Coast. (Compare California spreads in our last two presidential contests: 2020—Biden 63, Trump 34; 2016—Clinton 62, Trump 32.)
We are worlds apart, culturally and politically, from the rest of the U.S. Quiz West Coasters on where their affinities lie and they are likely to tell you they have more in common with a Canadian to the north or a Mexican to the south than they have with someone from, say, Alabama or West Virginia. (Coincidentally, California, the world’s fifth-largest economy, has Canada and Mexico as the top two on its export list.)
So get ready for a week that could decide our future. Then again, it is Washington D.C., where cans are kicked down the road as frequently as Trump tells lies.