I made a tofu dish for supper tonight (recipe), which the kids declined on patriotic grounds. I reminded them of the hot dogs we had for lunch, but of course, "What have you done for me lately?" Well, eat some bread, cuz we're not going to Dairy Queen, children's services is closed for the holiday, and HUAC was disbanded in 1975.
I can hear one of them in the kitchen right now making herself a milk shake.
This article, by Ron Brownstein, concerning whether the United States will crack up like in the 1860s, is perhaps the tofu of Fourth of July political journalism. But it's Marjorie Taylor Greene who has called for a "national divorce," and if it would make her a foreigner, my ears are open, twitchy, and q-tipped. Ted Cruz wouldn't have to go skip out in a crisis as he would already be living in another land.
But, as a political scientist quoted in the article asks, "What do you do with upstate New York? And Memphis?" What do you do with anywhere, really. The divide is not between regions of the country as it was in 1860. In Minnesota, we have 87 counties, and in the last election Trump got more votes in 74 of them. But in one of the other 13, Hennepin, home to Minneapolis and most of its suburbs, his deficit of about 327,000 votes was greater than his aggregate advantage in the 74 counties he carried, and he lost the state by 7 points.
The above map, which I mentioned once before, here, is someone's version of what the family court settlement would look like in the divorce Marj recommends. The two "countries" resemble gerrymandered congressional districts—the blue one is mostly just population centers connected by land bridges. Before the last census, a congressional district in Ohio, the 9th, included Toledo, some suburbs west of Cleveland, and, in between, was often about as wide as the right-of-way taking for a highway. Blow air into that balloon and you get the above Blue Nation. I think the mapmaker's point might be to show that he's set himself an impossible task. Suppose Brownstein's political scientist had asked, "What do you do with Dallas?" The answer to that question, apparently, is you make it the capital city of the Red Nation—even though Dallas County is overwhelmingly Democratic.
The geography of the mind is a different matter, and harder to make out, though the tells have accrued rapidly in the recent past. I remember that after the 2016 election, when Trump won despite having lost the national vote by around 3 million, some Republicans argued that it was no matter because Clinton had won California by about the same margin. In other words, Trump hadn't really lost the popular vote, because Clinton's entire margin was secured in California, where the voters I guess aren't real Americans? It seems that being an American means agreeing with them about who's an American, but by what logic can only one side play the game? Let's instead discount the votes cast by white men residing in states that once seceded from the Union. Now she won by a lot more than 3 million.
It's almost as if underlying the impulse to seek a divorce lies deep uneasiness about who can vote.
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