Together for better or for worse

Although America’s political divisions have always had a geographical element, the divide today between so-called “red states” and “blue states” threatens to grow wider than ever. A handful of “purple states” remain, but it has been decades since most southern and heartland states have voted Democratic in presidential elections, while the Northeast and West Coast have become seemingly unshakeable liberal strongholds. The pandemic accelerated and intensified these trends, with more and more Americans choosing to “vote with their feet” and relocate to states and communities that hold similar values and embrace similar politics.

The result has been a growing sense that we are lurching toward sectional rifts resembling those that preceded the Civil War. Controversial Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene earlier this year made headlines with her tweet calling for a “national divorce” between liberal and conservative states. Still, she simply gave voice to what many others have darkly hinted at.

A recent poll decided to test out just how many Americans sympathized with her sentiments. Although a majority of respondents rejected the idea, the margin was surprisingly narrow for such a far-fetched proposal: 67 percent of Democrats and only 55 percent of Republicans said they would vote against a referendum for their state to secede from the Union! While such talk may seem like idle banter in a country for which secession seems to have been long since ruled out as a constitutional option, it can have serious real-world consequences.

The first American conservative party, the Federalists, provides a good object lesson for Republicans flirting with talk of national divorce. Although the nation’s dominant party was initially controlling the presidency for the first twelve years of existence, the Federalist Party was effectively dead by 1816. And sectionalism was a big part of the reason why. Faced with narrow electoral defeat in 1800, Federalists increasingly gave up any claim to represent or campaign for the nation as a whole and instead holed up in their New England strongholds. When, in 1812, the Madison administration embarked on a disastrous war opposed by New England states, many Federalists started to mutter about secession. Although their Hartford Convention in 1815, in fact, decided against this approach, the mere fact that it had entertained the idea damned the Federalist party in the public mind.

It is a striking fact of American political history that despite the strong persistence of sectional political differences, no political party has ever been rewarded for leaning into that sectionalism. Before the Civil War, the Democratic Party gained its primary strength from the slaveholding South but also went out of its way to appeal to interest groups in the North. When the Republican Party formed as an exclusively Northern party, it was considered illegitimate, provoking civil war. Despite strong regional distastes for one another, Americans have a deeply ingrained sense that they are meant to be one nation and that any party questioning this fact does not deserve to govern.

Aside from helping to ensure electoral failure at the national level, fantasizing about “national divorce” is actually a losing strategy even for state politics. The early Federalists reached the conclusion early on that their political opponents were base slaves of passion and could not be reasoned with. No sooner did they abandon the attempt to make a persuasive political case within Democrat-majority states than they also gave up on trying to persuade the minority of Democrats in their own states. And it turns out that when you stop trying to persuade people in politics, you tend to stop winning elections. Before long, Federalists began losing even in states they had considered bastions of conservative common sense.

The fact is, we are stuck with one another, for better or for worse. Indeed, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s choice of the metaphor “divorce” is telling, as is the willingness with which many conservative Christians have embraced it. Having long since made our peace with the idea that it is human decision alone that can make and unmake marriages, we readily accept the notion that our political loyalties are the product only of human will and can be abandoned once they prove inconvenient.

The marriage of man and woman is the product, first and foremost, of divine providence, not human decision. In some way, so also is the marriage of a nation. Whether we like it or not, we find ourselves, providentially, one nation under God, and we have little practical choice but to remain such. Therefore, we’d better learn to make the best of it and figure out ways to reason together rather than idly fantasizing about an alternate political universe in which we could cut those pesky liberals out of our lives.