The Road to Splitsville ALL FOR ONE AND ONE FOR ONE

The Newsletter for Subscribers to THE SPLIT

Service Advisory: Readers will have noted, with plunging heart, that we have not posted the latest chapter of The Split this week. The reason: Our crack editorial and publication team (Rebecca) is in Milwaukee, exposing herself and her mental health, on our behalf, to the faschistische Kundgebung that is the Republican National Convention. So overwhelming has she found this, um, spectacle; so astounding this demonstration of what human beings are capable, that she’s been unable to attend to more banal duties. We apologize to our readers for this hiatus, and assure them that we will resume posting chapters of The Split this Sunday.

For the past twenty weeks, we’ve been discussing in this newsletter how much, or how little, we could be heading toward a real-life divorce of the red and the blue states, such as the one so masterfully depicted in The Split. We’ve documented actual appalling events, terrible proposed laws, nutso quotable quotes, repulsive manifestos, and other pieces of evidence suggesting an irreconcilable schism between the values (if you can call them that) and principles (if they actually have any) of conservatives (although they’re not really conservatives, but theocrats, fascists, and plutocrats), and those of nice, admirable, not-insane, real-American liberals. Or just plain real Americans. Or what you might call “normal” people.

Sometimes we’ve reported possible signs of separation in a disingenuous tone of regret. Other times, with lip-smacking glee. In any case, you will note that, whatever you call it—divorce; secession; separation—such a split has been entirely a fantasy of the right. We weren’t writing about this during the Obama administration, and we can’t be bothered to look, but it wouldn’t surprise us if there were abundant examples of pro-secession sentiment among the good ol’ boys and girls of the old Confederacy during those eight years. To many such wing-nuts conservatives, a Black president, even one born in the US (to say nothing of Kenya) is inherently un-American. And now, during Biden’s term, many in this same cohort of orcs citizens want to foment a “national divorce.”

But they represent the lunatic fringe—Marjorie Taylor Greene, other nutbar representatives, the Texas Republican Party. Opposing them on the right are the moneyed interests, random idiots, and religious zealots who want, not to start a new country, but to “take back” their old country. As we’ve noted previously (if not here, then somewhere. Who can remember?), by this they mean two things: wrest control of the US away from the liberals, immigrants, Jews, gays, and “elites” they believe are now controlling it; and un-do all the progressive gains made in the US since the New Deal, if not the Emancipation Proclamation or possibly the Magna Carta. They want to “take” the US “back” to the 19^th century, when men were men, women couldn’t vote, Blacks knew their place, and homosexuality, vaccines, and the climate change “hoax” didn’t exist.

This was the lay of the land until this past Saturday: the Republican Party either wanted to split the country in two or take over the whole thing. Then some young Republican tried to assassinate Donald Trump. And now we hear that Trump has had, from his near-death-adjacent ear-piercing experience, a “spiritual” epiphany.

Don’t laugh. The idea is not so much absurd as scientifically and theologically impossible. You can’t have a spiritual experience if you don’t have a soul. But it doesn’t stop there. We also hear that this newly-spiritualized Trump has re-written the acceptance speech he will deliver to the Republican National Convention, and that it will call for “national unity.”

Okay, now you may laugh.

How can you not? Trump has spent the last eight years vilifying and summoning violence against Democrats, liberals, immigrants, and anyone else not captive to the MAGA horde. He has said, repeatedly, to his slavering minions, that they have to “fight like hell” or they “won’t have a country.” Does he now propose to cancel and disavow that, declare he’s seen the error of his fascist-bully ways, and invite us all to hold hands and sing “Kumbaya”?

As if. The idea of a chastened, humbled Trump is one part science fiction and two parts hilarious. His entire political identity is based on demagogy, authoritarian strutting, and hate. He could raise Mr. Rogers from the dead, have him write the acceptance speech, read it at the convention, off the prompter, without improvising, and the next day be back to the raised fist, the chants of “Fight!,” and the Vicious Xweets with Their arbitrary Capital letters, Attacking His enemies. 

And why not? That’s what his base—and his donors—love. The visionary shitheads at the Heritage Foundation didn’t stay up late writing their Project 2025 term paper, just to have Trump seek to reconcile with the left, or the center, or anyone who thinks contraception should be legal.

Then again, there are different kinds of “unity.” Trump’s version of it might, as explained to us by an online friend, mean “Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Fuhrer,” not so much “let us join forces and work together” as “let’s you join us and obey me.”  As Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) recently Xweeted, “He is incapable of unifying peanut butter and jelly.”

We’ll see. What you’re reading is being written on Tuesday, July 16. Trump will give his speech on Thursday. By Friday we’ll know—something. What he’s calling for, whether he means it, whether he even understands it, or whether it’s all bullshit. Meanwhile, you can be forgiven for saying, “Guys, which is to say Ellis and Steve, come on. Are we even on the Road to Splitsville? And if we are, where the heck are we?”

The answer is a firm maybe. The irony is that the only way we’ll be on it, and stay on it, is if the Democrats win in November. If Trump wins, there will either be four years of repression, resistance, violence, and misery, or four years of governmental dysfunction, scandal, recession, and misery. What there won’t be is “unity.”

In other words, we won’t be on it but we’ll wish we were.