The Road to Splitsville FOR CHRIST'S SAKE

The Newsletter for Subscribers to THE SPLIT

Everybody is, or should be, talking about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page manifesto/game plan/we’re-hiring-ad of how they’re going to end democracy and bring a fascist dictatorship to the USA. It’s a grotesque reactionary wet dream about abolishing every aspect of the New Deal, crippling the economy, herding millions of immigrants into concentration camps, trashing the rights of women and the LGBTQ community, ignoring climate change (by eliminating—of all agencies--NOAA), re-polluting the country (by ending the EPA) and plunging you and yours into a boiling cauldron of social and political turmoil worse than the one we lived through during the Vietnam war.

They may not actually describe it in those terms; they euphemize and obscurantize and sanitize and use metric tons of words to keep people from reading the diabolical thing. But if you can stand to look at even a small portion of it, you’ll see that it raises as many questions as it answers, starting with: Why? Why publicize these hideous plans? To which the answer can only be, “We think Americans will like being dragged back to the 19^th century while we cave in to Russia, kill tens of thousands, and wreck the world!”

Well. It takes all kinds, including people bloated with hubris and out of their tiny minds. However, if you think this document opens a new high-speed passing lane on The Road to Splitsville, we regret to inform you that you should re-calibrate your GPS, because with Project 2025 you are, instead, on The Road to Catastrophe.

Splitsville is in a different direction.  When we get there, you’ll see that the conservative red states and the liberal blue states have divorced and now constitute two separate sovereign nations, one (still, appropriately) called the USA, the other the Confederation of Conservative States of America: CCSA. The framers of Project 2025, in contrast, don’t want to leave the modern liberal state standing; they want to conquer, destroy, ravage, and possess it completely.

Wanna know who does desire to withdraw from the modern liberal world and retreat to a conservative reserve? These guys, as brought to us in the N.Y. Times by Ruth Graham:

Without fanfare, however, some of Claremont’s key figures have been leaving California to find ideologically friendlier climes. Ryan P. Williams, the think tank’s president, moved to a suburb in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in early April.

His friend and Claremont colleague Michael Anton — a California native who played a major role in 2016 to convince conservative intellectuals to vote for Mr. Trump — moved to the Dallas area two years ago. The institute’s vice president for operations and administration has moved there, too. Others are following. Mr. Williams opened a small office in another Dallas-Fort Worth suburb in May, and said he expects to shrink Claremont’s California headquarters.

“Claremont” refers to the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank—well, anyway, tank—in the San Gabriel foothills east of Pasadena, California. The NYT piece quoted above refers to some of its members, conservative Christians all, who are putting their money where their mouths are and voting with their feet and putting their feet in their mouths where their money is, by moving themselves, their obedient tradwives, and their many obedient tradchildren out of fallen, sinful, liberal-infested places and into more congenial communities in Texas and/or, as you’ll see below, Idaho.

Of which we’re in favor and to which we say “Yay!” All we ask of religious zealots is that they not try to foist their beliefs on us, that they not send suicide bombers to our house, and that they not put the Ten Commandments on the walls of public schools and, if they do, they send us videos of third-grade teachers explaining to eight-year-olds what “Thou shalt not commit adultery” means.

Otherwise, if they want to live near each other, in “an aesthetic landscape to match, with more classical architecture and a revived conservative art movement and men wearing traditional suits,” that’s jake with yours trulies.

“A lot of us share a sense that Christendom is unraveling,” said Skyler Kressin, 38, who is friendly with the Claremont leaders and shares many of their concerns. He left Southern California to move to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, in 2020. “We need to be engaged, we need to be building.”

Yes, eight out of nine Justices on SCOTUS are Christians, as is the President, 88% of Congress, and the famously pious Speaker of the House, but “Christendom is unraveling.” Well, whatever. Bear in mind that, as a character in a Philip Roth novel says about Christendom, “the Bible is their bible!” Through the miracle of faith, they are able to constitute a solid majority of what they themselves define as “a Christian nation” and still feel persecuted and threatened.

Graham notes that “some see themselves as participants in and advocates for a ‘great sort,’ a societal reordering in which conservatives and liberals naturally divide into more homogenous communities and areas.” And in that respect, it’s Splitsville Here We Come. But will they be content to leave it at that?

Not all of them, no.

Fed up by what they see as an increasingly hostile and disordered secular culture, many are moving to what they view as more welcoming states and regions, battling for American society from conservative “fortresses.”

That “fortresses” link takes you to the American Reformer website, and a mind-crushing essay on how Evangelical Christians can mount a “cultural insurgency.” Fans of dense, turgid writing (“The currency in peacetime markets is respectability and reputation which captivates cultural engagers, indebting them to market forces.”) will find many riches here. The rest of us will find what could be thought of as a long, highly specific footnote to Project 2025, in which “real” American values are identified as being (and as having always been) right-wing Christina values.

Executive Director of American Reformer is Josh Abbotoy, who, Graham writes:

is moving to a small town outside Nashville this week with his wife and four children. Through his new professional network, he is raising funds to develop a corridor of conservative havens between Middle Tennessee and Western Kentucky, where he has also purchased hundreds of acres of property. He expects about 50 families to move to the Tennessee town — which he declined to identify — in the next year, including people who work from home for tech companies and other corporations.

A corridor of conservative Christian havens! If that isn’t a decent approximation of what, in The Split, we refer to as “enclaves,” we’ll eat your hat. Mentioned in this piece is our old friend, the Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), which we wrote about 17 weeks ago in The Road to Splitsville number 3. (In it, we quoted millionaire Charles Haywood, one of SACR’s founders, declaring in a podcast that he wholeheartedly endorsed a “national divorce” as a solution to the country’s problems.)

Damon Linker, a poli-sci lecturer at Penn, describes these coteries of far-right frothers as “a highbrow version of the militia movement.” We like that, but it makes us nervous. The militia movement doesn’t want to keep its hands to itself. It wants (or, after a few beers, it thinks it wants) confrontation, combat, and conquest.

So which will it be? Separate-but-networked enclaves of holier-than-thou-and-everybody-else Christian conservatives, where men in traditional suits run everything, while their first-and-only wives raise their many, surely-home-schooled children? (And we wonder: in those home-schooling homes, are the Ten Commandments posted in a conspicuous location in a large, easily-readable font in every room in the house? And, if not, why not?)

Or will SACR, with its SACR handshake and high-sign and password, get more militant, and seek to overthrow our secular order?

Or (and we like this one the best, and we will insist on getting some credit for it when it happens) will these Texas and Tennessee and Idaho enclaves figure “the heck with it,” and campaign for a Split?

Only time will tell, because America is a land of contrasts. But at least we know for certain that Skyler Kressin is well cared-for by his wife.

At his house afterward, Lauren Kressin, who was pregnant with the couple’s eighth child, served peach tea in tastefully mismatched china, quietly switching cups with him so he would have the “less feminine” one, she said with a smile.

Men: Do you have a wife who will defend you from feminine tea cups? We didn’t think so.