The Road to Splitsville HELLO, I MUST BE GOING

The Newsletter for Subscribers to THE SPLIT

While, from a pleasant grassy embankment, you gaze in wonder at all the traffic on the Road to Splitsville, you may suddenly find yourself thinking, “Wait a minute. Who are all those people? What do they think they’re doing? What kind of person chooses to drive down this highway toward a possible separation of the USA into two opposing parts?”

To which we want to say, “Don’t get us started.” But it’s too late. We’ve started.

There are several answers to your (very astute!) questions. Many of the people driving by are fundamentally ignorant, about themselves and the rest of the world. As such, they’re easily manipulated by various institutions (the church, the Republican Party, Fox News, right-wing radio) into hating things that would benefit them, and promoting policies and people that do nothing but enrich their manipulators.

They are taught, for example, that “taxation is theft.” And so they pile the family into the car, hit the Road to Splitsville, and move to Florida, where’s there’s no state income tax. Once there, they encounter other people like themselves: rabidly anti-tax—and, therefore, rabidly anti-government, anti-science, anti-vaccination, anti-intellectual, anti-“experts,” anti-abortion, anti-immigrant, and anti-everything else their manipulators have assured them is the real cause of their anxiety, frustration, and anger at the world.

“Oh, come on!” you may be thinking. “Aren’t they PRO- anything?” Yes! They’re pro-life. Which means they’re pro-gun, pro-no-license-concealed-carry, pro-stand-your-ground, and pro-Trump-death-cult. They’re also pro-people-who-are-as-anti-as-they-are. They gather in like-minded communities and live happily, if enragedly, ever after.

Or do they?

Not all of them, no.

Some—a non-trivial number—arrive in Florida expecting a tax-free paradise, and instead find a sweltering hellhole of soaring insurance rates, 100-degree nights, high rents, and an “armadillo infestation.”

So says a recent article on NBCNews.com, which starts by acknowledging (as we did, previously) the net increase in the populations of Florida (and of similarly state-tax-free Texas), while then pivoting, with profiles of people who moved to Florida for the good life and, faced with the bad life, left.

As a reporter with the unimprovable name of Shannon Pettypiece writes:

One of the first signs Barb Carter’s move to Florida wasn’t the postcard life she’d envisioned was the armadillo infestation in her home that caused $9,000 in damages. Then came a hurricane, ever present feuding over politics, and an inability to find a doctor to remove a tumor from her liver.

Yes, the armadillos are gross. And while we can’t really picture an army of those weird creatures doing that much physical damage to a home, we’re not trying all that hard. Still, it’s that last detail—the medical one—that might be the most distressing. Note that this is not a case, as in that of abortion access, in which Ms. Carter should have known better. There was no publicly-proclaimed change in the law regarding hepatic oncological procedures. This was just a case of not enough doctors. (Could it be that there’s a brain drain of people who are not fundamentally ignorant, about themselves and the rest of the world? And who have split in the other direction? You betcha!)

But that wasn’t Ms. Carter’s only reason for leaving. She describes herself as “a middle-of-the-road Republican,” but then says:

You cannot engage in a conversation there without politics coming up, it is just crazy. We’re retired, we’re supposed to be in our fun time of life. I learned quickly, just keep your mouth shut, because I saw people in my own community break up their friendships over it. I don’t like losing friends, and especially over politics.

She’s not alone in feeling that way, and not everyone is a newcomer. Donna Smith, a 61-year-old graphic designer, had lived in the Tampa area for more than three decades. She laments:

When I first moved to Florida, it was a live-and-let-live sort of beach feel. You met people from all over, everybody was relaxed. That’s just gone now, and it’s shocking. It’s just gone. Instead, it’s just a constant stressful atmosphere. I feel as though it could ignite at any point, and I’m not a fearmonger. It’s just the atmosphere, the feeling there.

Ditto Noelle Schmitz, who put out a Hillary Clinton sign in 2016, whereupon it was stolen and her house was egged. Says she:

I saw my neighbors and co-workers become more radicalized, more aggressive and more angry about politics. I’m thinking, where is this coming from? These are not the people I remember. I was finally like, we need to get the hell out of here, things are not going well.

And everyone talks about the expense. Smith “was told by her homeowners insurance company that she would need to replace her home’s roof because it was older than four years or her insurance premium would be going up to $12,000 a year from $3,600, which was already double what she had been paying.” We ask you: Do you know anyone whose roof isn’t older than four years?

These skyrocketing insurance rates are, presumably, due to climate change, and the heavy rains and super-storms and beach erosion resulting therefrom—factors which surely contribute to the increase in cost in maintaining the public sphere which, in a state with no income tax, must be met with the increases in property tax that makes everyone see, um, red.

Plus: rising homeowners association fees, unlicensed concealed carry, ardent Trumpism, a government obsessed with exterminating “wokeness.” Many of these disillusioned people are perfectly nice Republicans, who arrive in the Sunshine State expecting the Edenic (and tax-free) wonderland they may have experienced when they visited there on vacation, but discover, as full-time residents, a seething mosh pit full of angry morons packing heat. No wonder so many are leaving—not necessarily for blue states (perish the thought), but away from the extreme redness of Florida.

But again: Even more are arriving and staying. What does it all mean?

Maybe this: As political and cultural opinions get more extreme, and more emotionally-held, those who hold them feel happier (and safer) sequestered among their own kind. It’s a sort of concentration and centralization that’s the opposite of entropy; from E Pluribus Unum to (pardon our Latin) E Unum Pluribus. Or maybe E Unum Duo.

In a word, Splittsville, baby.  If this were to come about, would it be good or bad?

Well, for whom? For the MAGA rank and file, who seem happy (or at least willing) to endure all manner of hardships, as long as they can blame them on liberals, it might be just the thing. But for these centrist Republicans? (Since there apparently are some.) We think they’d experience a Split the way they’ve experienced Florida: gladly embracing the fantasy, and then, when the reality of it sinks in, feeling regret—and a desire to, as real estate agents say, “re-lo.” Yet again.