The Road to Splitsville IMAGINE THERE'S NO GOVERNMENT...IT'S EASY IF YOU TRY

The Newsletter for Subscribers to THE SPLIT

So here’s the question. (Okay, there’s more than one question. And in fact we’ll get to others. But first, here’s the question for now.)

What does the political right-wing (the Republican Party; the Heritage Foundation; the Claremont Institute; etc.) think life will be like if Trump wins and his neo-Hitlerian policies are implemented?

How will government function if Trump fires thousands of career civil servants and replaces them with incompetent and imbecilic “loyalists”? And if it won’t be able to function, what will that be like?

What will be the effect, in cities and rural areas, of rounding up fifteen million immigrants, uprooting them from their families, jobs, and communities, and interring them in “camps”?  (As Lindsay Beyerstein said on X/Twitter, among other things grocery prices will “go through the roof” when the American agricultural work force is deported.)

In light of such (if only just apparently) racist policies, how long will it take until local freelance groups (which, when they arose in Central and South America, we referred to as “death squads”) take it upon themselves to terrorize Jews, Blacks, Asians, Muslims, and every other group this or that collection of “real Americans” decides to attack?

Like we said: questions! We ask them, because a recent article in Salon, by Chauncey DeVega, makes a thorough case for the parallels between today’s Trump/Republican populism and the rise of the Nazis in Hitler’s Germany. You can check off the boxes with your eyes closed. Demonizing an “other” as vermin and filth? Check. Calls for the restoration of former glory? You betcha. Dire warnings of undesirables poisoning the pure blood of the Volk? Done and done. Threats and fantasies about killing or imprisoning the opposition? You got it. Hysterical fear-mongering about societal breakdown and rampant crime? In spades.

As for Trump’s enablers, it’s more than possible that the Elon Musks and Mike Johnsons and Marco Rubios and Ted Cruzes know that convicted felon Donald Trump is a lying ignoramus, but also that they believe they can control and manipulate him to suit their ends. If so, they should brush up on William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich to learn how industrialists and politicians think they can control an autocrat (and his rabid followers), get it wrong, and pave the way for disaster.

One doesn’t expect the MAGA hordes to know better; to them, Trump is the leader of the cult, and all cults sooner or later end, at best, in dissolution and recrimination and, at worst, in mass death, whether in a lethal Kool Aid party or a simple fiery conflagration. Oh, and speaking of mass death, one doesn’t expect the evangelical Christians to know better and, if they do, to care. They can’t wait for the Apocalypse, and if Trump turns out to be the Anti-Christ, all the better. His rise will hasten the return of You-Know-Who.

Then again, maybe the chaos and tumult outlined above is the plan. As DeVega says:

Authoritarians and fascists (in whatever form they may take) are experts at exhausting the public to make them pliable and subservient. Once in that condition, many members of the public will yearn for the type of order and direction that a strongman like Trump or Hungary's Viktor Orban or Vladimir Putin (or a tyrant like Hitler) promises a beleaguered and broken public. 

And when Trump finally keels over and drops dead (listen for the universe’s sigh of relief; you should be able to hear it across most of North America), what then? Or if—i.e., when—his progressing dementia becomes indubitable and plain to every eye, what will Josh Hawley, or Marcia Blackburn, or (God help us) Jim Jordan do?

(They may have to decide sooner than they think. For a definitive example of Trump’s fast-deteriorating mental capacities, take a gander at Brad De Long’s transcription of Trump’s recent post-verdict speech. Note the meandering lack of focus. Note the repetitions. But most of all, note the stunted vocabulary, not unlike that of a mildly-proficient third-grader.)

Of course, when it comes to the post-Trump landscape, everyone has thought about it—Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel and Jamie Dimon and that lot. But what bizarre alloy of arrogance and naivete makes them think they, or anyone, will be able to control what happens? We envision a scenario as written by the Coen brothers (we’ll get them back together just for this) and co-directed by Quentin Tarantino and George Miller: meticulous, can’t-miss planning by idiots, leading to bloody devastation and comical hijinx galore. You will say, “Armando Iannucci did this with The Death of Stalin.” We will say, “Not like this, he hasn’t.”

We’ve been writing The Road to Splitsville as a sort of semi-snarky warning. “You think the divorce of the red states and the blue is so inconceivable? You think it’s just a satiric fantasy? Well getta loada these real-life events. Christian chaplains and Bibles in public schools! Abortion laws straight outta El Salvador! Southern states angling for more pollution and greenhouse gases! Not so funny, now, huh?”

For almost 250 years, such a Split has been presented to us as not only unthinkable, but absolutely undesirable. Why? Oh, something something “preserve the Union,” something “a republic if you can keep it,” and so on. Fine. Sure, sometimes, when some story of racist bullshit arises from Mississippi, or some reactionary law gets passed in Florida, we find ourselves thinking what the great actor Charles Grodin titled his memoir, a greeting some woman at a dinner party or whatever once said to him: “It would be so nice if you weren’t here.”

If all the fifty states insisted on remaining United, we could probably live with it. But if United means a Trump Reich, and all the misery, death, destruction, corruption, and chaos it guarantees, the idea of a red-blue Split is starting to grow on us, and not simply as a dystopian satire.