The Road to Splitsville TWIN SHITTIES

The Newsletter for Subscribers to THE SPLIT

Okay, but seriously: Are we on The Road to Splitsville? Do we really think a separation of the red and blue states is, in any sense, a possibility?

Well, no, but maybe yes. We’ll explain why, but first: It’s not because Elon Musk keeps tweeting “Civil war is inevitable.” He does indeed keep tweeting that—and it’s not clear to us whether he’s referring to a civil war in the US, Great Britain, Europe, or Narnia—but it has (finally) dawned on us that Elon Musk’s political tweets are, without exception, extremely stupid. This is the man, you will recall, who when asked his reaction to the fact that advertisers were leaving X (formerly Twitter) in droves, responded, “You’re trying to blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go fuck yourself.”

Now, granted, that’s not a stupid political statement. It’s a stupid business statement. And it has the added characteristic of not making any sense—“blackmail” has nothing to do with it. But it offers a sense of how carefully and thoughtfully the richest man in the world crafts his public statements, i.e., not at all. So pay no attention to his musings on civil war.

Rather, pay attention to what happened as recently as this past Tuesday. The Harris campaign chose Minnesota governor Tim Walz as Harris’s running mate. We think this a perfect choice among an abundance of good choices, and we think it augurs well for a Harris win in November, assuming we’re using “augurs” properly. (We’re a little self-conscious about language use at the moment as we just saw Ari Melber use “accorded” instead of “acquitted,” as in “he accorded himself well.” And he’s smarter than us! Or do we mean “smarter than we”? See how hard this is for us or we?)

So let’s say the Democrats win the White House. Given the increasingly miserable/laughable quality of the Republican candidates for House and Senate, it’s not inconceivable that the Dems win majorities in those chambers. Let’s further suppose, therefore, that that comes to pass.

What will Republicans do? What will MAGA do? What will the red states do?

First, of course, they’ll do what they did in 2020, and whine, and pule, and cry foul, and deny the election’s legitimacy, and invent, spread, and believe, or pretend to believe, ludicrous rumors of “Democrat” cheating. There may be January 6-type episodes of violence. A hundred lawsuits will be filed, none with any merit. Five instances of voter fraud will emerge, all of them committed by Republicans. You know—the usual.

But it gets better, by which we mean, for them it gets worse. At that point, Donald Trump, their hero, will confront a quintuple whammy:

·         He will be a loser. Again.

·         He will have lost to a woman.

·         Of color.

·         He will therefore be eminently qualified for, and unprotected against, various criminal trials, some of which may result in his imprisonment. Finally—

·         All of these stresses and travails will accelerate his already-accelerating mental, emotional, cognitive, and physical decline.

How will the right respond?

They comprise two major factions: MAGA (secular, nostalgic, batshit insane) and Christian nationalists (religious, millenarian, batshit insane). And they both want the same thing: their own country.

Back when it looked like Trump would be facing feeble, pokey old Joe Biden, they all thought Trump would win, in which case “their own country” meant the entire USA. In (what passes for) MAGA’s mind, they would be “taking their country back.” The Christian theocrats, meanwhile, would dismantle much of the secular government, staff whatever remained with loyalists, and rule the nation according to the plan called Project 2025.

If both of these scenarios are frightening, it’s not because either could succeed, but because of the monstrous consequences that would follow their failure. The MAGA plan is a child’s fantasy: Daddy Trump will beat up immigrants and be mean to liberals, and somehow our lives will improve. They forget, or they pretend to forget, that the first Trump administration was a four-year-long cavalcade of ineptitude, criminality, fatal COVID mis-management, and grift. (“Oh, but the Republicans have learned their lesson,” the mainstream media assure us. “They won’t make those mistakes again.” Really, MSM? Have you met a Republican?)

The Project 2025 scheme, meanwhile, comes with a superficially more impressive intellectual pedigree, but commits the own-goal blunder of actually telling everybody what’s in it, thus horrifying normal people. Plus, the last time Republicans tried running a government with loyalists, we had the enormous and utterly corrupt fiasco of the Iraq occupation. Why these supposedly Biblically-inspired visionaries believe that Americans in the year 2024 would applaud, or even permit, the country to be subjected to the social relations and legal constraints that were old in 1850 is, as we say, beyond the scope of the present discussion and/or our linguistic abilities.

Let’s just put it this way: Even when these guys win, they fuck up. So what might they do if they lose?

We think they’ll still—more than ever—want their own country. Sure, it sounds preposterous. But, given everything that we’ve seen and heard and read from them since 2016, why should we think otherwise?

On the MAGA side, the defeat (to say nothing of the prosecution) of Trump would seem, to the faithful, to be a tyrannically-imposed fraud. Many of them will want Elon Musk’s civil war. (So will Musk, as long as he doesn’t have to fight in it.) Some of them, willing (or hoping) to die by cop, might try to “trigger” one, with the same barbaric and tragic consequences we see when a frothing racist tries to spark a “race war” by killing one or more Black people. But most of them will want to take their ball and go home, i.e., secede from the US, in an act that might, to us, seem petulant and self-defeating, but to them will seem heroic and noble.

As for the theocrats, not only do they want to control the country, they truly believe (or profess that they do) that Jesus wants them to control the country. That’s some motivation! And so, with the same smug certainty with which they propose, e.g., to outlaw abortion nationwide, to outlaw contraception, or withdraw women’s right to vote, they could very well begin a campaign to “explore” the possibility of exiting the bad, blue, secular US.

Again: those two belief systems (Trump as god; Jesus as son of God) lead to statements and behaviors that seem objectively insane. The former we indulge as “politics,” the latter we excuse as “faith.” Talking about engineering a Split between the liberal and the conservative states may seem nuts, yes.

But only to us.