WTF?

Yeah, it is crazy time.  And I know I am becoming a curmudgeon.  But what is happening is way, way beyond incipient curmudgeondry.  This is whack-a-doodle batshit crazy stuff.

Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has asserted that the United States needs a divorce between Red and Blue states. Forget the fact that over 600,000 Americans died fighting a civil war that even former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said signaled no right of any state to succeed.

Apparently, Greene’s point is this: we can’t  (or won’t) compromise, so let’s ruin the United States of America.  Assume it could happen without violence (I know, you have to suspend disbelief in this exercise), what would the new Red States of America look like?

• Abortion would be illegal under any circumstances – rape, incest, life of the mother at risk?  Doesn’t matter.  No go.
• Birth Control would be taken away as an automatic right.  If not totally illegal, it would be stringently restricted.  Certainly not available to anyone under the age of 21.  Or any unmarried person, just like prior to 1972.
• Voting rights would be severely curtailed.  Voter restriction and voter suppression would rule.  People of color would find it more difficult to vote than ever before. 
• Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, along with most other social programs like Head Start, Aid to Dependent Children, low-income housing support, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would disappear.
• The right to unionize would be taken away.  All states within the RSA would be “right to work.”  The minimum wage would certainly be lower than the $15 an hour necessary to keep full-time workers just above the poverty line.
• Many or most of the “poor” would be bused to the old USA.  After all, they have been practicing this on illegal (and some legal) immigrants for some time now.
• Professors and teachers would have their choice of materials subject to state or RSA government approval.  Children would never learn about such things as slavery in the USA, the Holocaust, or the Native American genocide.  They would never discuss such topics as discrimination, gender fluidity, or sex.
• Being trans or gay would be illegal.  I shudder to think of the penalties that would exist for these crimes.
• Progressive income taxes would become a thing of the past.  If anything, there might be a “national” sales tax.  But without social spending, the budget would be roughly 60 percent less so the need for tax revenue would drop accordingly.
• Immigration opportunities would be severely restricted and non-existent for people of color.
• Not sure democracy would survive.  Good odds that the government would be more like a fascist regime with an autocrat leading the country.
• There would be a national religion.  Nominally Christian.  Catholics, Jews, Moslems, Hindus, Sikhs, Native Americans and any other non-Christian group would be subject to discrimination and violence.  Over time, religion is likely to become required teaching in schools and mandatory for certain professions and government positions.
• The RSA would withdraw from NATO and align with folks like Putin, Xi, Orbán, Ortega, and the other autocrats around the world.
• All current federal and state legislation around equality for women and people of color would vaporize.  Title IX, equal pay for equal work, non-discrimination requirements in pay, mortgage rates, loans, access to healthcare and insurance, and housing would be gone.
• White, Christian and nominally evangelical people would be and would always be in positions of power.  I would think that Presbyterians, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Catholics, many Baptists, Mormons, and non-Christians might not be exactly happy about this.

This is the world in which a whole lot of Trump/DeSantis/Greene/Boebert/Gosar/ Gaetz/Jordan supporters want you to live, a place where they make the rules you have to live by.  And American voters who agree with or simply accede to that thinking are more numerous than you think. 

How many corporations will stay in the old USA when the RSA has no corporate taxes, no constraints on hiring or firing and little regulation?  Aha, but how the hell will they get anyone to want to work there?  How many people of color would want to live in that new country?  Similarly, how many women or non-Christians?  The parallels with autocratic, religion-based, and race-based countries are solid and unavoidable. 

The impact on the old USA would be as catastrophic as the impact on those states succeeding.  What do you think would happen states like New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Illinois and California where the urban centers dominate the population, but the rural centers dominate the area. Oh yeah, by the way, those 5 states comprise over a third of the nation’s total output of goods and services.  Civil war really would occur.  We would be a shell of our former stature in very little time.

This is not the vision of the United States the founding fathers had.  It is not the vision that Abraham Lincoln had, nor FDR or Dwight Eisenhower.  This is not the US that I grew up in.  This is twisted and evil.

I am reminded of the McCarthy Hearings during the Communist witch hunts of the 1950s. After smearing a young lawyer from his firm, attorney Joseph Welch responded to McCarthy’s innuendo and accusations with ” “Until this moment, …… I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” Welch then asked, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” 

Such a plea to conscience and decorum would fall flat today. In the 1950s, Welch’s strike to the heart began the cascade that exposed McCarthy for what he was and hastened his demise. In a world where the President of the United States is heckled by members of Congress in the audience the answer is no, there is no sense of decency. Not today and, unfortunately, not in the near future.

I have used this quote from Maya Angelo before: ““When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”  Be forewarned.  They show us who they are over and over, day after day.  And it is frightening.  They are fascists, authoritarians, many morally corrupt and out to remake the United States in their image.  These people and their supporters – either through active support or simple acquiescence —  make me want to puke.  Do not be passive.  Silence is tacit agreement.