New Republic Writer: Hey Let's Have A De Facto Divided Country With Nigh-Absolute Power Residing In the States

How about we make it more than a de facto partition?

Dear Red-State Trump Voter,

Let's face it, guys: We’re done.

For more than 80 years now, we--the residents of what some people like to call Blue America, but which I prefer to think of as the United States of We Pay Our Own Damn Way--have shelled out far more in federal tax monies than we took in. We have funded massive infrastructure projects in your rural counties, subsidized your schools and your power plants and your nursing homes, sent you entire industries, and simultaneously absorbed the most destitute, unskilled, and oppressed portions of your populations, white and black alike.

All of which, it turns out, only left you more bitter, white, and alt-right than ever.

Some folks here in self-supporting America like to believe that there must be a way to bring you back to your senses and to restore rational government, if not liberal ideals, sometime in the foreseeable future. Everyone seems to have an answer for how to do this. Every day another earnest little homily finds its way to me over my internet transom: "Think locally, act globally," or "Make art and fight the power," or the old Joe Hill standby--"Don't mourn. Organize."

To which I say: Don't organize. Pack.

Not literally, of course. Not even the good people of Canada should have to stomach a mass migration of moping American liberals mumbling, "Live locally … make art." What I mean is that it's time for blue states and cities to effectively abandon the American national enterprise, as it is currently constituted. Call it the New Federalism. Or Virtual Secession. Or Conscious Uncoupling--though that's already been used. Or maybe Bluexit.

Done and done. When do we sign papers?

posted by Ace at 08:39 PM

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