Seriously, Why Is Nobody Talking About An American Two-State Solution?
In 2017, the intellectual linguist, philosopher and political activist Noam Chomsky said: “the Republican Party is the most dangerous organization in human history”. And that was before the entire GOP leadership stood idly by as Trump botched the handling of the deadly coronavirus, before Trump unleashed a military crackdown on peacefully protesting Americans, and before Trump’s attempted post-election coup d’etat!
Chomsky’s assertion sounds extreme at first — the most dangerous organization in human history?? C’mon! Human history is replete with extremely dangerous & destructive organizations: Al Queda, Isis, the Mafia, the Taliban, the NRA, the Colombian & Mexican drug cartels, the Spanish Inquisition, the Third Reich. Menacing rulers & organizations have been part of human history from time immemorial. Yet none of these past threats ever posed the existential danger that today’s Republican Party poses to the survival of humankind.
As I see it, the greatest threats to continued human existence are: climate change, nuclear war and infectious disease. Wouldn’t you agree that these constitute the holy trinity of existential threats? The Republican Party has exacerbated matters in not one, but all three of these fronts, causing substantial, often unnecessary, suffering and death to millions of humans, animals and plants … as well as accelerating the pace toward our collective demise.
Take climate change. Trump had not been in office long when he pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement, effectively reducing society’s chance of reaching global emissions goals, and limiting climate research. Over his four years in office, Trump has dismantled more than 125 environmental policies, and he’s working on tearing down 40 more before leaving office. The Trump administration loosened oversight of polluting industries, weakened Obama era limits on carbon emissions for cars and power plants, and eroded protections for endangered animals to make way for further oil exploration. These measures have exacerbated the climate-related dangers we’re facing, possibly in irreversible ways. We’re seeing the effects: prolonged and intensified hurricane seasons, uncontrolled fires in CA, tornadoes, floods, drought, famine. Make no mistake: Climate change denial on the part of the GOP greatly imperils our habitats; our sources of food, air & water; and life on earth.
On the nuclear front, Trump tore up Obama’s Iran deal without even pretending to replace it. Whether you agreed with the Iran deal or not, the reality is that departure from diplomacy has resulted in rapid acceleration of Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Israel now believes that Iran is a mere 3–6 months away from having sufficient fissile material for a nuclear weapon! Tensions are especially high after the recent assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, presumably by the Israelis. I would not be surprised if Trump added an Iranian war to the list of calamities he is leaving for the Biden administration to deal with! Nor did Trump’s bromance with Kim Jong-Un do much to impede the expansion of Pyongyang’s nuclear stockpile and missile capabilities, much less dismantle them. North Korea is no less menacing post- Trump; quite the opposite, Kim Jong-Um is emboldened now that he has been legitimized by the orange leader of the free world.
As for the pandemic, we are all watching this tragedy unfold before our eyes. At the time this was written, over 300,000 Americans had died of covid-19, and more than 17 Million Americans (that we know of) had tested positive for coronavirus. And what is the Trump administration doing to combat this horrific microscopic attack? Zippo, zero, nada, zilch, rien. Trump has “dealt” with the worst pandemic in the history of our country by ignoring it and hoping it will just disappear, poof. “We’re rounding the corner” is his standard line. Trump’s infamous Axios interview showed us just how much Trump cares about Americans dying alone, by the hundreds of thousands: “It is what it is” … as if we’re talking about lab rats! Trump dismantled Obama’s entire pandemic preparedness operation, and has repeatedly and relentlessly tried to strip Americans of their ACA healthcare (because God-forbid he left a single Obama achievement intact). His administration has done a whole lot to exacerbate the threat of covid — including pitting states/governors against each other in the procurement of PPE; vilifying and attacking respected immunologists and leading medical experts; politicizing mask-wearing; promoting fake home remedies like hydroxychloroquine and drinking bleach; holding super-spreader gatherings & rallies with thousands of un-masked, non-distanced participants; and ordering vastly insufficient vaccines to inoculate our population. Meanwhile the nation’s hospitals are bursting at the seams, medical personnel are overwhelmed and exhausted, and 3,000 Americans — more than the total number of people who died in the 9/11 attacks — are dying every single day in America. And there’s still no plan to do anything about it, 10 months into this!
Trump and the entire Republican Party are wrecking our country. Trump’s legacy? An uncontrolled pandemic that will have killed half a million Americans by the end of Winter, a great many of them needless deaths; a battered economy featuring massive job loss, the collapse of small businesses across America, and hunger, with lines at food banks not seen since the 1930s; children cruelly separated from their families as part of a heartless and ineffective immigration policy; a weakened democracy and eroded confidence in once-sacred institutions like the FBI, the CIA, the Defense Dept; loss of trust in the media; substantially heightened racial tensions and hate crime statistics; devastatingly weakened environmental protections; courts at every level packed with extreme-right judicial nominations; national security threats due to the president’s dereliction of duty because he doesn’t like the election results; escalated tensions with Iran; and the replacement of actual reality with a fictitious version of reality that completely undermines American democracy and security.
It would be easy to blame these disasters solely on Trump, or to think things will return to “normal” when he leaves office. But I’m afraid Trumpism is the new normal for the Republican Party, they are now the party of Trump, the party of lies and conspiracy theories, of fake news and violent threats to election officials who are just doing their jobs. The GOP has shown us, in no uncertain terms, that they don’t give a rat’s ass about democracy, that they have no love of country, no concern for the lot of ordinary Americans, that they see people of color as an inferior race, some would say an inferior species. Most of all, Republicans will do ANYTHING to stay in power, no matter how ruthless, illegal, immoral, destructive, or insane.
For them, it all boils down to one inconvenient demographic truth: the so-called “browning of America”. The U.S. Census Bureau projects that, for the first time, Whites are slated to become a minority group in the U.S. in the year 2045. The Black and Hispanic populations are growing rapidly, while the white population is declining as a percentage of the whole. Conservative whites are in a panic about the prospect of being outnumbered, and therefore voted out of power. That’s why they go through such great lengths to suppress minority votes. Their cause is a desperate effort to cling to their white male power and privilege at any cost. In doing so, the GOP is accelerating the demise of the American empire.
So what happens next? Well, Biden and his team will get to work in January. You won’t see the Dems taking long golfing vacations, watching 10 hrs of TV a day, or holding cult rallies. They will roll up their sleeves and get to work, finding competent solutions to improve conditions for the greatest possible number of Americans. That’s what Democrats do. I’m not saying the Democrats are perfect, or faultless; they have their share of issues and scandals for sure. But unlike Republicans who, now we know, are in it ONLY for the power and the money, Democrats genuinely care about their country, about the fate of fellow American citizens, including black lives, they care about our institutions, about the truth, and about science. That makes it easier to overlook or forgive their peccadilloes. So the Democrats will distribute covid vaccines and control the coronavirus; they will stabilize the economy & create jobs; strengthen safety nets; reestablish diplomacy, alliances, and hopefully U.S. credibility in the world; and tackle climate change aggressively. Then, in four years, or 8 years, or some time in the future … amnesiac (or racist) American voters will somehow forget how horrific things were under Trump; Democratic votes will be suppressed, and the Republican Party will make its way to power again. Then they will proceed to dismantle all the progress that the Democrats will have made, predictably slashing taxes for the rich, favoring corporations over workers, driving up the national debt, making life miserable for immigrants, poor people and people of color, isolating the U.S. and using muscle over diplomacy … leaving countless problems for Democrats to fix, yet again. This dynamic is beyond dysfunctional, it’s destroying us.
If the existential threat posed by the Republican Party were perpetrated by another country, you better believe we would defend our country, with all our might! We would not hesitate to unleash the wrath of our military force against a foreign adversary, as we have done so many times in American history. The United States spends enormous sums of taxpayer dollars — over $700 Billion every year! — to build a world-class military apparatus, supposedly to defend America & Americans from harm. Clearly this massive investment in weaponry is not helping us now — the entire military complex is useless in defending us from the two actual existential threats facing our nation right now: a microscopic virus, and anti-democracy traitors amongst us (who don’t believe in microscopes!).
What do you do when the enemy is inside you? How do you deal with the ugly, putrid cancer rooted deep in the soul of America, that is metastasizing alarmingly? I think we were all quite shocked to learn that 74 million Americans drank of the Clorox and voted for more lies, corruption and conspiracy theories. GOP misinformation & disinformation campaigns are clearly effective, and they are infinitely more dangerous than even the most aggressive & lethal forms of cancer. Now, I have no medical training whatsoever … but my layman’s understanding is that the main tools of oncology are chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery. As much as I would love to indulge in the fantasy of using potent chemicals and radiation to zap the entire Republican establishment out of existence … that would go against my nature, I can’t in good conscience condone the use of violence. I much prefer the more precise solution of excising the cancer surgically. And that’s what we must do, my fellow Americans. WE MUST EXCISE THE GOP CANCER SURGICALLY. Or else we’re all going to die. Whether it’s from the incompetent management of covid, uncontrolled guns in schools, nuclear war, the ravaging effects of climate change, the militarization of our police force, mauling by rabid neo-nazi Trump-cult fanatics like the Proud Boys, the dismantling of social security and healthcare offerings, or from sheer GOP corruption and recklessness … if Republicans ever occupy the White House again, We. Are. All. Going. To. Die.
I say: let’s not wait for the inevitable, imminent, unfinished Civil War to rip us apart! Let’s take a proactive, strategic approach to intentionally and intelligently carving the country into two nations — possibly more than two. I’m proposing a Blue-America Brexit. Call it the American Secession, the Great Partition, the U.S. De-Unification, the Big Split, the Great Divide. If you’re thinking: “If we divide this country into two, then Putin will have won”, my reply is: maybe so. But you know who else wins? Half of America, humankind, sanity, human decency, planet earth, endangered species, our water supply, and truth. I hate to be dramatic here … but we are talking about “the most dangerous organization in human history”, as Noam Chomsky so vividly put it. Are you seeing how insane these Republicans are behaving in Trump’s final days — threatening the lives of Georgia election officials for doing their jobs and not going along with Trump’s lies? Honestly, I felt less unsafe growing up in Colombia during the Pablo Escobar years than I do being in the U.S. in 2020, knowing there are over 400 Million weapons in the hands of hordes of fanatic, white supremacist Trump cult zombies who are raging because daddy told them the election was stolen from them!
For some time now, America has reminded me of a marriage long gone sour. We can’t stand each other; the hatred, fear and mistrust of ‘the other side’ is real, visceral and deep. So why do we have to stick it out? Why not get a divorce?? Everyone involved is clearly miserable. Administrations spend their time in office dismantling what the previous administration of the opposite party put in place, only to have their own policies undone by the subsequent administration. Trump has taken this dynamic to the extreme, obsessively dismantling every single piece of Obama’s legacy … but it seems like the left & right have operated this way for eons. One step forward, three steps back … it’s no wonder we have made such little progress in decades; we are still fighting the same basic civil rights battles we fought in the 60’s! Clearly, we have not reckoned with the ghosts of our Civil War past. While progressives like Bernie Sanders and AOC push for liberal agendas like fighting growing income inequality, electoral reform, and universal healthcare … Red America is clutching to the past with tooth & nail. No matter how many statues we topple, the symbols and bigotry of the Confederacy are stubbornly pervasive and shockingly ubiquitous. Additionally, the irrational fear of communism/ socialism is apparently on the rise again. Conspiracy theories about Cuba & Venezuela in this election cycle sure reminded me of the McCarthy era!
Let’s face it. This country is quite evenly divided. We just learned that a whopping 74 Million Americans voted for Trump — that’s 47% of the 160 million Americans who voted in this election! Which means that nearly HALF the country is enamored with the narcissistic, corrupt monarch-wannabe currently in office, and the other half is tearing its hair out in desperation. We are NEVER going to agree. We will NEVER meet in the middle, there is NO bringing this country together. In fact, the trend has been in the opposite direction: both sides of the political spectrum have become increasingly polarized in the last few years.
Tragically, there is no stopping all the GOP misinformation & disinformation machinery. If there’s anything Trump knows how to do is to hijack the media’s attention, he is persistent in his lying and he has a huge megaphone. He will likely go on to start his own media outlet(s), plus he will continue driving his base to channels like Newsmax and OAN (who’s viewership I understand increased from 46,000 to over one Million in just a couple months!), talk radio, and now there’s Parler — all serving up GOP propaganda & conspiracy theories that are not only embarrassing on the global stage; they also put our country in grave danger. I would not hold my breath on the dis/misinformation disappearing any time soon; as long as there’s a First Amendment, there will now be Russian-style propaganda in America.
Does anyone actually, truly believe that Biden can unite this broken nation, even as half the country does not even believe Biden is the bona-fide President-elect? Do you honestly think that, by being a moderate Democrat and a good, likeable guy, Biden can actually win over any Trump fans? Do you think he can reach across the aisle and work with Republicans — especially with Mitch McConnell likely to still be in charge of the Senate? Please. If we have learned nothing about these tea-party-poopers, then we’re the fools. The Republican Party is what it is, they have been nothing but consistent, it always boils down to a handful of conservative priorities: starve the government by cutting taxes for the rich, pack the courts with ultra-conservatives, maintain racist policies that keep people of color “in their place” (including incarcerated & killed by the police), attack and slash social nets, block immigration, block minorities from voting, block anything & everything liberal, preserve fossil fuels, and above all, prioritize corporations over workers.
So how exactly do we go about partitioning the nation? Honestly, I have no clue. But I think we need to make it a priority to figure it out, and quickly! I would say it begins with the Blue states forming coalitions and think tanks to think through all the implications of secession, and start coming up with a viable plan. We are, after all, a State-centric nation; in many ways, the structure of our Republic should make it much easier to divide than if we had a more centralized government, like most countries. I suspect secession conversations are happening among Red States too, I’m sure many conservatives would be thrilled to have their own Red nation … you know, like Texas. Hopefully all those 18 other Red States that joined the TX lawsuit against 4 other states’ election results, will join TX in their secession movement, helping further my cause. The Blue State governors have already been working together in the war against covid, forming pacts with neighboring states to fill in the leadership void left by the Federal government. Now we need to take it further. At some point, Blue State governments need to start collecting & redirecting their residents’ Federal taxes towards funding a new Blue-America government, with its own branches of government, its own courts, and its share of the military arsenal. No more Blue States subsidizing Red States!
When I mention my two-state idea, people usually say it’s impossible because of geography: how do we neatly break the country into 2 contiguous geographically-contained areas? To which I respond: Why do the countries need to be geographically-contiguous? Aren’t Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and Guam as part of our country now? Why can’t our borders be messy and electronic? Look, we have fancy tools for gerrymandering, don’t we? If political parties can carve up neighborhoods and postal codes in bizarre shapes and angles for legislative advantage, then surely we can figure out how to apply these tools to separate Blue-America from Red America. It will be challenging to extricate those proverbial ‘islands of blue’ in Red States, like Austin and Miami/Dade. Large numbers of people may have to relocate. It sure wouldn’t be the first time people of color decided to migrate North to flee the racist South!
Forming a new country would give us the opportunity to write a new constitution! Think of the possibilities! Freed from the evil forces of Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham, Ted Cruz and the anti-science/anti-truth contingency, we could forge a new path forward and become leaders in solving the world’s biggest problems, like global warming, cancer and space exploration. (I wonder which side Elon Musk would be on, now that he’s moved from CA to TX?!). With free healthcare and education for all, and common-sense gun laws, Blue America just might begin to resemble Canada (and Bernie Sanders would die a happy man). In order to succeed, Blue America would have to regulate the media, imposing stringent fact-checking/truthfulness requirements, to keep out the propaganda. We would need a ministry for policing the truth — maybe that’s the FCC’s new role? We have some difficult First Amendment issues to decipher.
Finally, we might want to implement this plan after Trump is safely behind bars, or mired in legal battles, or 6 feet under. God forbid he became the Red State leader! We should start planning the Great Divide right away though. I have faith that Trump will be indicted and imprisoned soon enough for his lifetime of crime. Without the mad narcissist at the helm, wouln’t it be nice if the neighboring nations of Blue America and Red America could finally learn how to cohabitate peacefully?
Even after Trump’s departure from office, the Republican Party will remain the single greatest threat to the security of our nation, and to the survival of life on earth. Seriously folks, we need to start talking about an American two-state solution!
