If you had any last lingering doubts about the desperate State of the Union, you haven’t seen the results of a recent poll of Republican voters by Bright Line Watch/YouGov. Nationwide, 50% of the sample said they preferred secession to compromise with a Democratic administration.
Among Southern Republicans — in the 11 states of the old Confederacy, plus Oklahoma and Kentucky — secession prevailed by a vote of 2 to 1. Sixty-six percent of these patriots would be ready to fire on Fort Sumter once again. It’s much the same nasty crowd that turned its guns on the United States in 1861. Back then, they started a civil war so they could continue to buy and sell African slaves. This time, they only want to keep those slaves’ descendants from voting, or winning Senate seats. But it’s a damn frightening echo, and it completes a repulsive descent into white supremacy for a Republican party that once defeated those slaveholders and freed those slaves.
This is no laughing matter. The most rabid of the GOP’s congressional attack dogs, like Madison Cawthorn and Marjorie Taylor Greene, have allowed the infantile whimpering of a defeated, demented president to lure them to the brink of treason. If the statue-smashers are still punishing dead Confederate generals for betraying their country in 1861, what’s a loyal American’s response to red-state legislators who promote insurrection and secession in 2021? The gallows and the firing squad may be out of fashion, but aren’t treason and sedition still serious crimes? Yet, unsurprisingly, 40% of Democratic voters in the same Bright Line survey responded, essentially, “Let the bastards go.”
My friend Gene Nichol, a distinguished constitutional scholar, now calls Republicans “the most dangerous anti-democracy party in the world.”
“The GOP has abandoned the American experiment,” Nichol wrote in The Progressive Populist [Oct. 1]. “They now wage war against it. They seek to do what the Confederates couldn’t. No wonder they’re attached to the Stars and Bars. The Republican Party has become home to moral, political, scientific, racial, democratic and constitutional nihilism. It giddily embraces the destruction of our foundational norms and institutions. It cowers before our darkest forces, assuming it’s safe to ride the back of the tiger.”
No laughing matter. On one internet site that analyzes the secession survey, there’s a photo of some Proud Boy thug parading the Confederate flag through the Capitol last Jan. 6. If that doesn’t chill you, friend, you’re carrying the wrong passport. This is, as Nichol asserts, as serious as death — the death of an estimable democracy. But humor intrudes, rudely, when we try to imagine what kind of sovereign state would take its place on the world stage if our Southern Republicans were able to secede from this Union they profess to despise.
When any nation breaks apart — think about the Balkans and the former Yugoslavia — inevitably one of the divorced partners gets the best of what the former nation had to offer, and the other gets — the rest. The division of America along red/blue party lines would yield a spectacularly uneven divorce. It doesn’t take much research to predict a demographic trainwreck for some new lily-white nation that would begin where America ends. Genetic diversity would be the first casualty, of course. White power would be such a universal assumption in an all-Republican principality that every un-white citizen in his or her right mind would pack a bag and light out for the cool blue north. There’d be no more work for Jim Crow or the KKK in the land where they used to flourish. In a few years this orphan nation would be whiter than Norway or Finland.
The whitest but not the brightest of new nations, our red-state spinoff. The rest of its profile is all too predictable. By any measure of educational or intellectual achievement — test scores, high school graduates, college degrees, ranked universities, illiteracy — states dominated by Trumpublicans rank at or near the bottom of the American barrel. That’s with the worst yet to come, once the divorce is finalized. The Republican Right’s relentless war on science and medicine would soon cost the new polity most of its scholars, physicians and scientists, those professionals who have always been the cream of the intellectual crop in a region where learning is undervalued. Professors and doctors would quickly follow minority Southerners on their northward migration, with engineers, high-tech industries and the people who invest in them close behind.
It doesn’t seem farfetched to imagine a new Dark Age in Dixie, once secession detached it from the mainstream of Western civilization. Check those color-coded maps of America and you’ll see that dark red states are already far behind the rest of the republic in critical categories like public health, poverty and technology. They’re suffering from more COVID cases and deaths, more vaccine resistance and fewer available ICU beds (none in Alabama) than any of the states that rejected Donald Trump. Those maps show that scarlet-red states lead the nation in only two demographic areas, each problematic—-gun ownership and passionate Christianity.
Can you think of an unemployed demagogue, possibly an ex-president, who would not be embarrassed to take command of a nation of armed white Christians who can barely read? (Don’t accuse me of exaggeration unless you’re fully aware of what it means to rank in the intellectual sub-basement of 21st-century America. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 50% of American adults are unable to read a book written at an eighth-grade level. Though the average American adult is a seventh-grade reader, watching Fox News requires an 11th-grade level, according to the National Institute of Literacy.) Where the Old Confederacy raised its statues to native generals nicknamed “Old Hickory” and “Stonewall,” will the new Confederacy raise them to a chubby draft dodger they call “Old Bone Spurs”?
I struggle to picture an equestrian statue like the one of General Lee on Monument Avenue in Richmond, complete with a horse that looked big enough to carry Doughy Donald. Would they set him on a throne in Birmingham, crown him president-for-life in Little Rock? No absurdity seems impossible, in these states that have shown so little resistance to Donald Trump’s lies and fantasies. But the leadership of this post-American fragment state isn’t one most generals or politicians would envy. Texas, the largest and most prosperous of the old Confederate states and one that harbors many ardent secessionists, has emerged as America’s most radical opponent of abortion rights. The Texas statute that will soon face Supreme Court review — especially creepy because it adopts the fascist stratagem of inviting citizens to spy and inform on each other — is clearly this century’s most ominous challenge to Roe vs. Wade.
In a post-secession South, the Texas abortion ban would almost certainly become the law of the land. And, as an obvious consequence, nearly all the young women who lived in these red states would leave them for a saner reproductive environment — followed closely, in the course of nature, by all the young men. The average age of a Trump-land citizen might end up somewhere in the late 50s, which would eventually produce a terminal society of women too old to breed and men too old to fight. Even troubled Mexico, eyeing this armed but decrepit society on its northern border, might revive the spirit of Pancho Villa and decide that it looked like an easy conquest.
I hope I’m not discouraging any of you eager secessionists, but there’s one more demographic humiliation I feel compelled to pass along. Obesity, as we all know, is a national pandemic that may end up killing more Americans than COVID-19. And of course nine of the 10 most obese states (excepting only Michigan) are among those 13 red states that polled 2-to-1 for secession. The fattest five are Mississippi, West Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky. Donald Trump might fare better running for president of the USA than taking the helm of a comic-book nation that’s predominantly old, white, sick, fat and ignorant. Imagine its Olympic team? In a Southern culture where sports have always been fanatically central, shuffleboard would replace football and the 100-yard dash might take five minutes.
A national motto for such a laughably unpromising republic might well be borrowed from Dante’s Hell: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” I’ve entertained myself trying to think of an appropriate name for a remote, hopeless country where benighted gnome-like primitives live primitive lives. In the funny pages, Al Capp of “Lil’ Abner” fame invented Lower Slobbovia, and the “Dilbert” cartoonist Scott Adams weighed in with a similar dystopia he calls Elbonia. The novelist Gary Shteyngart coined “Absurdistan.” After reviewing a number of humorous alternatives, some submitted by droll readers (“Zombia,” “Doofusland”?), I decided to call the New Confederacy “Oblivia.” That would make its citizens “Oblivians,” and anything connected to this sad, poor land could be described as “Oblivious.”
You might think I’m having too much fun with a subject as deadly serious as secession, or even suspect that I’m among the 40 percent of progressives whose response to the South’s secession movement is “good riddance.” Unfortunately I live in North Carolina, a state from the Old Confederacy that has often been described as “purple” rather than red or blue, at least since Barack Obama won its electors in 2008. But lately that purple has been stained a dismal shade of pink. Obama lost North Carolina in 2012 and Donald Trump prevailed there in 2016 and 2020. We have a Texas-size problem with a Republican legislature that includes one infamous cretin — a parson — who compared Abraham Lincoln to Adolf Hitler. (The late great Molly Ivins referred to these feral legislators as “rightwing fruitloops,” and wouldn’t it break her heart to see what the fruitloops and a looped-in governor have wrought in her beloved Texas?) Carolina, as we call it — South Carolina is another world — has way more than its share of fruitloops, and our congressional delegation features the unspeakable deplorable Madison Cawthorn, whose antics leading up to Jan. 6 may yet land him in the penitentiary.
Cry, the beloved country. Am I too old to emigrate? If worst truly comes to worst, in a replay of 1861, will North Carolina be consigned to Oblivia?
Hal Crowther is a longtime journalist whose latest essay collection, “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners” (Blair, 2018) won the gold medal for nonfiction at the Independent Press Awards, as well as the gold medal for essays at the Foreword Review Awards. A winner of the Baltimore Sun’s H.L, Mencken Writing Award, he is the author of “An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken” (Iowa, 2015) and four previous collections of essays. Email delennis1@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, December 1, 2021
Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us