Optimism on January 6: There Is No 'Secession Threat'

Maybe America isn't quite as polarized as it looks...

Jan 07, 2024

This is the 15th installment of the new “Axis of Genocide” series at this Zionist Substack, the successor to the “Antisemitism and Culture” series which can be read in two 30-essay collections here and here.

This new series will document and analyze the antisemitic genocidal war waged against Israel by the Hamas terrorist group and its primary supporter, the Islamic regime in Iran. The accomplices in this attempt at a second Holocaust — Vladimir Putin’s criminal-gangster state in Russia and the authoritarian regime in China — will also come in for scrutiny and loud condemnation, as will the non-state actors supporting them, particularly the international Muslim Brotherhood propaganda network, and radical activists of both the far left and the far right. Other evil states and terrorist groups will also receive scrutiny. You can find a list of previous installments at the end of this post. Thank you for your support.

I brought a bag with over a dozen mostly-unread books in it on our holiday trip to visit family in Indiana. I wasn’t sure how the mood would strike me while here, so it seemed wise to provide myself with a variety.

After just over a week here, one book in particular jumped out as especially apt: David French’s Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation. I’d had this copy for a few years, started it, and then never got around to finishing it. The reason: as much as I’ve long worried about the seeming coarsening and polarization of America’s political culture, the idea of it resulting in the literal end of the United States and its reforming as two different countries just seemed too farfetched.

How would that go down, exactly? Which issues that divide Americans today could be so important and so white-hot that they could provoke anything comparable to the Civil War?

And then

Sally Shideler

and I spent a week here in rare-steak red Indiana. All of a sudden, this idea of the country’s deep divisions started to sound a little more plausible.

Are Americans now so divided and at odds in understanding seemingly basic facts that it could spell the end of our form of government?

How did this polarization happen? What might a “national divorce” actually look like if it happened? And what could be done to stop it? French’s book is divided into three parts, each one focused on answering one of these questions.

And I’m relieved to report that having finished the book today - completing it on the 3-year anniversary of the attack on the Capitol in 2021 - I’m really not worried anymore about America fracturing apart. While I still admire French - his #NeverTrump conservatism during the dawn of the Trump era was a sentiment I shared, and still do - I found his book largely unpersuasive. Here’s why.

The first section - titled “The Relentless Momentum of Our Mutual Contempt” - is the longest section of the book, at 116 pages, and also the most effective. French lays out the various reasons why America’s political culture has seemingly grown more polarized and more vicious. I’d agree with most of his analysis and he makes it well, even if he leaves out a few important factors and, in a way, overstates his case.

In particular: he doesn’t really factor in the role of online algorithms in making people more extreme. That’s such a massive factor, and while he seems to acknowledge aspects of it here and there, it doesn’t get the treatment it needs. He also doesn’t at all consider the generational component - specifically, how will the rise of Gen-Z into political engagement impact America? Those who have read the previous post in this series, laying out the deeply messed up moral values of the under-25 cohort, will understand what I’m suggesting.

But that’s OK. The chapters he does have here make a lot of good points, especially “How An Academic Paper Explains America,” which lays out the concept of “The Law of Group Polarization.” This is the idea - firmly established in social science experiments for a long time now - that when groups of like-minded people gather and deliberate over an issue, they get more extreme rather than coming to more rational, reasonable conclusions. This is a very important concept to understand. People gathering in large groups to try and accomplish meaningful objectives can often and oh-so-easily fly off the rails.

OK, so having set the table and laid out the problem in such depth, what are the potential consequences? It’s in part 2 - “The Dissolution” - that French’s argument begins to unravel.

He presents two different scenarios in two chapters - “Calexit” and “Texit” - in which America might come apart. He then devotes a third chapter to describing the global turmoil which would then result, with a divided America no longer able to project its military might on the global stage, maintaining the post-World War II global order.

In French’s imagination, California becoming absurdly extreme on gun control, or the South quadrupling down on anti-abortion extremism, could provide the circumstances in which the country splits. While these chapters are interesting and well-written, French undercuts them both tremendously with the section’s third chapter following them, “A World on Fire,” which describes his predictions for what would happen internationally.

He is correct in his suggestions of what would almost definitely occur if America split in two, but he doesn’t factor it in to his Calexit and Texit scenarios. Obviously, a governor of California or Texas who was considering forming their own country for one ideological reason or another would bump into a starkly apparent reality: a weakened America would equate to bolder, stronger, more expansionist incarnations of Russia, Iran, China, North Korea, and likely many other countries, too.

In other words: the global threats of the Axis of Genocide will keep us together as a nation. Breaking up the country to have a gun-free California or an abortion-free South just isn’t worth it when the cost of doing so would be to fully launch World War III (or IV or V depending on whether you want to throw in the Cold War and War on Terror into that category, which I am inclined to do, but to each their own.)

The third part - “To Save America, Chart James Madison’s Course” - is the weakest and least persuasive part of the book. I found myself rolling my eyes endlessly chapter after chapter. What are Dr. French’s prescriptions to heal this sick land? As the name suggests, he calls on rediscovering principles rooted in the Constitution and various founding fathers. He calls for Pluralism, Tolerance, Federalism, Kindness, and an appreciation for the Bill of Rights.

Sure. That’s the ticket. Just persuade the partisan ideologues who hate each other to be nice and tolerant to one another. Yeah, that’ll work. Good luck with that. Try and convince unreasonable, emotionally-driven people to become reasonable and embrace Enlightenment philosophy based in the 18th century. Solid plan, there. I remember coming up with the same idea after watching that great “John Adams” miniseries circa 2009 and publishing an article arguing it at a right-wing blog. “The founders! The founders! If we all could just come to appreciate the ideas the founders were talking about and that they used to create our country!”

Dream the fuck on. Seriously.

But the key reason why French’s argument didn’t persuade me and why I’m no longer concerned about secession movements in the near future: like so many, he seems to assume that virtually all Americans choose to align Left or Right, Democrat or Republican, Blue State or Red State, Secular or Christian Fundamentalist. He makes no reference to the masses of Americans who feel alienated from these various binaries, or who simply don’t care.

This breaks apart when we consider just a handful of facts.

Such as: in the last election 80 million Americans who were eligible to vote chose not to do so. That’s a third of the electorate choosing not to participate. Think this huge chunk of Americans is particularly interested in forming a new country because of guns or abortion?

And of the 2/3rds who did choose to vote, think all of them are firm left or right? I will again share and emphasize research cited from the previous installment in this series, now used for a different purpose:

Faith and Flag Conservatives (10% of the public)
Committed Conservatives (7%)
Populist Right (11%)
Ambivalent Right (12%)
Stressed Sideliners (15%)
Outsider Left (10%)
Democratic Mainstays (16%)
Establishment Liberals (13%)
Progressive Left (6%)

See how this works here? The only parts of the electorate which are potentially so extreme that they would conceivably push for brand-new countries reflecting their ideological preferences are the 6% of progressives and 10% of “faith and flag conservatives.” And even among those groups, it’s almost certainly not all of them, but a small fraction. None of the other groups are in any way interested in secessionist ideas.

So where’s the threat?

And here’s where we arrive at January 6, 2021. Some would surely point to the attack on the Capitol as some omen of what’s to come. If a group would attack the Capitol to try and stop the certifying of an election, then surely such acts could grow more widespread and intense in the future, right?

Yes, I do anticipate we’ll see more acts of violence from people embracing the ideology of those who made war against America that day.

But it’s really not part of a broader mass movement of people.

Here’s a question to ponder: what ideology really drove the rioters of January 6? If you think it was “Trumpism” or some form of a “radical right,” then I’d say you’re wrong.

In my humble opinion, what really caused January 6 was a much more fringe, marginal idea that lacks strong leaders: Q-Anon. The Capitol was not attacked by people who just “supported President Trump” or merely believed his lies that the election had been stolen. No, the rioters were far more extreme than that. These were largely people who bought into the absurd conspiracy theory that the government is actually run by blood-drinking pedophile global criminals. That’s it. When understood in that context, then all of a sudden, the problem seems much less dire. Yes, it’s frightening and disturbing to see conspiracist ideologies expanding, but we’re far off from them achieving a critical mass to really influence the country’s politics in a meaningful way.

So on this January 6, take a moment for hope and optimism - the country is not as polarized and extreme as it may look. There remain vast majorities of Americans who are not interested at all in tearing the country to pieces.

Now, do you want to see greater unity in America? You want to see those obsessed with guns and abortion put down their pet causes and come together toward a common good?

I actually do not, for a simple reason: it will take great tragedy and violence to do that. French doesn’t hit on what it will actually take to bring Americans together:

WAR

Americans come together when they have no other choice, when we have no other options, and we must cooprrate to survive. The attack on Pearl Harbor brought Americans together to fight and win in World War II. 9/11 brought Americans together to fight and win the War on Terror. 10/7 in Israel has now unified the Israeli people in their mission to destroy Hamas.

It will take something that horrifying and profound for Americans to “come together” again. And I hope it doesn’t happen. Some day, we may look back nostalgically on the trivial, stupid bullshit that so many love to “debate” so passionately now. We have the luxury of obsessing over which bathrooms trans people will be allowed to use, or which states will let a woman get an abortion, or how many bullets some gun magazine can hold, or whether “free speech” means that Substack and Twitter (no, I will not call it X) must host the views of Nazis and other genocide advocates.

Be careful what you wish for, David French. You just might get it…

Optimism on January 6: There Is No 'Secession Threat'

Maybe America isn't quite as polarized as it looks...

WAR

Discussion about this post