By Wayne Allensworth
If I had only one reason to vote for Trump-Vance in November, this would be enough: Kamala Harris voted against requiring doctors to render aid to babies born alive after a “botched” abortion. That alone tells us all we need to know about her and what her party has become. The “abortion van” outside the DNC only confirmed the ghoulishness of the ghastly, and, yes, demonic abortion cult. The Republicans are hardly perfect from a pro-life point of view, but the lines are clearly drawn. Abortion dissolves one of the most precious ties we have — that between mother and child. We will be judged by how we treat the most vulnerable among us. What you did for the least of these, you did for me…
And abortion is only one front in a raging culture war. Ask yourself a question: If a child can decide to “transition,” why can’t one consent to relations with a “minor attracted person?”
Meanwhile, the neocons from the George W. Bush administration, as well as from Mitt Romney’s and John McCain’s campaigns, many of whom had supported Hillary Clinton and President Joe Biden, have endorsed Harris. War today, war tomorrow, war forever is a non-negotiable precept for them. And, as Glenn Greenwald observed, Harris is reading from the same foreign policy page as the neocons. Tulsi Gabbard’s and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsements of Trump signal the great divide as well. They are life-long Democrats with lives invested in the party who have concluded that the party has lost its mind. And they are honest liberals — people who give more than lip service to free speech, who oppose oligarchy, and who have no desire for another world war, and who have effectively joined a populist, patriotic Republican campaign. The realignment of the parties is consolidating.
The great divide between the two camps is between two diametrically opposed world views. Here’s another indicator (at about the 13-minute mark) of the great divide: Trump is winning among poll respondents who are members of an organized religious body. Harris enjoys the support of 83 percent of atheists. We are witnessing what is at heart a religious struggle, a clash of metaphysical systems. The differences between them are not amenable to the give and take of republican government.
Which brings me back to a piece I wrote for Chronicles over five years ago. Titled “The End of Politics,” it is worth looking at again. Some excerpts follow:
“Politics are over in America. Political maneuvering will go on, of course, but the old civics-class view of American political life was based on a set of assumptions that are no longer operative.
America was once far more homogenous than she is today. But the passing of the 1965 Immigration Act and the political and social revolution of the New Left changed the country demographically and culturally. The old America of regional cultures was about as diverse a polity as could be while remaining stable. America, with her Anglo-Saxon political heritage, was a country with a considerable reserve of “social capital” and public trust. It was understood that a loss at election time was not an existential crisis (the election of 1860 notwithstanding). Politics were not zero sum.
That is no longer true. And this means the old politics, which had been hollowed out over a period of decades, are largely a thing of the past.
Politics no longer are concerned with mere policy, which can be bargained over within a procedural framework that once included shared cultural assumptions. Now politicians debate the most fundamental moral and social issues of society and culture, including the legitimacy of the American polity as such, the value of human life, even the definitions of gender, sex, and marriage. Tax policy and healthcare policy are the sorts of things that can conceivably be worked out in committee. Fundamental disagreements over the foundational elements of civilization cannot…
So what now?
There are scenarios that could conceivably give Middle America a shot at saving some portion of their country and protecting their heritage and posterity.
For starters, the Democratic Party, divided between the neoliberals represented by old white people like Pelosi and Biden, on the one hand, and the (even more) radical hard-left Che Guevara wing, on the other, appears to be headed for trouble. The “coalition of the fringes” is a fragile one made up of very touchy elements—white Starbucks leftists, Jews, blacks, gays, “trans” people, Asians, Hispanics, and others who really don’t like one another very much. They are held together only by a disdain for Middle America that is stoked by old resentments, a desire for revenge, and fantasies about armies of KKK supporters and neo-Nazis committing mostly imaginary hate crimes.
If the San Francisco Democrats implode, that may give Middle American populists more breathing room to organize in some fashion and resist their displacement in a manner yet to be determined. One way might be organizing state- and local-level resistance. … In California, where leftists called for secession in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, last year inland voters proposed breaking up the state into a red “New California” and a blue coastal state that would span the distance from San Francisco to Los Angeles. In Democratic-controlled states like Washington, New Mexico, and Oregon, a number of local sheriffs and county commissioners are resisting gun-control laws adopted by their state legislatures, raising the possibility of Second Amendment sanctuary counties within blue states. …
We don’t know what form or forms a united movement might take, or where such a movement might end up, but something has got to give if we do not wish to go quietly into that good night.”
So here we are over five years later. The social-political divide has only grown wider.
Your observer has pondered “internal secession,” whereby red states distance themselves from the Washington Blob and act on their own, as Texas Governor Greg Abbott has with respect to Biden’s southwest border invasion of illegal aliens. That realignment could encourage further population shifts. The “big sort” has been underway for some time, as Americans seek locales more agreeable to their morals and beliefs.
Politics as we have understood it cannot continue. We are approaching a point where each election cycle becomes a systemic crisis. Only increasing authoritarianism can hold together a country that is no longer a nation. I am not sanguine about the prospects for an eventual mutual agreement on separation. That would require a reservoir of goodwill, and I see precious little of that. But I believe globalism will fail, and that may be our chance to go our own way, to build something new. In the meantime, our people must act opportunistically to take advantage of whatever openings present themselves for improving our situation. A political perfect storm might be brewing that could create an opening for a Trump-Vance administration to accomplish something positive.
Countries do not last forever. Like people, nations have lifespans. They are born, they live, and they die. In the past 35 years alone, we have witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the creation of numerous new states. Czechoslovakia split into Czech and Slovak republics.
History does not stand still, and neither should we.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.
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