Member of Congress Marjorie Taylor Green advanced the “national divorce” thesis. The Republican said that the two leading political forces should peacefully divide the United States into zones of influence. This is not about the collapse of the state, but about a deep reform of its constitutional foundations. The congresswomen’s statements, despite accusations of populism, are well founded. In recent years, there has been increasing talk in the United States that the ideological divisions that are dividing the country are insurmountable and that the likelihood of civil war is as high as ever. Izvestia found out what ideas Marjorie Taylor Green is promoting and how feasible they are.
According to Taylor Green, the United States is moving towards a “national divorce” when Republican and Democratic states are legally separated. They will continue to exist in one country, but life in them will be regulated by other legal frameworks. Like it or not, we are heading for a national divorce, but I don’t want a civil war, it should never happen. wrote she’s on Twitter.
Trump Man
Marjorie Taylor Green, who represents the 14th district of Georgia in the House of Representatives, has become one of the most popular politicians in the United States in a few years. During the 2022 midterm campaign, she raised $12.5 million, a record for a Republican in the lower house of Congress.
The harsh, often offensive, rhetoric against the Democrats and especially their left wing, the “progressives,” made Taylor Green an excellent advertisement. She has repeatedly supported QAnon’s messages (including the most incredible ones), criticized the race, climate and COVID agendas of the Biden administration, and still supports the version of the rigged results of the 2020 presidential election. In the two years following Biden’s election, Taylor Greene authored five of the nine impeachment resolutions. In addition, she belongs to a group of congressmen demanding an audit of funds allocated for military assistance to Ukraine and the US withdrawal from the conflict. “Because of our own arrogance and the ‘struggle to save democracy’ in Ukraine, which is not a member of NATO, Russia, under heavy sanctions, is proving to the world that it does not need the US dollar or friendship. [c США]” she said.
Contemporary American politics is polarizing and becoming more and more radical. Therefore, the appearance of such figures as Taylor Green, naturally, was noted in an interview with Izvestia by Ilya Kravchenko, adviser to the director of RISS.
– The element of direct competitive confrontation has always been a very important component of political life in the United States, but now we see fewer attempts to reach an agreement, and the debate, as a rule, is reduced from discussion to accusations and monologues. For this reason, Marjorie Taylor Green is the face of her time. But it is one thing to talk about worrying trends, and another to try to curb them after coming to power. Traditionally, the Republicans, being at the top, try to strengthen the federal government in the same way as the Democrats, the expert emphasized.
conservative wave
Taylor Green is an absolute supporter of Donald Trump. In many ways, therefore, her crushing victory in the elections in Georgia did not become a sensation. Republican scored nearly three times as many votes as her Democrat counterpart Kevin van Osdal. The ex-president, in a published congratulation, called her the future star of the Elephant Party.
In January, a number of American media reported on the intention of the congresswoman to run for vice president under Trump in the 2024 elections. There has been no official information on this yet, but since the list of real supporters of the ex-president is not particularly large, her chances are assessed as quite high. “She’s ambitious — she’s not shy about it, and she shouldn’t be. <…> She sees herself on the shortlist for Vice President Trump,” Steve Bannon, his former senior strategic adviser and right-wing ideological leader, said in an interview.
A feature of the ideological split in the United States is that liberal concepts are always in sight – their views are disseminated by the mainstream media. American conservatism, on the other hand, is often invisible and its outbursts seem sudden, notes Valery Garbuzov, director of the Institute for the US and Canadian Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
There have been several conservative waves over the past decades from Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. The third wave was a response to the election of Barack Obama. It will be interesting to see how much the conservative electorate can rise again by 2024, the specialist argues. If Trump manages to get into the Republican primaries, he will most likely win. Judging by the current trends, after that he will be able to win the elections as well. Therefore, the party elite in both camps will do everything possible to prevent him from fighting for power.
Thus, Taylor Green is the spokesman for shy voters (“silent supporters”), the “deep people” that led Trump to victory in 2016. The ideological attitudes of this part of the republican electorate are focused primarily on the fundamental rejection of the bipartisan political elite and the federal government apparatus as its instrument. Not without reason, in a commentary on the “national divorce”, Taylor Green added that “Washington and the political world” in the United States were “completely divorced from real Americans.”
The development of anti-elitist tendencies in American society reflects the level of public confidence in the institutions of power, Ilya Kravchenko believes.
– All sorts of anti-elitist concepts and conspiracy theories, of which Taylor Green is a supporter, regularly surface on the surface of public discussion. The fact is that the confidence of Americans in the president and Congress is falling, especially given the constantly emerging negative newsbreaks. This creates fertile ground for such judgments, and sometimes provokes acts of political action on the part of the population,” the interlocutor believes.
“One country, two systems” American style
The idea of dividing the country along ideological lines is not new, as is the story of a possible civil war. According to a survey conducted in July 2022 by the University of Chicago Policy Institute, about 28% of US residents feel himself cut off from his government to such an extent that “it will soon be necessary to take up arms” against him. The same study indicated that 73% of Republican voters agreed with the statement that “Democrats tend to be bullies who want to impose their political beliefs on those who disagree.” Among Democrats, the share of Republicans who think so is 74%.
In August, the University of California published its study, according to which more than 50% of Americans “expect a civil war within the next few years,” and more than 70% of those polled — regardless of party affiliation — agree that “American democracy serves only the interests of the rich and powerful.” . Tellingly, the Democrats also recognize the presence of crisis manifestations in American society. Last June, Michael Podhorzer, head of the Analyst Institute, which caters to “progressives,” called the stratification of the United States into 25 “red”, 17 “blue” and 8 “purple” states the great division of the country. And a former member of the Ford, Carter and Clinton administrations, Robert Reich, in an article for the Guardian, said that the second US civil war already underway and that the solution will be something reminiscent of Brexit: a mutual decision to follow different paths on most issues, but remain connected on a few fundamental points.
The projects of Taylor Greene and her opponents from the Democratic camp are not about dividing the country into two independent states, but about changing the emphasis in the US textbook confrontation between the federal government and the states and in the two-tier system that unites them. The so-called “America of two versions” will have to maintain a single statehood, have a consolidated policy in the areas of national defense, finance and civil rights. At the same time, attitudes towards religion, institutions of family and marriage, social security and many other issues will remain the sovereign right of each state.
The problem of interaction between the federal authorities and the states has been discussed throughout the history of the United States, this is one of the classic issues of American statehood, Valery Garbuzov commented to Izvestia.
One of the historical differences between Democrats and Republicans is a different understanding of the role of the so-called big government. The former advocate a significant involvement of Washington in local life and for the federal government to perform a predominant part of social functions. More conservative Republicans see the 19th century as their ideal and demand greater independence for local communities,” the expert noted.
fertile soil
Taylor Green’s statements would have remained “populist slogans of a conspiracy theorist” if they had no social and historical foundations. In 2020, 13 counties in Democratic-run Oregon campaigned for secession and transition to neighboring Republican Idaho, and today the movement is gaining momentum.
In recent years, Oregon and its largest city, Portland, have become perhaps the most prominent expression of left-liberal politics in all its diversity. The number of property crimes in Oregon is now almost doubling higher than the US average. From May to October 2020, during a period of riots involving BLM activists, Portland became one of the nation’s largest hotspots of violence, with the authorities responding to the robbery with a significant reduction in the number of police units. Judges are guided in their decision-making by the so-called critical racial theory and are in favor of a quota representation of the LGBT community in government. The state has decriminalized the possession of “small” quantities of drugs, including heroin, which has caused a 41% increase in overdose deaths in a year. Today, according to a number of polls, Portland wears the title of “the main hole in the United States.”
As a result, residents of 13 rural districts in the south and east of Oregon (which is 9% of the population and 63% of the state), who have voted for the Republicans for more than 30 years, advocated secession (secession from the state) and joining the traditionally “red » Idaho.
Protester in Portland
However, such initiatives, as well as various independence movements and discussions about borders, are nothing new for the United States.
In 2020, a number of counties in Virginia announced their intention to secede after attempts by state Democrats to limit gun ownership. The population responded with thousands of rallies and a movement to join neighboring West Virginia.
Such confrontations are not something dramatic for the history of the United States, but the current level of social tension can give them an additional impetus, notes Valery Garbuzov.
“The United States was created as a union of independent states, and the laws of individual states often clash with each other or federal laws,” the expert explains. – American society initially lives with legal and ideological lines of division. Until recently, the state coped with such internal conflicts and has a positive experience of overcoming such contradictions. At the same time, we are now seeing serious social and political divisions among Americans. It is likely that the degree of confrontation will continue to rise.
