Ancient Problems Require Ancient Solutions

Our problems aren't THAT new

A few days ago, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) ignited a vigorous conversation when she sent this tweet:

Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 @mtgreenee

We need a national divorce. We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s traitorous America Last policies, we are… https://t.co/Azn8YF1UUy

I understand where the sentiment comes from, because nobody wants to be ruled by idiots who live far away. (We like our politicians in tar-and-feathering range, for obvious reasons.) The founding of America itself was the act of telling far-off authorities to stick it where the sun doesn’t shine.

However, MTG’s suggestion for a state-level national divorce isn’t feasible for a number of reasons. First of all, states aren’t “red” or “blue”, they’re purple:

This is before we get into “Didn’t Vote”, who generally outnumber either party.

Assigning states to a particular country because of the way they voted (especially under dubious rules in 2020) is insane — people were voting for a president, not a country! This is especially problematic because many states are overwhelmed by their one major population center. (Portland is the reason that Oregon is blue, Seattle is the reason that Washington is blue, etc.) Should people in rural (red) Washington be stuck in Blutopia because of one city hundreds of miles away? I think not!

The much better option MTG touches on later in her tweet — shrinking the size of the federal government. As I often say, government exists to protect all the rights of all its citizens — that’s it. Instead of the current situation where everything is made political because the government controls so much (funding especially), it’s better to have government shrunk to the proper size so you don’t care who the President is, much less the Secretary of Transportation.

This was the idea of the United States to begin with. The Founders sat down and tried to create a system in which government was local enough that the people could affect change. The federal government was extremely limited (by the Constitution), generally to those things the states couldn’t handle on their own. (National defense, diplomatic relations with other nations, etc.) Everything else was left to the state governments, which could generally do as they pleased. This federalist structure allows states to experiment with various means of running government, expressed here by 1932 Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis:

In this system, California is free to be California, and people are free to ‘vote with their feet’ if a state is run badly enough. (Between Newsom in California, Inslee in Washington, and Brown in Oregon, three idiots have ruined the entire west coast!)

One intriguing idea I’ve come across is the ancient idea of city-states. Historically, these have been huge population centers capable of handling their own governance (and defense!) The best known modern city-states are undoubtedly Vatican City (home of the Pope) and Singapore (a sprawling island city covering 720 sq km. and housing nearly 6 million people).

While regular city-states are independent, I see no reason that a modern city-state of Portland couldn’t still be under the preview of the federal government but politically separate from the rest of Oregon — which is already trying to escape.

With this idea, cities get additional powers (closer to what states have), but have to deal with their borders themselves. Obviously cooperation between governments would be called for in some instances (as happens right now), but generally we’d let Portland be as weird as it wants — but it can’t affect the rest of the state.

Obviously this would require some deep conversations and out-of-the-box thinking our current political class is ill-equipped to handle. How big would a city have to be to be declared a city-state? How would this shake up the Electoral College? (Winner-takes-all rules are dumb, by the way.) Would this even matter, considering that some people seem to think their ideas are so good they must be mandatory for everybody in the nation?

Ultimately, the goal of Americans should be to be able to happily live next to other Americans, no matter who has what political views. We do this by shrinking and localizing government, not through more DC-centralization.