It’s time, America. It’s either a two-state divorce, or “Heil, Trump” will be coming to your neighborhood as it has already come to mine.

We are in a civil war. Not very hot — yet — but in which tension is building daily. Neo-Nazis party in my neighborhood of Chevy Chase, unnoticed by the Leader, while he attacks the cast of Hamilton instead. Clinton keeps racking up votes, now with a 2,000,000+ vote lead, while no one is yet auditing the states that swung the Electoral College (itself a vestige of slavery). Liberals are turning in on themselves, while conservatives stand stunned, buried at the foot of the wreckage of the Republican party while the kakistocracy takes shape.

All this because a few hundred thousand Rust Belt citizens, repeatedly fed misinformation and disinformation in our era of Big Data, decided to first destroy the Republican Party, which had betrayed then for forty years (fool me once...), and then take down the entire country in a fit of pique for an encore. Now they will learn what pain really feels like, as they’ve given unlimited power to a demagogue (“Hamilton’s besetting fear was that American democracy would be spoiled by demagogues who would mouth populist shibboleths to conceal their despotism.”) while emasculating themselves. Their new Karl Rove fancies himself as Darth Vader, Dick Cheney and Satan, though on a good day he elevates his narcissistic neo-Nazi self-image into Thomas Cromwell (who ended up executed by the Crown, but no matter).

Still, the fact remains that 62 million people voted for the El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago, in spite of the fact that a significant plurality of those voters felt he was unqualified. All I hear these days from Republicans (and some Democrats) is we failed, in this perverse Marxist analysis, because we didn’t empathize with the poor white working class, while we played within our diversity and let multiculturalism and intersectionality run amok. We must learn to show compassion. Not to our myriad of communities competing for the American ideal of equality, but for a swath of the country - the heartland and Confederacy, along with the Rust Belt - that just ended the American experiment its white race had run for the entirety of 240 years, as if it were simply a season of Survivor.

Sorry, but no. I’m all out of empathy and compassion. Feel free to hate me all you want because I’m an elitist who shows disdain for you. Enjoy waiting for the factories and mills to return as you fling your resentment at the bicoastal elites who’ve created the government programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act (sorry about that) upon which you depend. You’ve been fighting a culture war and a religious war, and while you won this battle, you will most assuredly lose the war.

But just as I have no empathy or compassion left, I also have no room for hate in my heart. Vengeance is toxic. So, in the interest of giving most Americans what they what, I again offer what I’ve previously called the 36th Parallel, or Two-State Solution. An amicable disunion so the white enthno-nationalist supremacists can have their own land, their own “safe space,” (as much as they revile that phrase), and diverse America can be free in its own country.

There’s plenty of precedence for this plan — the former Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, which gently dissolved their bonds of empire and union. Soon the same will probably happen to the UK. At times it’s gotten ugly, as it did in Yugoslavia, but there is plenty of centrifugal momentum to provide more than adequate justification for us to give it a go. To ignore the alternative is to condemn us to civil war.

I’ve heard that the idea is just absurd. It’s a taboo; after all, preserving the Union is what drove Lincoln to go to war in the first place, and the thought that the exceptional United States would ever break up is inconceivable. But Trump was as inconceivable three weeks ago. A fascist takeover by an admitted sexual predator of adolescents and fraudulent businessman was inconceivable. Today few believe a Brexited UK will remain intact; it didn’t take too long to imagine Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland taking flight to join the EU as independent states. London may secede as well, its population greater than Scotland and Wales combined. Their economies depend on it.

So we can do the same. Already there is a growing movement for a #CalExit, and New York has also announced its refusal to play nice with Washington beginning next year. We don’t need to secede from the start; even I can’t imagine Democrats having the guts to do it. But we can set up regional compacts in the northeast and Midwest to develop the governmental relationships that will lead to the future United States. Resistance to Homeland Security’s deportation raids and Muslim registries will build regional will to continue on the path to independence. We already have regional agreements with Canada to control acid rain and greenhouse gases; with the upcoming gutting of the EPA we can take those as a model for the future dissolution. Cities and states can refuse federal funding (not that it will be offered for much longer anyway), and we’ve long known that the Confederacy survives only with subsidies from the blue states.

I know secession is unconstitutional, but that didn’t stop Jefferson Davis. What is Trump going to do to the 6th largest economy on the planet? Invade? Resistance (#Resist) is not futile. It is the essence of the American experiment, dissent on behalf of efforts to create a more perfect union. It’s just that the effort required to create that union is simply too difficult with 120 million apathetic non-voting citizens and 60 million who’ve been trying to kill the federal government for the past forty years and have now finally succeeded. We don’t need to play that game. We don’t need to maintain efforts at political persuasion in an anti-political world where fascism is ascendant. President Clinton said we needed to vote for Hillary because our children and grandchildren would thank us. It wasn’t enough. Now we have to separate and end this marriage which was arranged and forced from the beginning, and has never, except when the outside world intruded and threatened destruction, shown any real cohesion. Let’s call an end to the 50 state experiment so we can salvage the ideals upon which the original constitutional republic was based. Separation will let us do a better job at it. A roughly 50-50 state split will do it, or we can start by cutting the Confederacy loose.

We can continue to flounder around in a miasma of pain and incomprehensibility, or we can work towards reclaiming the Declaration and Constitution from the fascists. A friend recently mentioned that the South won the Civil War, and we’re only now recognizing that fact.

It’s time, America.

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