George Rebane

That fractured Latin exemplifies what the Pew Charitable Trust reports (here) is a sentiment held by more and more Americans.  We have reported the ‘out of one, many’ movement for some years now under the Great Divide moniker.  While there have been many movements to reconfigure the United States over its almost 250-year history, the current one is unique in that it draws its strength from the radicalization of the progressive Left and their obsession with an ever-bigger government whose goal is to unite the world under one political leadership.

The Right’s reaction to what they see as the collectivists’ desire to abrogate our Constitution has taken various forms from the formation of new states (e.g. State of Jefferson movement to create North California) to the peaceful break-up of the United States into “smaller, more functional nations” that may or not be more loosely united under a TBD confederation.  Recently even elements of the Left have seen a benefit in states seceding from a Union that they view as not having progressed as progressively as required by their time table toward a one world government.

Reuters in 2014 found that almost one in four Americans wanted their state to secede.  Today California’s nascent secession movement is accompanied by ones in Texas, Oklahoma, Maine, Utah, and West Virginia.  There’s even one on Long Island wanting to become a sovereign nation-state.  And all of these sentiments are reflected worldwide today in various ways by people wishing to live among those with similar values and mores who then would have a better chance to determine their own more agreeably cohesive futures.

When examined in the large, what really constitutes a culture, society, party, tribe, or country?  The first criterion for assembling and identifying such a unit is that their members share a set of beliefs which are important in organizing their lives.  Joining and proclaiming their unity through an identifiable organization establishes their desire and provides mutual support for putting such beliefs into practice.  And when, over the course of time and events, these beliefs change or are no longer shared, then reasonable people have sought to reform themselves so as to again be united and go forward with likeminded others.

People with disjoint beliefs who continue to operate under a common banner sooner or later become dysfunctional along several dimensions, some of these unintended and therefore surprising.  When such unions are held together by a greater force or power, the level of dysfunction and discontent increases at an ever more rapid pace toward a violent resolution such as a fragmenting revolution or a massive slaughter of the innocents such as occurred in Red China’s Cultural Revolution (circa 1970) which took the lives of over 100 million of its citizens.

Such dysfunction is also visible in the operation of our two political parties, each of which seek to corral people of significantly different ideologies under one tent.  Recently this has been most pronounced in the Republican Party as they seek to govern with strong caucuses of constitutional conservatives at antipodes with moderate centrists who want to go along to get along with the other side.  And the Democrats appear to be so fractionated that they no longer have a unified message other than that of their rabid Left which regularly demonstrates that it is prepared for all sorts of violent ways to make its voice heard.

Other countries have attempted to deal with wide ideological spectra by forming multiple parties each of which is more narrowly focused in its beliefs, and when elected to power must often work within marginally performing coalitions in order to govern.  But, as we have seen, even then results vary, especially in countries with strong ethnic and regional differences.  I would like to see a more varied political landscape in the US in which at least four political parties – Far Left, Center Left, Center Right, Far Right – offer choices to our voters.  Today it has become harder than ever for people to agree, let alone understand, what each of the two parties really stand for and how they see the country’s future.

In our ‘e unum pluribus’ debate what has contributed least is the Left’s early denigration of those who see the advent of a Great Divide and want to have a reasonable discussion of its possible variants.  Now there are emerging louder voices from the progressive coalitions in states like California seeking to implement advanced forms of constitutional collectivism, voices that are calling for outright secession as the only acceptable solution to the Great Divide.  Sites like ‘Ex Unum Pluribus’ have come online to foster proposals on how the United States should divide itself into a new grouping of internally more cohesive nations (here).  The bottom line is that denial of Americans’ sentiments about living with more likeminded neighbors is simply being ignorant of our country’s surging social tides.

Human organizations are a work in process, whose forms oscillate between the wars of the many and the stultifying peace of tyrannical empires.  No one has cracked the code for a planet bathed in eternal sweetness and light.  The United States of America embodies the most advanced form of such research, and has managed to coagulate large numbers of various peoples under a constitution that is based on a minimal set of wisely chosen ‘universal rights’ within a structure that also provides for peaceful reconfiguration with the passage of time and the changing of minds.  We should avail ourselves.