After denouncing “Democrats’ traitorous America Last policies” and their “sick and disgusting woke culture,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) declared, “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.” Asked if her plan was realistic, Greene replied, “It’s something we should work towards because it’s kind of the vision that our founding fathers had for America, and I think it’s great.”
Given her propensity for incoherent, ignorant, irresponsible, and inflammatory claims, Greene’s latest proposal is easy to dismiss. In 2022, for example, she maintained that “Earth warming and carbon is actually healthy for us. It helps us to feed people, it helps keep people alive.” Determined, apparently, to compare the then-Speaker of the House to the Nazi’s secret police, but not exactly an expert on the Third Reich, Greene asserted that “everything is completely out of control. Not only do we have the D.C. [District of Columbia] jail which is the D.C. gulag but now we have Nancy Pelosi’s Gazpacho Police spying on members of Congress.” Joining the military, Greene opined, “is like throwing your life away. Not to mention that they’ve been forced to take the vaccine.” And, at a rally in Michigan featuring former president Trump, she said, “I won’t mince words with you. Democrats want Republicans dead, and they’ve already started the killings.”
Greene’s secessionist rhetoric, Spencer Cox, the Republican governor of Utah, told reporters, “is destructive and wrong, honestly, evil … we need elected leaders that don’t profit by tearing us apart.” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) called her proposal “insane.” Conservative commentator Eric Erickson reminded Greene that “the Confederates already lost once.”
Most Republicans, however, have exercised their right to remain silent — probably because Greene is not alone in advocating a red state, blue state divorce. After the 2020 presidential election, Rush Limbaugh told his listeners, “I actually think we’re trending toward secession. What in the world do we have in common with the people, in, say, New York?” In 2021, 66 percent of Republicans in the South told pollsters they supported leaving the Union. Last year, thousands of Texas Republicans approved a party platform calling on the state legislature to authorize a referendum on secession. Several Republican lawmakers in Maryland have proposed that three counties in the state break away and become part of West Virginia. Late last month, Sean Hannity seemed open to splitting the United States into politically autonomous zones, ostensibly to avoid a bloody civil war. And Hannity endorsed Greene’s idea of “banning people who move to red states from blue ones from voting for five years so they don’t bring their bad politics with them.”
It seems appropriate, then, to consider some implications of Greene’s secessionist fantasy.
A compelling case can be made, for starters, that Georgia, Greene’s home state, is blue. Joe Biden carried it in 2020. Georgians elected two Democratic United States Senators in 2021, and re-elected Sen. Raphael Warnock in 2022. If, on the other hand, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and the Georgia legislature engineered an affiliation with the red team, Fulton County, the most populous and wealthiest county in the state, which gave more than 70 percent of its vote to Biden in 2020, might decide to secede from the seceders.
The same scenario could play out in Dallas and Harris counties in Texas; Broward, Leon, Miami-Dade, Orange, and Palm Beach counties in Florida; Cuyahoga, Franklin, and Hamilton counties in Ohio, and other predominantly blue counties and cities in red states.
In all likelihood, some or all of these secessions would be violent.
But if, somehow, the red and blue states manage to separate, the new normal, as with virtually all divorces, would have substantial economic ramifications. Domestic and international trade relations would be disrupted, treaties would have to be renegotiated, federal assets (including the gold at Fort Knox and military bases at home and abroad), would have to be parceled out, the national debt would have to be paid off.
Talk is cheap, but secession would be expensive for the large number of red states that are indirectly subsidized by blue states. These days, eight of the ten states most dependent on appropriations from the federal government almost always vote Republican. Ironically, many voters in those states believe their tax dollars are supporting Latinos and Blacks.
West Virginia gets 2.36 times more money from Washington D.C. than its residents pay in federal income taxes. Over 4 percent of the workers in the state are employed by the U.S. government, the seventh highest percentage in the country. They earn, on average, nearly double what employees in the state’s private, for-profit companies are paid. For every dollar Mississippi residents pay in federal income taxes, the state receives $2.53 from the government Marjorie Taylor Greene loves to hate. The state of Wyoming gets 56.4 percent of its revenues from the federal government, the highest percentage in the United States. The annual income of federal workers who reside in Alabama ($67,948) is more than double the average income of private, for-profit workers ($33,242).
By contrast, seven of the ten states least dependent on appropriations from the on the federal government almost always vote Democratic.
A performance artist, with no apparent interest in legislation or the consequences of her rhetoric and holding a free pass from Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), MTG is getting what she wants: attention on social media, Fox News, and talk radio, and a de facto role as a power broker in the House of Representatives.
Republicans can certainly do better than Marjorie Taylor Greene. But it is not at all clear they want to.
Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. He is the co-author (with Stuart Blumin) of “Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century.”