The 2000 election was boring. With both candidates trying to out-moderate each other, they were almost indistinguishable. The biggest breach of civility was Democratic candidate Al Gore’s very practiced sighing during the debates. The campaign did not become interesting until election night.
Fast forward to 2018.
The two parties, and the country at large, are hopelessly divided. Moderates have retired or been picked off. The midterm elections aren’t going to solve anything: If Republicans win, Democrats will keep rioting, and if Democrats win, Republicans will buy a lot of guns. Nolan Finley wisely summed it up in the Detroit News: We hate each other.
On the hot-button issue of immigration, there is no consensus at all: Either we erect a wall between ourselves and a country we haven’t fought a war with in 170 years or we eliminate all border control and give taxpayer-subsidized healthcare to all of Latin America.
But that’s just the most dramatic example.
As a nation, we no longer agree on anything — historical icons, statues, flags, the national anthem. We don’t watch the same news. We don’t consume the same entertainment. One side sees President Trump as an offense to all they hold dear, while the other side sees Trump as their only defense of all they hold dear.
Much of this ballyhooed tribalism is the Internet’s fault, specifically Twitter, but this might have been inevitable.
Our nation is the product of a 250-year experiment in multiculturalism that has gone off the rails as globalization and technology have shrunk planet Earth faster than anyone could have predicted or prepared for. As a nation of 330 million people of increasingly disparate cultures, modern America is unprecedented in human existence. And it’s not working.
We don’t feel any unity, and we don’t want to feel unity; we feel only contempt for each other, which is the No. 1 indicator in a marriage that divorce is imminent.
So instead of bemoaning how divided we are, it’s time to lean into it. The answer is really easy.
Kick California out of America.
California is responsible for pulling the Democrats so far left they’re no longer Democrats, and without California, the Democrats’ presence on the national level disappears. Without California, Trump goes from losing the popular vote by 3 million to winning it by 1.5 million. Without California, the current Republican edge in the House of Representatives almost doubles. California is the only thing keeping the Democratic Party alive, but it’s also the thing that’s killed the Democratic Party.
With no grown-ups in Sacramento to say “Hey, wait a minute,” California has abandoned the virtues of liberalism and replaced them with the totalitarian drumbeat of progressivism. And the sparkling, golden example of the failure of progressive politics is California itself.
Because California is a disaster.
Despite the insistence that so-called progressives can solve income inequality, California boasts the worst income inequality in the country. U.S. News & World Report ranked it dead last for quality of life. In the last 10 years, 1 million more people fled the state than moved in from other states. It has somehow managed to accrue $2 trillion in debt — about one-tenth of the federal government’s entire debt, including the cost of all the wars we’ve ever fought.
And they call this “progress”? Can the word “progress” sue California for defamation of character?
Drill down and it gets even worse: Los Angeles is a nightmare of gang violence, homelessness, and pollution — a New York Times op-ed aptly compared it to a third-world country. Meanwhile, San Francisco boasts California’s worst instance of income inequality, has vanquished the biological urge to procreate, and is literally covered in poop.
California wants to save the world from Trump, but maybe it could start by saving California first.
A piece in the Guardian once speculated that California might become “America’s first failed state” — and it has. Unfortunately, because it’s so big, it’s able to inflict that failure on the rest of us, particularly poor, defenseless Nevada. When we hear the terrifying threat that “California is the future,” the rest of us are left to wonder: If progressivism fails so utterly in a place as rich as California, how could it possibly work anywhere else?
Californians may complain that they only have two senators, but the rest of us complain that such a horribly run place gets any senators whatsoever.
Californians rumbled about secession after the 2016 election, but that ran out of steam. Then they tried to split into three more manageable states, and they screwed that up. The rest of the country needs to quit waiting for California to govern itself, quit tolerating how it pollutes our entire political system, and simply kick it out.
After that, California can legalize every drug, rack up all the debt, ban all the plastic straws, and make its new country as awful as possible for all but the ultrarich. The rest of us will just keep being America. The Democrats will be forced to revert to the center-left party they should be and the worst thing in politics can be Al Gore sighing again. Everyone will be happier.
And then, of course, we’ll build two walls.
Jared Whitley is a longtime Washington, D.C., politico who worked in the Senate, the White House, and the defense industry. He has an MBA from Hult International Business School in Dubai.
