Scenes from a loveless marriage
By 
Michelle Goldberg’s column (free link) about a couple of new novels whose plots revolve around the breakup of the United States uses the same trope I used a few days ago when discussing the same issue — that of an increasingly loveless marriage. This is in part because one of the novels — Kurt Andersen’s “The Breakup” — employs the plot device of an actual marriage breaking up in the context of an ongoing national divorce:
“The Breakup” follows a politically heterogeneous couple, Asher and Natalie, whose separation coincides with America’s national divorce. Part of their rupture stems from their differing attitudes toward what the book calls Disunion. Asher, a Jewish progressive most at home in cities, is basically glad to be rid of the right-wing territories that break away to form the Free American Republic. Natalie, the sort of anti-woke classical liberal who in our time might write for The Free Press, mourns the end of America. Unable to bear their smug San Francisco environs, she decamps to Tennessee, where she grew up.
I just want to pose a rhetorical question here: Speaking of “anti-woke classical liberals,” does Bari Weiss realize she is nothing more than Larry and David Ellison’s paid lady, and not the Fearless Independent Speaker of Hard Truths she presents herself as being? Answer: Of course not! While it’s true we all become who we pretend to be, it’s also true that we then totally forget this has happened. Bari started out on the grift, no doubt, but the work is now a shoot, which is I suppose the only kind of sincerity we have left in Cyberworld.
Back to our breakup:
The book is also rather too full of pat liberal wish fulfillment. Cut off from blue-state largess, the Free American Republic struggles with economic crisis and emigration. Montana, suffering “secessionists’ remorse,” tries to rejoin a United States that has just elected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez president.
But I appreciated Andersen’s attention to the banal bureaucratic details of Disunion. There’s a civil war in “The Breakup,” but a relatively small one; Americans just aren’t that dedicated to keeping the nation together. The problems of unwinding the country are primarily logistical, like how to link blue cities in red states — called I.M.R.s, or independent metro regions — to the United States mainland. Many of these questions are handled, in typical American fashion, by lawyers who find in Disunion a lucrative new market.
I confess I find that last sentence depressingly plausible.
Goldberg also discusses Emily St. John Mandel’s “Exit Party:”
St. John Mandel’s post-civil-war America is a brutal place. Los Angeles is full of shantytowns and refugees. In the middle of America, we soon learn, things are worse, as rival militias scrap over territory. Still, there’s hope in the new configuration. “I know countries don’t last forever, and there’s always going to be new ones,” says a guest at the party, “but it feels like a miracle, right?”
This reminded me of something else:
All cities, all states, all reigns are mortal; everything, either by its nature or by accident, comes to an end. And so a citizen who finds himself living in the final stages of his country’s existence should not feel as sorry for it as he should feel for himself. What happened to his country was inevitable; but to be born at a time when such a disaster came to pass was his own particular misfortune.
Will this be our own particular misfortune? The next six decades will be crucial I’m guessing, but here’s my own genial metaphor for our current circumstances. What “America is going through a divorce” rhetoric misses, I believe, is that this is true for maybe 20% of the populace — for the highly politically engaged, usually extremely online, piece of the polity. Think of these people, blue and red, as the couple in a marriage that is falling apart.
But then think of the children. About 35% of the country is made up of people who are completely disconnected from politics altogether. These are people who never vote, even in presidential elections, and who pay essentially no attention to politics whatsoever. Think of them as being like a small child in our fractious possibly failing marriage. They no doubt sense in an atmospheric way that something seems to be wrong, but they can’t give it a name because what’s wrong is completely outside their experience.
Another 40% consists of, very roughly speaking, Ariana Grande voters. These people pay some but not much attention to politics. Think of them as the older child — they are definitely aware that something is wrong, and they can even give it a name — perhaps they even whisper the D word to themselves very occasionally, as some sort of frightening but still purely hypothetical possibility. But they have no real idea just how bad things have gotten for Mom and Dad (the 20% who are living the breakdown/breakup every day, as opposed to paying attention to bits and pieces of it now and then).
The one thing that very much does not exist in this metaphor is anything like no-fault divorce. It’s going to be more like Henry VIII style divorce, if it comes to that eventually.