In his breakdown of the silliness of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s most recent call for a “national divorce,” Wilfred Reilly argues that the “solution” to the problems Greene objects to “is a revitalized federalism.” Quite right. But I’d go a step further: What Greene is actually talking about, in terms of the way she describes her ideal outcome, isn’t national divorce — it is federalism, plain and simple. Here’s what she calls for, in her own words:
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.
From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s traitorous America Last policies, we are… https://t.co/Azn8YF1UUy
— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) February 20, 2023
We need to shrink the federal government, allow state governments to chart their own course on important questions, and allow for a multiplicity of laws and models of governance to flourish in keeping with the diverse political cultures of the different states? Huh. You know, we used to have a word for that. In fact, it was a pretty important word, in the American political tradition, describing one of the key components of our political system‘’ and the republican way of life it engendered. Here’s a hint: It rhymes with “shmederalism.”
If Greene actually wants the outcome she describes, she’d have a much better chance with the principles of government that our Framers gave us than whatever new, disjointed red-state federation exists in her imagination. That she sees “less federal government, and more autonomy for red and blue states” as a destruction of the American constitutional order, rather than a renewal of it, raises serious questions about how much she really knows about said constitutional order in the first place.