Today’s Tom Woods Letter, which all the influential people receive every weekday. Be one of them.
The election of Donald Trump has fast forwarded the dissolution of the United States by 50 years, maybe even a hundred.
Ideological and cultural differences have reached a point at which huge pluralities simply loathe each other. What one group considers holy and praiseworthy the other considers abominable and deplorable.
This was not always the case. Check out an episode of the old show What’s My Line? on YouTube. Panelist Bennett Cerf was one of the founders of Random House publishing. He was a left-liberal by the standards of his day. But he was gentlemanly, well dressed, charming, affable, courteous, well mannered — the very opposite of his counterparts today.
And he still believed in that now discarded idea: the honorable disagreement. He could call Ayn Rand a “brilliant woman” while still disagreeing with her “cockamamie philosophy.”
Whatever political disagreements there were, Americans shared quite a bit in common culturally, morally, and in the most basic standards of civilized behavior.
That’s all gone now.
The left is in my view getting pretty much what it deserves, after having brought nearly all of life under the purview of the state. Not one tear should be shed for them.
And the double standards are ridiculous. Left-liberals who had precisely zero to say about Barack Obama’s connivance at the starvation of an entire country — Yemen — are hysterical about temporary immigration restrictions. I don’t know precisely where on the scale of state enormities those rank, but I’m fairly certain it’s somewhere below starvation.
So discombobulated are leftists that they’re suddenly willing to consider forbidden thoughts.
About a third of Californians, for instance, now favor secession from the Union. There’s also talk of trying to keep state money from flowing to the federal government.
Now when you and I advocated things like that, these very people called us racists, “neo-Confederates” — my favorite dumb-guy smear term — and reactionaries.
It’s different when the self-righteous ninnies want to do these things, of course.
I have to admit: even though I knew the status quo — the low-intensity civil war brewing beneath the surface in America — could not go on forever, I am surprised at how quickly opinion is changing.
Everyone once took for granted that the goal was to seize the federal apparatus and impose their vision on the country.
How about just abandoning this crazy, inhumane task?
Why not admit the differences are irreconcilable, and simply go our separate ways?
As recently as six months ago, you were a terrible extremist for entertaining such thoughts. Why, governing 320 million diverse people from a single city is the best conceivable political arrangement, citizen!
Not so anymore. The left is not used to being trounced so decisively, and in its disorientation it is willing to consider ideas beyond the 3-by-5 card of allowable opinion.
And the right is observing more acutely than ever the depths of the hatred that the academic, political, entertainment, and media establishments feel toward them.
The Union is coming apart.
I don’t and can’t know the timing. But this thing is coming undone.
And when it happens, we’ll all be happier.
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