Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has revived her call for a “national divorce” in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s fatal shooting. Experts in political science warn that such an outcome would not be peaceful ― and that Greene’s proposal is alarming.
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On Monday, Greene shared a lengthy post on X, formerly Twitter, dangerously blaming people on the left for Kirk’s death, saying “millions” of liberal-leaning people were celebrating it. Many Republicans had rushed to publicly blame Democrats for Kirk’s death, even while the search for a suspect was still underway — and despite the fact that both people on the left and the right have been subjected to political violence and threats in recent years.
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“There is nothing left to talk about with the left. They hate us. They assassinated our nice guy who actually talked to them peacefully, debating ideas,” Greene said of Kirk. “Then millions on the left celebrated and made clear they want all of us dead.”
“To be honest, I want a peaceful national divorce. Our country is too far gone and too far divided, and it’s no longer safe for any of us,” she continued, before adding: “Tighten your circle around your family and protect them at all times. I will pray for the left, but personally I want nothing to do with them.”
Greene has called for a national divorce before. Back in 2021, the congresswoman suggested that people moving from blue states to red states should have a “cooling off period” before they’re able to vote.
“All possible in a National Divorce scenario. After Democrat voters and big donors ruin a state like California, you would think it wise to stop them from doing it to another great state like Florida,” she wrote on X at the time. “Brainwashed people that move from CA and NY really need a cooling off period.”
And in 2023, she wrote on X that “we need a national divorce” and that “everyone I talk to says this.”
She added, “From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the [Democrats’] traitorous America Last policies, we are done.”
When Greene called for a national divorce in 2021, political commentator and journalist Mehdi Hasan called her out at the time in a TV segment on his then-network MSNBC, calling her a “serious threat to democracy.”
Hasan pointed out that Greene, who represents Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, comes from a state that “tried a national divorce in the 1860s.”
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“Why? Georgia wanted to keep the institution of slavery,” he said at the time. Georgia was the fifth out of the 11 Southern states to secede from the Union, following the election of President Abraham Lincoln. The Civil War followed.
While Greene’s tweet on Monday called for a “peaceful” national divorce, one expert in political science emphasized that such a scenario would not be possible.
“Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s renewed call for a ‘peaceful national divorce’ underscores a growing belief that red and blue America can no longer coexist,” Ryan Griffiths, a political science professor at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, told HuffPost.
“History shows such a divorce would not be peaceful,” he continued.
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History has shown that attempts to divide the country have often resulted in violence.
Griffiths, author of The Disunited States: Threats of Secession in Red and Blue America and Why They Won’t Work, told HuffPost that the “idea that irreconcilable differences justify secession ignores the violent history of such efforts, including the Civil War, and overlooks the reality that Americans are deeply intermixed — politically, geographically and ideologically.”
He said that while polarization is “real and worsening,” the solution is not to separate. It’s to find common ground.
“Americans share more values than they realize, and it is our political leadership and not the people that is most polarized,” he said. “We need leaders who reject extremism, denounce violence, and work together to heal the divide before the call for divorce becomes a dangerous reality.”
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Griffiths emphasized that the US “lacks the conditions for a clean split.” Then he added, “Any attempt to divide, based on what we’ve seen historically, would trigger cycles of violence, displacement, and lawlessness.”
Alvin B. Tillery Jr., a professor of political science and African American studies at Northwestern University, told HuffPost that he believes Greene’s proposal for a national divorce is “the Neo-secessionist language invoking the Civil War that has been common in Republican Party circles, particular in hinterland areas of the South like the district that [Greene] represents.”
Tillery said that this rhetoric has been popular among “white nationalist politicians” throughout the 20th century. And that, then, when most white opponents of racial integration switched parties from Democrat to Republican in the 1980s, there was a lot of “resurgent talk of ‘states’ rights’ and ‘starving the beast’ of federal government,” he explained.
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“[Greene’s] national divorce language is just an extension of these themes,” Tillery added, before emphasizing the dangers such rhetoric has had on people across the country — especially those with public platforms.
He said that as Black colleges and professors across the country, including himself, are receiving death threats in the wake of Kirk’s killing, “national divorce language is more alarming than normal.”
This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
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