America is now two countries: Which one do you want to live in?

 Not long ago, voters in 33 Illinois counties voted to leave Illinois and become part of Indiana. Twelve counties in eastern Oregon--perhaps America's wokest state-- voted to leave the Beaver State to become part of Idaho.  And in Texas, a robust secession movement has been active for many years.

What's going on? 

Clearly, Americans are dividing into two camps.  Blue State residents vote Democratic and are comfortable with the Democrats' woke agenda, which includes heavy government intervention in the national economy, transgender participation in girls' sports, and open borders.

Red State voters tend to hold traditional cultural values that emphasize patriotism, family, and Christianity. Red State voters are suspicious of federal regulations, and they're frightened by the Democrats' open border policies and the insertion of woke values in the public schools.

As a map of national voting patterns illustrates, Blue and Red states are geographically distinct. The Blue states are mostly clustered on the East and West Coasts, while the Republican-leaning Red states comprise the South, the Midwestern plains, and the Rocky Mountains west (except for Colorado and New Mexico).

As Abraham Lincoln observed in a 1858 speech, "a house divided cannot stand," and we are a divided nation. I thought the 2024 election results might usher in an era of political calm, but the election of Donald Trump for a second presidential term has been met by calls for resistance and a "civic uprising" by the coastal elites. Trump's enemies have filed well over 100 lawsuits to sabotage his political agenda.

What does the future hold? I think it is unlikely that conservative populations in woke states will be able to break away and join more conservative states.  The conservative counties in Illinois will never be able to escape to Indiana, nor will the eastern counties of Oregon ever become part of Greater Idaho.

Nevertheless, America's political and cultural divide is becoming sharper and more contentious by the day. I live off a gravel road in rural Mississippi, where cultural values are as different from Boston as Congo is different from Canada. America is now truly two separate countries.

America today is becoming more and more like the United States in 1860. As Bruce Catton, Erik Larson, and others have explained, by the eve of the Civil War, the radical abolitionists in New England and the rabid pro-slavery advocates in South Carolina despised each other and actually longed for war. 

And war is what they got. 

Unless academia, Democratic politicians, and the legacy media show more respect for the hard-working and decent people of Flyover Country, the nation will one day fall apart. If that occurs, my loyalties will be with Flyover Country--my doctoral degree from Harvard notwithstanding.

 

2024 Presidential Election Results by County

David Brooks Says that the Universities are the Crown Jewels of American Life. That’s Baloney

In a recent op-ed essay in the New York Times, David Brooks called for a “civic uprising” against the Trump administration. Brook envisions a revolt of the intellectual elites, including those who hang out in the universities, which he described as “the crown jewels of American life.”

The universities, Brooks extols, “are hubs of scientific and entrepreneurial innovation,” and “[i]n a million ways, the scholars at universities help us understand ourselves and our world.”

Brooks goes so far as to attest that the universities mold young students to become cultured, critical thinkers:

I have seen it over and over. A kid comes on campus as a freshman, inquisitive but unformed. By senior year, there is something impressive about her. She is awakened, cultured, [and] a critical thinker. The universities have performed their magic once again.

I’m sorry, David, but that’s pure, unadulterated bullshit. As the media shows us daily, the universities are not nurturing students to be cultured, critical thinkers. They’re producing anti-Semitic racists who rampage through college campuses spewing venomous hatred toward Jews.

If the universities were doing their jobs, they would be educating young people to think rationally and to have some understanding of Israel’s heroic struggle to maintain the only democratic society in the Middle East. Instead, anti-Israel student protesters voice their support for Hamas--a gang of rapists, torturers, kidnappers, body snatchers, arsonists, and-child killers.

Moreover, if the nation’s university leaders were compassionate champions of social justice, which they claim to be, they would not be hiking tuition year after year, forcing their students to take on ruinous levels of debt to obtain liberal arts and humanities degrees that are worthless.

To be fair, Brooks admits that American universities have flaws. “Many have allowed themselves to become shrouded in a stifling progressivism that tells half the country: ‘Your voices don’t matter.’”

Brooks fails to acknowledge that the “flaw” he describes as “stifling progressivism” is not a quaint and harmless eccentricity. It is an expression of the universities’ bigotry, provincialism, and base contempt for traditional American values.

In short, Brooks is wrong to say that American universities are advancing “the glories of our way of life.” On the contrary, the gasbags who run the colleges and teach in them are programming their students to be intolerant, racist, simplistic, and self-absorbed. And they’re charging a boatload of money for the privilege of destroying American culture. 

An anti-Israel encampment at Columbia: "the glories of our way of life"