 Is it time for blue states and red states to stop fighting over their differences and just… get a divorce? Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, along with many on the political right, says it's time to seriously consider breaking the country apart. The Libertarian Party has also been promoting this idea on Twitter since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Pro-lifers, why share a country with those who support the dismemberment of babies in the womb? Pro-choicers. Why share a country with those who would take a woman's right to abort away? Hashtag national divorce. The politics of abortion are thorny and contentious even among Libertarians. But how about free speech, guns, private property? Is trampling on our rights more legitimate when a state or city government does it? Why would it be acceptable at the local level, but not the federal level, to relinquish our liberties to the tyranny of the majority? Also, the kind of national divorce between red and blue America that partisans like Greene are calling for doesn't accurately capture the rich political diversity of a country designed from the founding to contain multitudes. When I tweeted that, talk of a national divorce applies, there are only two sides and that you must choose one, and that the whole movement is really about tribal rage, I got a lot of pushback, including in the form of this map, showing America divided into hundreds of many states, suggesting that we can balkanize into a limitless number of political tribes. I love how it gets people thinking about something that seems almost off limits. I talked about the possibility of a national divorce with Dave Smith, a comedian, podcast host, and possible Libertarian Party candidate for president. He says the topic is a political litmus test. I think the question becomes, how bad do you really think this current situation is? How bad? Is it an inconvenience? Is it not the most desirable one? Or is this something that is really dangerous? And I think the situation of us being a union right now is very dangerous. I believe that not only are we in this white hot culture war because of how big the government has gotten and everybody's fighting over who gets to rule over the other half of Americans when they seize control of this central national government. There's also a lot of concerns about what keeping this together might look like. And hey, we might democratically elect a real deal fascist. I mean, you know, who personally, I could argue that we already did that with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and then Obama and then Donald Trump, but it could be a lot worse than that. So there are scary possibilities all around. The question is, which one is more likely to yield better results? I agree that there certainly could be a point where talking about breaking this thing up would make sense if a real fascist, 1930 style fascist took control in the U.S. And I'm not willing to rule that out either, and I might find myself more on your side if that were to happen. So I think maybe the disagreement is how unsalvageable is this right now? Because we do have methods, other methods to force decentralization. We have, we do have the 10th Amendment. We have all the work that someone like Michael Bolden has done to help push states and localities to ignore federal and state gun laws, to push drug legalization. We now have a Supreme Court that is willing to start sending some of these contentious issues back to the states. They're willing to strike down executive agency actions that have no basis in congressional law. Why not work within the system? We have a little bit more. Why not work towards real federalism, getting more libertarians onto the Supreme Court eventually, because while the Supreme Court might be doing some things we like, they also aren't so good on things like the national security state or what police and border patrol do to people wouldn't working with what we have make a little more sense than saying we're in a white hot culture war. So let's start dividing into red and blue states and see where that goes. I don't disagree with any of that. I just see it as kind of a false choice. Like I love Michael Bolden, both as a person is a good friend of mine, but both as the person and I love the 10th Amendment Center. I think that's fantastic. I think anywhere you can nullify any law is great. And then, you know, anywhere that you can see a little bit more decentralization, a little bit more federalism for all of that. So I don't see it as one or the other. But I guess the question kind of comes down to like, do you believe that a group of people has the right to secede from a government that they don't want to be part of? And if you believe that, then you're at least in principle not opposed to the legality of a national divorce. And I do think that we've kind of reached a point in America where it's very it's very reasonable to ask this question when you see where so many people are how divided so these different portions of the country are. And to say, well, why exactly is it that you guys want to be together? I do worry that it's a throwing the baby out the bathwater situation because even with the example of lockdowns, you know, the federal courts are the ones who intervened in some in some of these blue states like California where I was living at the time and said, you know what? You can't just shut down churches indefinitely. And so that's the point that I think is worth pondering and perhaps preserving from a libertarian perspective is the idea that here in the United States, we happen to have a constitution that is based on very libertarian principles of protecting natural rights. And I grant all almost all of what you're saying in that many times that is not upheld and it's ignored. But it is still a source that can be drawn upon occasionally to restrain state action at the state level. And so I'm just trying to imagine this world where California and Texas and Alabama don't have to abide by the first, second, fourth amendments. Their police can do whatever they want without respecting your rights at all, much less telling you what your rights are. A smaller government, I don't think is inherently more libertarian. I don't think that that necessarily follows, especially when you're talking about governments the size of state governments in the United States. These are not tiny townships. I mean, California is the size of a small country. So, yeah, just suddenly saying, OK, now you don't have to follow any of these protections that we have on individual rights. I think that that could be a huge mistake. I don't think those concerns are unfounded. And I think that certainly if we were to the point where we're actually getting into logistically how this would work for states to secede, yeah, it would really have to be done the right way and not the wrong way. The thing is still that the idea that these states would be told you don't have to follow the First Amendment or the Second Amendment or something like that. I mean, you know, I just think that look, even even taking the again, it always could be worse, I suppose. So we don't have Mao Zedong as the president of the United States. Thank God. But you need to look at something like the Second Amendment. I mean, we have people right now sitting in cages for 30, 40 years for the crime of owning a gun. We're bringing a gun across state lines. I mean, you know, the idea that, oh, if the state governments got their way, they don't have to abide by the Second Amendment, it's true. That is true. And I would like them to. But we also don't really have to abide by that right now. And even when the Supreme Court reaches one decision, I don't know, the Second Amendment is pretty clear. And what are they saying now? They're like, well, maybe when you apply for a concealed carry permit in New York, you don't have to show a special cause or reason. But you still have to apply to get permission from the state government in order to go do it. So there is no perfect libertarian. But I mean, come on, that is a that is a big step in the right direction. Before you have these sheriffs who could just say, we're not going to give out concealed carry permits to anyone. And now we have the court saying you can't discriminate because you feel this person deserves a gun and this person doesn't. And that's kind of like the root of what the Constitution is supposed to offer is equal protection under the law and saying, whether you are the federal government, whether you're a state government or whether you're a town of five hundred, you can't pass a law that only applies to these people and doesn't apply the same way to those people. If we have a national divorce, that's all out the window. And states can do whatever they want. They can discriminate however they want. I mean, you know, we we see tiny despots all around the world. We just got out of Afghanistan and now it's governed by the Taliban. It is not some super powerful government, but I mean, they're extremely repressive. And we've got, you know, fundamentalist groups here in America that it's not totally outrageous to think that with no constraints whatsoever, that we would see these very disturbing, un-libertarian oppressive societies emerge. Yeah, it's I guess, again, I don't disagree with you. It's just from my perspective. I think we have like an extremist fundamentalist group in charge right now. Like I think that's basically what we're living under. And in terms of discriminating under the law, I mean, talk to someone vaccinated people depending on where they've lived, about how they've been discriminated against under the law for the crime of not consuming a pharmaceutical product, which, by the way, does not at all work the way they told us it worked when they were selling it to us. So again, it's it's like, look, the truth is that right now, if we had states seceding, you would probably have I think reasonable hypothesis to say is you would have much greater liberties in some areas, in particular things, and probably much less in others. But the question is, is this moving in the right direction, making them making the governments more and more local, or is more centralization moving in the right direction? And I guess the question to ponder for for libertarians is like, what is more likely our ability to say play within the system? What to take over the federal government? I mean, even if you envision, say, even if whoever your favorite libertarian person ever is, Ron Paul or Gary Johnson or whoever, I mean, envision them being elected president. I mean, they'd still look, they'd still have they'd have the entire corporate press turn against them in a vicious way, like worse than Trump that would be completely turned against them. You'd have a whole bunch of three letter organizations spying on every single one of their of their cabinet members, of their advisors, all of this finding as much dirt as they could on anyone. Who knows what else might be done? This is going to be very difficult. However, taking over a local government, taking over a town, taking over a city, this might be a little bit more practical. And then the other thing I would say that's a worthwhile thought experiment is, you know, which is the Rothbardian kind of point, right? Which is that basically, which I've come to agree with that. Basically, you if you don't believe in world government, the only other thing that's logically consistent is to believe in anarchism. Like there's no kind of reason why there should be any step in between. I mean, if if New York and Canada, excuse me, if America and Canada can be in a state of anarchy kind of with each other and you don't think there has to be one government ruling over the two of them, why is it then that we can't have more and more secession and all the way down to neighborhoods, blocks, individuals? But I would I would ask, do you think if it was governed under, let's say the United States of America's Constitution that we should have one world government, that we should have the entire world under one government, but we have this this piece of paper that we very much like. And that's going to be our protection. My objection to it is that this is all historically contingent, that again, the founding documents of the US are based, you know, in these ideas that emerged from the Enlightenment. The idea that we're going to get the globe to agree at this point on kind of a an agreement based on just minimal protection of natural rights. It's so farfetched. That's the same argument for the country, that the idea that we're going to get these 330 million people to all agree on a limited government that's only there for rights protection and that this is going to remain stable also seems to be farfetched. An objection that I aired on social media was that the term divorce itself is something that most people associate with two people ending a marriage and in America in an American context, where everything's so polarized between right and left, blue and red, that this evokes the idea of breaking into red America and blue America. I mean, you this is an idea that's being pushed by people like Marjorie Taylor Greene. It doesn't seem like an improvement from a libertarian perspective to just be pushing this message, specifically the term divorce and what it connotes. What am I missing there? Well, I mean, I think it's a fair that's a fair criticism. I mean, yeah, you know, sometimes these terms are not are not perfect. I think that the the term secession is not great either, because what everyone thinks of with that is not. They don't think of the Declaration of Independence. They think of the Confederacy. So I don't know, maybe there is a better term for it, maybe like independence or something like that. Maybe is a better is a better term. That's a fair point. Look, the goal, the goal for us should always be more liberty. And the truth is that I personally believe that in the same way that I think that the 13 colonies had a right to declare their independence from from the British Empire. I think that people have a right to declare their independence from a government that they believe has become tyrannical. I would agree with you in principle that that right exists. But the issue for me is that there are a lot of libertarians and the Libertarian Party itself pushing this national divorce message out there. I think we both want to see the Libertarian Party grow in prominence and influence is this the kind of message that we want people to be associating with libertarians, that we want to see a national divorce and whatever, you know, might come after that because it does bring to mind the 19th century, the last time that we tried a national divorce, violence, civil war. There's just landmines everywhere and I worry that there's not enough care in how people talk about it. I think there's a strong argument that there should we should be careful in the way that we talk about it. And I think that at least every time I ever talk about it, I'm always very clear to be like the goal here is peace, which I I see peace and libertarianism as indistinguishable. I think as synonymous, I think that that's essentially what libertarianism is, is the philosophy of peace, that that's basically what non-aggression is. And it's on a small scale on an individual level, it's peace. And on a national level, it's peace, like that's the idea. So I think anything we should we're promoting, we should always be as crystal clear as we can that the reasoning that we're the reason that we are promoting this is because we want to see a peaceful, a peaceful outcome. So if that's a peaceful separation or a peaceful you know, organization that either one is fine as long as it's peaceful. So I don't think that's that's unreasonable. I think we should we should try our best to be clear. It's tough. Sometimes I think on Twitter, you know what I mean, to be like clear with with any message. I do think that for the libertarian party to be successful, we are going to have to be radical and shake people up a little bit and get people to consider a whole new way of thinking about the world. And almost everybody who has been very successful at introducing libertarianism to people and getting them to convert or whatever you want to call it, at creating more libertarians. It's always the people who are really kind of, you know, they're the radicals. It's always like Iron Rand or, you know, Harry Brown or Ron Paul or these people. Even Milton Friedman, who did a very good job at this, it was never like it was never his like more moderate positions that converted people. Milton Friedman didn't convert people by saying that like, well, he thought the Federal Reserve really should have, you know, had easier monetary policy in nineteen twenty nine or something like that. He did it with free to choose, you know, he did it with like this radical vision of being completely a completely different way to live than what we're currently under. And so I do I'm not against the libertarian party kind of using bombastic language to try to snap people into a different way of thinking about the world. I would say that another way that libertarians have succeeded is by being pragmatic and persuading people to implement more libertarian policies, which maybe people don't accept because they accept the libertarian philosophy wholesale, but because just this one idea like giving people school choice sounds good. And then when the policy works, they want to expand it and they're open to hearing more ideas along this line. Is there a role for both of these in the vision of libertarianism that you see moving forward? Oh, yeah, I like I completely agree. And so I've been saying this for for a long time since before the Reno reset and all this stuff that there's kind of this split sometimes in libertarians where they say it's either like the radicals or the pragmatists and like there's I think there's like a real strong case for pragmatic radicalism. And I think that in the libertarian party in the past, you've kind of had this this divide between like really stupid radicalism and really milk toast like a compromised, practical pragmatism. So the you know, there you would have the radical in the libertarian party would, you know, say, you know, I don't need a driver's license. You know, I'm against driver's licenses. And that's like, oh, OK, wow, you're radical, but it's on this really like in this really stupid way to be radical, like that isn't going to resonate with anyone that everyone goes, OK, that just seems crazy to me. And then the pragmatist would be like, you know, you know, saying we well, let's legalize marijuana, but none of the other drugs. I think like Ron Paul was the best of the best version of all of this, where he was the most radical, but always put the most important issues first. Like he was like, this is what we're really again, and what we really care about is not being completely pure on driver's licenses, but we care about being completely pure on the wars and the Federal Reserve and the war on drugs and the police state and like these things that really matter. And then trying to coalition with everybody, whether it's Dennis Kucenich or Bernie Sanders or whoever, on any one issue that might be really important. And so I think there's room for all of that. I think, in fact, I think that's exactly what we should be trying to do. Dave and I agree on the importance of single issue coalitions, a strategy that's been remarkably successful at, for example, advancing school choice in both deep blue cities and red states. We also agree that the protection of individual rights is fundamental to a peaceful and prosperous society, perhaps just not on how best to achieve it. Is rooting for the breakup of the USA at this moment in time, really all that libertarian? This question reminds me of the litmus test, posited by the anarcho-capitalist economist Murray Rothbard, whose work has had a major influence on Dave Smith and the current libertarian party leadership. What if a button existed that would immediately abolish the state? That is all government. A radical libertarian, Rothbard writes, would blister his thumb pushing it, while so-called gradualists, including fellow anarcho-capitalist theorist David Friedman and those of us at Reason Magazine, would hold back as we fretted over the unintended consequences. So is that where you fall? You would be blistering that thumb, pushing the button to blow up the state, if you could? Yeah, absolutely. And I think that I think another point that Rothbard made, which is pretty clearly indicated in the title of the piece there, do you hate the state? By the way, I'm a fan of David Friedman. I actually I read David Friedman's chapter in Michael Malice's Anarchist Handbook and I loved it. It's like a brilliant piece. But with David Friedman, what you almost always get are these very brilliant technical arguments about the inefficiency of governments. And I don't think Murray Rothbard would disagree with 99% of his literature. But the point Rothbard is making is that on a human level, when you look at this institution, you should be filled with rage and passion in the same way that the example that I like to use is, you know, if you were talking about slavery and your comment on slavery was, well, I think that overall, this is an inefficient way to pick cotton and that a voluntary system of cooperation would produce more cotton at a lower price. It's just something kind of weird about that being your feeling. You know what I mean? Like I agreed that is all true, but you should hate the institution of slavery with a passion because these are real human beings who are being destroyed and having their existence robbed from them. So that's to me kind of like the split when I look at the federal government, I don't think to myself like, oh, you know, as many libertarians do, they'll kind of have this thing where it's like, what a bunch of jokers with all of their unintended consequences and these do-gooder programs that really end up backfiring. And I'm like, I don't think they backfire. They enrich all the people who they're trying to enrich. I look at the federal government of the United States of America as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world that is responsible for just in the last 20 years, the deaths of millions of Muslim people in third world countries, which, by the way, has also made quite a few people very rich. So to me, that's really the fundamental split. It's like, how evil do you think this organization is? See, what I view as a fundamental split is the method to getting to a smaller state, maybe even no state. Let's say Rothbard's thought experiment had some plausibility to it and you could eliminate the state, the question just immediately rises. What what comes in its wake? So how do you feel about the idea that we've never seen in modern history a functioning anarchic society? So we need to kind of proceed with caution and kind of slowly unwind to get there rather than burn it all down, let's say. Yeah, well, I mean, it depends exactly on what you mean by burn it all down. I mean, I'm not opposed to unwinding, you know what I mean? Like I'm not I'm not against. I'd be very happy with any step that would unwind. You know, if, let's say, the national divorce, even just talking about it, like moves the overton window to where people are actually thinking about that. But we settle for like radical decentralization or a strong 10th Amendment or, you know, something like that. I'd be quite happy with that compromise. I'm not against moving in that direction. The question is more to me about again, like, what exactly are we saying by burn it all down? I mean, are we talking about burning down the military industrial complex that has, you know, like a current genocide going on in Yemen on its hands? That I'm very happy to burn down. Well, I guess a concrete example would be in the case of a national divorce, a major state like Texas seceding from the Union, and then a kind of falling of the dominoes where now the Constitution does not really apply to the people living in the United States. So we're saying we don't have a need for this anymore. We're just going to kind of discard the past couple of hundred years of history and try something new. Is that what you have in mind when you are entertaining the idea of a national divorce? Do I almost have to reject the premise of the question? And the the the point and I think why so many people are at the point of entertaining this idea of a national divorce is that the Constitution has already been disregarded. And I mean, you know, you give me an amendment to the Bill of Rights, and I'll tell you how the federal government has wildly violated it in every possible way you could imagine. He's right that words written down on an old piece of paper aren't enough to protect our rights, but they do matter. As Austrian Nobel Prize winner, F.A. Hayek wrote, the only safeguard against creeping tyranny is a clear awareness of the dangers by the public. Having a written Constitution that venerates individual rights, make them part of a political creed, which the people will defend even when they do not fully understand its significance. Defending institutions that emerge to meet precisely the challenge of safeguarding liberty, such as the courts, the media, think tanks, advocacy organizations, was a major theme in Hayek's work. What we must learn to understand is that human civilization has a life of its own, he wrote, and that we must cautiously and humbly aim at a piecemeal rather than total reform to avoid the kinds of bloody and barbaric upheaval that ideologues of the 20th century inflicted on much of the world. Does this cautious approach mean every government institution must be preserved? Of course not. I'd like to see a libertarian president immediately shut down federal agencies and America's foreign military occupations and for the Supreme Court to declare the modern administrative state unconstitutional. We should be engaging in political struggle and pressuring courts however they can to protect Americans liberties against all governments, federal, state and local. The most effective method for increasing freedom is the use of technological tools that allow us to bypass the state altogether and extend the scope of the Bill of Rights, print your own guns, communicate through encrypted services, build new worlds in cyberspace and hold and transact in Bitcoin, which the government can't censor or devalue. I'm grateful Dave Smith took the time to talk all this through. And he did convince me not to rule out future independence movements as a check against tyranny and I appreciate that he could acknowledge the perils of talking loosely about something as consequential and potentially bloody as a national divorce. In a reply to Murray Rothbard, David Friedman stressed the value of humility in politics, writing that my arguments and Rothbard's could be wrong. Some sort of government might be the least bad alternative among workable human institutions. Rothbard, on the other hand, was certain he was right and viewed disagreement as war. That's why I'm not a button pusher like Rothbard or Dave Smith. I want to know what comes after the collapse of the state and we simply cannot know. Always proceed with caution in the face of uncertainty. A dramatic national divorce and the ensuing total reform that Hayek warned about could lead to a more libertarian world or it could lead to chaos and destroy the hard one liberties that emerged from centuries of unplanned human effort to gamble how lucky do you feel? The Constitution isn't a holy text. It's not an all powerful shield against government tyranny. But it is, as Frederick Douglass once put it, a glorious liberty document. For libertarians, it can be a weapon, quite a powerful one in the arsenal needed to defend our liberties and decentralize power. Instead of tossing it aside, maybe the task is figuring out how better to wield it.