Fewer People Pledge Allegiance to the Divided States of America

The center has not held, and the divide has become a chasm.

While it is common during every election for US citizens to declare they’ll leave the country if the party opposite of their own wins and then never do it, there have never been so many ready to pack it in as there are now if Donald Trump wins. During Trump’s presidency, the number hit 40-million Americans ready to offshore themselves. About a quarter of young people (based on poll statistics) have said they would leave, and the numbers are rising.

It’s not entirely due to Trump, though. People in America under both Trump and Biden have lost the American Dream because the middle class has been decimated:

Fewer and fewer Americans, pollsters have found, believe "the American Dream — that if you work hard you'll get ahead — still holds true." In 2012, it was 53%. By October 2023, it was down to 36%.

One big contributor to that loss of faith is the rise in housing prices. Another is the ability to work remotely so people can pick where they want to have their house and find cheaper more beautiful housing opportunities elsewhere, such as Italy. Nevertheless, Doris Speer, president of the Association of Americans Resident Overseas, a nonpartisan group based in Paris, says a second Trump presidency may cause a lot more to shove off than before:

A second Trump presidency, Speer said, could serve as a "catalyst" that further fuels the growing diaspora of Americans living in exile. After November, Europe could well become what Canada was for draft dodgers during the Vietnam War: a political asylum for Americans fed up with their own country

Many will feel disenfranchised if Trump wins. Many others will feel disenfranchised if he loses, but one thing is clear: America is not just divided over Trump but is experiencing a growing, chasm between the Liberal Left and the Hard Right because the center is falling away almost completely just like the middle class has deteriorated as politicians served their rich cronies in both parties.

The chasm is particularly evident in the headlines today as Nikki Haley lost to Trump in all twenty states that voted on Super Tuesday, other than liberal Vermont. Haley ran as what one might now call an old-world Republican—a Reagan Republican. Many who were once big Reagan supporters wouldn’t think of supporting her today because they have moved further Right than Ronald Reagan, who once called the Soviet Union the “evil empire” and who probably wouldn’t feel a bit differently today as he sought to create a very intense US military presence in the world. Reagan Republicanism is finally fading away to make room for a new owner of the party.

Today the key moment is Nikki Haley dropping out of the presidential race the morning after Super Tuesday and effectively bringing the Republican primary contest to an end….

Haley declined to endorse Trump yet, urging him to convince her voters to support him. Haley’s lack of endorsement stood in contrast to many reluctant establishment voices, like GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Wednesday, rallying around Trump.

Trump has taken full ownership of the Republican Party. Not only did voters solidly reject the centrist Haley by a 2:1 margin with McConnell (far from loved by Trump) giving the Donald a solid endorsement this morning, but other centrist party members have thrown in the towel, including among Democrats, leaving few occupying the center of American politics anymore.

“It is abundantly clear that former President Trump has earned the requisite support of Republican voters to be our nominee for President of the United States,” McConnell, R-Ky., said in a statement….

Just after Trump’s impeachment trial on charges of inciting the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, McConnell declared on the Senate floor that there was “no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”

But McConnell voted against convicting Trump of the charges, as did more than enough other Republican senators to acquit the ex-president.

So, Haley exits, stage Left. (Center stage politically, but she is not in the center of the stage as in center of the show as the spot light on her turns off today, and as there is no more center anyway. So, she is Left as far as the New Right is concerned. She leaves a Leftist traitor in the eyes of MAGA.)

With Trump racking up win after win, the writing has been on the wall for weeks for Haley’s exit. And she all but acknowledged her campaign was about making a point rather than actually winning.

That point: Donald Trump is a liability for my party, and I’m going to prove it.

Except that what she wound up proving was the exact opposite.

Ultimately, Haley’s campaign mostly served a somewhat different but valuable purpose: showing how much of today’s Republican Party is defined by Trump and has little use for traditional conservatism.

Haley’s campaign gave us a pretty direct test that has eluded us previously: what would happen if voters were faced with a one-on-one choice between Trump and the GOP of yesteryear.

Haley exuded the Reagan and George W. Bush eras. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more prototypical standard-bearer: conservative but pragmatic, fiscally conscious, hawkish on issues like Russia and Ukraine, and uninterested in the right wing’s almost-singular focus on provocation.

Well, that lost.

Tellingly, Trump dominated among actual Republicans, almost always taking at least 70 percent of them. That went up to around 8 in 10 in both North Carolina and Virginia on Super Tuesday….

[Haley’s] version of Republicanism isn’t really Republican anymore — not as the party is currently constituted.

Politicians flee, too

It is not just voters who are leaving the country in this divide but also centrist politicians who are ditching American politics because of Trump and the divisiveness in congress between MAGA Republicans and centrist Republicans, not just between the Left and the Right. If you’re a centrist, you’re considered a Leftist by the New Right. One realty-TV actor has replaced another golden-era actor among the Republicans, so the Reagan era in Republican politics is dead.

Nowhere could that be more baldfaced and obvious than in how only three members of congress endorsed Haley:

Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) joined Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) on Friday. The lack of support from the GOP’s institutional wing epitomized its members’ fear of alienating Trump and his base.

Thus, another headline today talks about the centrists who are leaving both parties: “Centrist extinction looms as Sinema, Manchin, Romney call it quits.”

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema's (I-Ariz.) decision not to seek re-election has dealt the latest in a series of crushing blows to Senate bipartisanship, hollowing out a centrist core that has suffered under years of intensifying polarization.

Joining this group in an declaration of his own over the weekend was House Republican Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), who said his main reason for retiring from congress was so that he wouldn’t ever have to lie for Trump, not because he couldn’t win if he wanted to:

“We’ve gone from a time when the Tea Party stood for conservative principles, for constitutional principles, to a time where the [populists] have taken over the Republican Party and are really advocating things that I believe are very dangerous,” Buck told Stirewalt….

“The MAGA crowd ran a primary against me last time. I won 75-25. I’m not concerned about [a] primary, I’m not concerned about losing a general election,” Buck replied, adding…

“But really we’re at a time in American politics, that I am not going to lie on behalf of my presidential candidate, on behalf of my party. And I’m very sad that others in my party have taken the position that, as long as we get the White House, it doesn’t really matter what we say.”

As a result of these departures, you can expect an even more sharply divided congress with little hope of bipartisan politics: (There hasn’t been much of hope of that since Trump’s first term anyway.)

The departures of Sinema, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) — three moderates routinely vilified by their own parties — will leave a massive hole for bipartisan deal-making.

These were people in both parties who tried to find a way to stitch across the divide to pull together some sort of fabric for a deal both sides could minimally tolerate. The days when Reagan could persuade people to conservative ideals with his humor, his facile thinking, his amicable way, and his willingness to build coalitions and could win because his arguments and ideas beat out others … are long gone.

"You lose the center, you lose the moderates, you're screwed. You really are screwed," Manchin told Politico after Romney's retirement announcement. "I'm hoping the voters will wake up."

Manchin can hope, but for the time being there is little chance of that, as the Year of Chaos widens the chasm between the two long-divided sides of America where there is no center that holds anymore. The center ground is all falling away. With demented Mitch McConnell also retiring soon, expect a total inability to compromise on anything. I’ve never liked Mitch, but he was an old-world politician able to work with the other party. I still don’t like him and don’t lament seeing him go. If he were in a meat refrigerator at a grocery store, he’d be the piece that was slightly green and iridescent.

I would say there will be quite a scrap over the red meat for new party leadership in the senate, like there has been the last few years in the House, except that the centrists have largely been run out of town, so who is there left to fight with?Tuesday’s election made that abundantly clear. Trump owns the Republican Party, lock, stock and barrel —so much so that the Republican National Committee is even seriously talking about paying his legal bills for him.

I cannot even imagine Ronald Reagan ever having so many legal cases against him personally because he was never divisive enough to accumulate so many enemies who hated him so viscerally. His enemies hated him politically but otherwise tended to like him personally and often worked with him as he persuaded America toward his ideas. That is a bygone kind of politician from a bygone era. I don’t know if we will ever see that again.