Mouse trap

When it comes to U.S. politics over the past decade — hell, the past generation — the only thing we've been consistently able to agree on is, of course, that we can't agree on anything.

That probably shouldn't come as a surprise. Let's face it; all the easy legislative work got done right out of the gate, a couple centuries ago. "Murder? Theft? Yeah, we probably ought to put those down under 'felonies.' All in favor? Right. OK, we're done for the day. Let's go down to the pub and grab some Sam Adams." And everybody was happy, except possibly for Samuel Adams. And hey, maybe he liked the attention.

What's really telling about all this divisiveness is how, over the course of the past several presidential elections, the focus of the division has sharpened until no one, no matter which misleading kinds of straw men (sorry, straw persons) they'd built to represent their opponents or allies in the past (remember "soccer moms"?), no one can now deny the principal characteristic that divides us.

Urban vs. Rural.

That's right. All this political angst boils down into a bad — and I mean "grade-school theatrical adaptation" bad — retelling of "The City Mouse and the Country Mouse." Just fucking wonderful. That's what's gotten us so upset that, on the left and on the right, there are growing numbers of people arguing primarily about who'll get to secede from whom.

I can see where simply breaking the nation up into the Red country and the Blue one might be tempting. Only problem is, it's not even remotely possible, and I don't just mean the constitutional legalistics and the negotiations about custody of, say, the armed forces and the nuclear arsenal.

You can find a slew of red-vs.-blue maps scattered across the Net, based on the voting patterns of the elections of 2016 and earlier. Some are the basic news-network state-by-state tallies showing how the Electoral College votes broke down ... and those are misleading as hell for secessionist plotters. More ambitious maps show which counties the Red or Blue candidate won ... and those are almost as misleading, since (1) how each county in a given state went has nothing to do with how many electoral votes (or popular votes, for that matter) went to each party's stooge, um, candidate, and (2) counties vary even more in population than their parent states do, ranging from Los Angeles County's 10-million-and-change to the fewer than 90 people living in Kalawao County, Hawaii, which apparently is, honest to god, a former leper colony. (Leaving aside those poor bastards, whose situation is definitely unique, the next smallest counties are largely prairie-state acreage with fewer than 500 residents each, not counting their livestock, so the point still stands.)

The better election maps do two things to earn the distinction: They use a color spectrum including various shades of purple in the middle (pure red indicates a Republican landslide, pure blue a Democratic one, and pure purple indicates a near-50-50 split) for each county, and/or they include indicators of how populous each county is. My favorite source for this is the work website of Princeton University professor Robert J. Vanderbei, who's broken down presidential elections using one or both of these methods going back to the Kennedy-Nixon title bout of 1960. Here's his page for 2016, which yields this graphic showing county-by-county breakdowns for both votes and populations:

Note how red, broad and flat (i.e., unpopulous) the rural heartlands are; how towering and blue the teeming megacities; how confusingly and wishy-washily purplish the suburban counties and smaller cities.

Now tell me we can split the country into Red and Blue subdivisions. Because those are the lines we'd have to draw to give each squabbling side its own sovereign nation. Ever since anarcho-libertarianism caught on in the science fiction realm, writers have had major fun imagining micro-governing systems with little or no dependence on geographic boundaries, but none of them have borne much resemblance to anybody's "America."

So what we need is not secession but a system in which no one feels that need.

Funny thing is, we've already got one, at least on the national level.

There are many variations on that old tale, "The City Mouse and the Country Mouse," going all the way back to Aesop's Fables, but most of them run along these lines: The City Mouse visits his country cousin and finds there a place where life is quiet and pretty dull, the food available for scavenging is plain and sometimes sparse, but the few dangers are easily avoided. Then the City Mouse plays host in turn, and the Country Mouse gets a taste of a much more bustling and exciting world with varied and plentiful food to feast on ... and deadly, nerve-racking hazards around every corner.  The moral of the story is usually either "everything in life's a trade-off" or just "to each his own."

And when the post-Revolutionaries finalized their design for this country as the "United States of America" back in 1789 (c'mon, folks — the year the Constitution took effect), they did so knowing they were knitting together not just cities and country settlements but a widely disparate collection of communities, and deliberately rigged things to give those communities, for better or worse, the freedom to stay as they were as much as possible. The powers assigned to the federal level were a little vague but limited to the sorts of things that weren't practical on a state level: diplomacy, defense, interstate commerce, etc. They made this more explicit with the Tenth Amendment, the one that reads "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

And, with a few exceptions, later amendments have generally stuck to that principle, with most of the exceptions being in another area — the rights of American citizens — that can only really be dealt with at the federal level. (I'm not going to get into the permanent pissing contest over the one authorizing the national income tax other than to note that without it, the feds would be stuck with the relatively pissant revenues available from things like excise taxes, and we'd have to wave goodbye not just to social programs but, say, a fighting force capable of modern-day combat.)

In fact, the biggest bonehead move we've yet made in amending the Constitution was when enough people got their panties twisted over liquor that we banned it nationwide in 1919. And fourteen years later, when we repealed that amendment with another one, the replacement specifically included language allowing states and their communities to stay dry if they so wished. Some of those communities still do (even though their mini-Prohibition was already a joke in an era when anybody looking to tie one on can get across damn near any county line in less than an hour).

Honestly, the only way you could give the various flavors of Americans any more legal leeway in being who they want to be is if you were somehow able to single-handedly amend every state's constitution to end with "the powers not delegated to this state by its constitution, nor superseded by the United States Constitution, are reserved to its municipalities respectively, or to the people."

So it's not going to come as any surprise to readers of future posts here if I sway in the direction of states' rights, and people's rights, when trying to hash out ways to soothe our national neuroses. It comes as a bit of a surprise to me, mind you; for much of my adult life, if I thought of balances of power at all I tended to lean slightly federalist, if only because that seemed more efficient while state- and community-level lawmaking felt kind of archaic.

But if Prohibition didn't serve as an illustration for us all that acting at the federal level can be a serious overreach, it should've; if the lesson had been learned, Congress would never have tried to pull constitutional fast ones like the "Defense of Marriage Act." (While I'm on that subject, let's clarify that civil rights issues are still the kind that belong at the federal, not state or community, level, the shitty tainting of "states' rights" as a cloak for "legalized bias" notwithstanding. And if you're still up for restricting rights of people based on things like sexual orientation, be honest and attentive enough to see that you're already behind in that battle, and based on how your fellow Americans' beliefs have been shifting, your final defeat appears to be nigh.)

That mouse story would've sounded bizarre if it ended with the City Mouse and the Country Mouse each marshaling all their resources for a culture war to impose one mouse's values on the other one. Why the fuck doesn't that ring false in real life?