MTG Advocates an American Ausgleich
The GOP’s most controversial Congressmember’s pushing a National Divorce set politics on fire – but she channeled a valid idea that can work
In record time, Marjorie Taylor Greene became one of the polarizing figures in American politics. The 48-year-old Georgia Republican has only been in Congress two years, yet she is the GOP figure, aside from Donald Trump, that liberals most love to hate. It’s an impressive accomplishment, no matter how you look at it.
Indeed, MTG – as she is ubiquitously known – seems to have been designed in a lab to make progressive heads explode. Everything about her appears calculated to offend liberal sensibilities. To Democrats, MTG’s mere existence proves that the Republican party has become a hotbed of racism, sexism, homophobia, conspiracy-mongering, rejection of progress, and all-around troglodytism. None can deny her impressive trolling acumen.
Neither is MTG popular with Conservatism, Inc., which the MAGA movement she so bumptiously embodies was supposed to dethrone permanently, yet that task remains incomplete. Regular conservatives view the Peach State provocateur with distaste for her gauche statements, her immoderate tweeting, her messy personal life that’s inconsistent with conservative “family values” preaching, plus there’s the nagging fear in GOP circles that much of the party’s base consists of people just like MTG.
All of this only makes MTG’s fans love her even more. Like Trump, the hatred of liberals and the GOP establishment proves her authenticity. She bears an uncanny political resemblance to another Congresswoman known by her initials, Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), the omnipresent AOC. Ideological differences aside, both women regularly make half-baked, attention-seeking statements that are taken as deep wisdom by their devotees, while being met with eyerolls by everyone else.
All the same, MTG outdid herself this week by taking to Twitter, her preferred platform, where she has almost two million followers, to advocate for what she termed National Divorce. She’s tweeted many times about this over the last couple days, but the essence of her idea was captured in a tweet-thread on Tuesday which began thus:
Why the left and right should consider a national divorce, not a civil war but a legal agreement to separate our ideological and political disagreements by states while maintaining our legal union. Definition of irreconcilable differences: inability to agree on most things or on important things. Tragically, I think we, the left and right, have reached irreconcilable differences. I’ll speak for the right and say, we are absolutely disgusted and fed up with the left cramming and forcing their ways on us and our children with no respect for our religion/faith, traditional values, and economic & government policy beliefs.
MTG then proceeded to flesh out her National Divorce concept, which boils down to: Washington, DC, becomes the home of a vastly reduced federal bureaucracy, whose main function is national security. The Pentagon will remain, but almost all other functions – MTG especially cited education and law enforcement – will be passed down to the states (or Red and Blue sub-national entities: this wasn’t clear from the Congresswoman’s tweets). This would preserve the United States as a global power, while keeping the U.S. dollar functioning as the world’s reserve currency, still allowing Red and Blue America to go their own way on the big domestic issues where they vehemently disagree.
Reactions to MTG’s National Divorce idea ranged from laughter to hysteria. Many Democrats, especially Very Online ones, viewed her suggestion as tantamount to civil war. She explicitly refuted that claim by tweeting, “National Divorce is not civil war, but becoming a necessary reality because of our irreconcilable differences.” Most Republicans ignored her thoughts while some denounced it forthrightly. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), known for his dislike of all things MAGA, condemned MTG: “There are some people in my party and the other party that say things to try and get a headline and get people to send them money. And that happens to be in today's 'loony left,' or I should say 'loony right,'” adding, “I think Abraham Lincoln dealt with that kind of insanity. We're not going to divide the country. It's united we stand and divided we fall.”
The nicest thing that liberal commentators termed MTG’s idea was “ridiculous” yet none can deny her essential premise that Red and Blue America are growing further apart and increasingly hate each other. Poll after poll reveals the widening chasm over basic political and social values between the two Americas. While divorce may not be a palatable option, can anybody really maintain that the marriage between Red and Blue America, with its constant bickering amid outbursts of domestic violence, shouldn’t at least be in counseling?
Above all, MTG channeled the essence of a successful political divorce that worked before (though I see no evidence that she knows this). Commentators who compared her idea to the Civil War got the right decade, the 1860s, but focused on the wrong country. Instead of America they should be discussing the Habsburg Empire, a long-lost place which looms small in the minds of American politicians and pundits. However, what MTG suggested bears an uncanny resemblance to the political deal that birthed Austria-Hungary and saved the Habsburg Empire for another half-century as a great power.
That deal was the Compromise of 1867: Ausgleich in German, Kiegyezés in Hungarian. A bit of history needs unpacking, briefly. By the middle of the 19th century, the Habsburg Empire was ailing, in desperate need of a political relaunch. Although the venerable Habsburg dynasty had ruled much of Central Europe for centuries, their empire was coming apart amid changing political times. The liberal-inspired revolutions* of 1848 which convulsed much of the continent hit the Habsburg realm especially hard. Hungary rose in armed revolt against the dynasty and was only brought back by force, including Russian military assistance.
After the blood-soaked victory of the counterrevolution in Hungary and other parts of the empire, the Habsburgs, under the young Emperor Franz Joseph, opted for quasi-military rule and authoritarian solutions, particularly over Hungary, which they feared might revolt again. The brief 1859 war against France in northern Italy ended badly for Vienna and demonstrated the weakness of the authoritarian system: many Hungarian soldiers were diffident about fighting for the Habsburgs. Political turmoil mounted and the even more painful Austro-Prussian War of 1866, wherein Berlin pushed Vienna out of the German Question at bayonet-point, revealed in just a few weeks that the empire’s deep internal divisions were dragging the Habsburgs out of the ranks of Europe’s great powers.
In order to save the dynasty and the empire, Franz Joseph concocted a generous deal with Hungary’s political elite, leading to the 1867 Compromise. This created Austria-Hungary, a divided entity that was united by the monarch (Franz Joseph was Emperor of Austria but King of Hungary), plus national defense, a common foreign ministry, and a joint finance ministry to fund the military and diplomacy – and nothing else.
All matters not related to the military and international diplomacy were granted to “national” governments in Vienna and Budapest, which each had its own parliament and its own laws, made however each half of the Dual Monarchy saw fit. There wasn’t even common citizenship: Austria and Hungary had different passports and sent separate teams to the Olympics. In addition to the common army and navy, Austria and Hungary each had its own second-line army, roughly equivalent to America’s National Guard.
Most of all, it worked. Although the Compromise hardly solved all the Dual Monarchy’s problems (in particular, it left Hungary’s minorities out of the deal, leaving some of them unsatisfied), it ended the most divisive political debates between Vienna and Budapest. Moreover, the deal successfully kept the Habsburg realm in the ranks of Europe’s great powers for another half-century, until their empire, along with several others, came crashing down at the end of the First World War.
Although it ended badly in 1918, it would be mistaken to write off the creation of Austria-Hungary as unsuccessful. On the contrary, after 1867 the Dual Monarchy experienced unprecedented economic growth, astonishing artistic and cultural progress, plus political maturation. The law reigned supreme, personal freedoms grew, and by the eve of the First World War, Austria-Hungary had embraced universal male suffrage, becoming modern democracies. While it was long fashionable to dismiss Austria-Hungary as a retrograde mistake – few held this view more than hyper-progressive President Woodrow Wilson – recent scholarship emphasizes the political, social and economic progress that transpired under the Dual Monarchy.
Obviously, America in 2023 is not the Habsburg Empire in 1867. Yet there are more than a few similarities. Austria-Hungary, a very diverse place, was a Catholic empire with large minorities of Protestants, Jews, Eastern Orthodox, even Muslims. Its ethnic divisions were even deeper than our own, with the empire consisting of a dozen different nationalities, several of which hated each other, and might abandon the Habsburgs if given the chance.
Of course, America has no ancient monarchy to bind us together. However, we have the Constitution, the flag, and much shared history (even if we can no longer agree about even the most basic aspects of that history). MTG’s National Divorce idea is premature, as evidenced by the reactions her tweets brought from all political angles, but that doesn’t make it wrong or foolish. Her concept merits balanced, calm discussion, with Austria-Hungary in mind. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to entertaining what National Divorce might look like is that America is still feeling strong. Franz Joseph didn’t opt for the 1867 Compromise until an embarrassing military defeat forced painful political reality on Vienna. It will take something similar to convince America’s political elite to think about radical solutions such as MTG suggested. Watching East Asia, particularly Taiwan, Washington may be sleepwalking into just such game-changing military conflict.
*I am using “liberal” here in the 19th century European sense, which bears scant resemblance to how Democrats employ that term these days.