Democrats Want a Divorce

          When a marriage is in crisis, a point often occurs when constant bickering, arguing and fighting yields to detachment and hopelessness. The yelling stops. It’s quiet.

But it’s not peace. Exhausted, dispirited and contemptuous, one or both partners give up trying to convince the other that they’re wrong or ought to change. They accept that improvement is highly unlikely and check out emotionally.

Some psychologists call this uneasy calm a “silent divorce.” Dr. Ridha Rouabhia describes a silent divorce as “a state of being legally married but emotionally disconnected from one another, thus carrying within it a relational breakdown that is very often imperceptible but deeply damaging.” By the time you and your spouse are fighting your own personal cold war, odds of divorce are high.

Couples who fall in love and dedicate themselves to long-term committed relationships tend to fit into one of two categories. There are the soulmates who share important values and personality traits. Then there are the complementary types, a.k.a. “opposites attract,” where—hopefully—one partner’s strengths make up for the other’s weaknesses and vice versa.

Complementary couples can have successful marriages. But these relationships work only if each partner appreciates their partner’s contributions and is cognizant as well as grateful that their own failings are generously overlooked. As time builds familiarity and familiarity breeds contempt over the course of a lifetime, that can be challenging.

Years ago, I was close to a classic complementary couple. The wife, whom I met in college, was married to a man ten years older than her. A tight-cropped salt-and-brunet WASP from the Midwest, he was politically and temperamentally conservative, preppy and stuffy. A fluffy-blonde converted Buddhist from the West Coast, she leaned left and was loud, bubbly and unfiltered. Everyone who met them instantly understood their mutual attraction. Wild, sexual and adventurous, my friend dragged her uptight husband out of his shell. She made his life fun and interesting. Organized and always planning for contingencies, he bailed her out and cleaned up her frequent messes. He made her feel safe. They were a cute couple.

Over the years, the mutual gratitude that drove my friends’ Lucy-and-Ricardo marriage ceded territory to sneering contempt. She got tired, and then angry, at always having to initiate sex. He grew weary of the drama from her never-ending series of crises. They fought. Then, they didn’t. They had fought to a stalemate.

Their “silent divorce” lasted a few years before giving way to the real thing.

Everyone thought it was a shame.

They needed one another.

The American political union between partisans of the two major parties is a complementary marriage. Though frequently fractious, for much of the 20^th century there was a tacit understanding between Democrats and Republicans that each brought something to the union, to the country, that the other needed even if they weren’t good at verbalizing their appreciation.

Like my friend’s husband, Republicans were America’s stolid, responsible, national caretakers. Based in the countryside (and until recently in the boardroom), they were boring and hated the hippies and their rock ’n’ roll and never would have supported civil rights and other liberation movements had they not been forced upon them. But conservatives also provided and protected virtues like military strength, national pride and deficit hawkishness that, deep in their pot- and LSD-infused souls, liberals knew were essential to the republic.

And like his wild-and-loopy wife, Democrats were reckless tax-and-spenders who hung out on the coasts and in big cities and tried and failed at social engineering schemes like welfare and affirmative action, but some of those schemes, like Social Security and Medicaid, saved the country, and drove almost all the progress that improved people’s lives and thus staved off revolution. Though they didn’t like to admit it, Republicans knew in their stock-portfolios-for-hearts that liberalism saved them from their rapacious selves and forced them to admit when their wars didn’t work out.

The national marriage started to unravel under Reagan, enjoyed a rapprochement under Clinton and turned ugly under Obama. As with any failed romance, it’s hard to pinpoint a specific moment that marked the beginning of the end. I’d pick 2010, when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” McConnell’s idea of trying to win back the White House wasn’t wild. His formulation, emboldened by the rise of the proto-MAGA Tea Party, was remarkably contemptuous. As an opposition party, the GOP was expected to articulate its own set of policies while paying lip service to its willingness to work with the president on issues where the two parties had common ground, rather than center its messaging around pigheaded obstructionism.

            Republicans, having failed to prevent Obama’s reelection in 2012, doubled down in 2014 when McConnell pledged not only to block Democratic initiatives just because, but to threaten to shut down the federal government every time the other party tried to push through a bill.

            Now everything is going their way. White House, Congress, Supreme Court, big tech and a compliant news media—Trump and the Republicans control it all. There was scarcely an echo of the riotous protests in response to Trump’s first inaugural in 2017 in the streets of Washington for the second one last week. Democratic leaders and their allies are despondent, disorganized and silent. “Far from rising up in outrage, the opposition party’s lawmakers have taken a muted wait-and-see approach,” reports The New York Times. Liberals are actively tuning out of politics, canceling their subscriptions and turning off MSNBC, televised organ of the DNC.

            After sounding Defcon-4 at volume 11 every time Trump issued an obnoxious tweet during his first term, incessantly shrieking about the January 6^th Capitol riot, unleashing ferocious partisan legal warfare against him and hysterically characterizing a Trumpian restoration as an existential threat to democracy that would bring about real and actual fascism, the post-electoral silence of the liberal lambs is deafening.

            You may feel good about all this, if you’re a Republican.

            Don’t. As the Tacitus quote currently circulating in response to Israel’s flattening of Gaza goes: “They make a desert and call it peace.” The sounds you’re not hearing—leftists marching and chanting down the block, liberals bleating in the comments section, Democratic politicians hollering about Trump’s unprecedented awfulness—is not acquiescence, much less acceptance. It is the disgust of silent divorce.

            Democratic voters (of whom I am not one, I am to their Left) have given up on the Republicans with whom they share a country. Democrats still live under the same roof as their Republican spouses—for the time being, there’s no way for them to move out—but their anger has devolved into a cold contempt from which there is rarely any way back. Those people—Republicans—can stay in their Electoral College-inflated flyover states and watch Fox and NASCAR and vote however they want, including against abortion, and we (the smart people) will keep to ourselves in our urban enclaves. They’re not worth yelling at.

            They’re not even worth talking to.

            This marriage is in trouble.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)