In the wake of the most fraudulent election in America’s history, the result of which will be further diminution of America’s liberty and prosperity, the country’s deep and seemingly unbridgeable divisions have become accentuated.

Victor Davis Hanson captures some of the divisions in a dissection of the rural-urban dichotomy:

Ideological differences are now being recalibrated as rural-urban on issues from guns and abortion to taxes and foreign policy. Red/conservative is often synonymous with small-town and rural. Blue/progressive is equivalent to urban/suburban….

The cities since antiquity been considered cosmopolitan and progressive; the countryside, traditional and conservative. In the positive appraisal, Western literature always thematically emphasized the sophistication and energy of cities, balanced by the purity and autonomy of the country….

That fact of the rural/urban dichotomy is underappreciated, but it remains at the heart of the Constitution — to the continuing chagrin of our globalist coastal elite who wish to wipe it out. The Electoral College and the quite antithetical makeup of the Senate and the House keep a Montana, Utah, or Wyoming from being politically neutered by California and New York. The idea, deemed outrageously “unfair” by academics and the media, is that a Wyoming rancher might have as much of a say in the direction of the country as thousands of more redundant city dwellers. Yet the classical idea of federal republicanism was to save democracy by not allowing 51 percent (of an increasingly urban population) to create laws on any given day at any given hour….

So much of the absurdity of the modern world relates to a culture entirely divorced from the commonsense audits of 2,500 years of rural pragmatism. Antifa is the ultimate expression of tens of thousands of urban youth, many deeply in college debt, many with degrees but little learning — and oblivious of how they are completely dependent on what they despise, from the police to those who truck in their food and take out their waste, to those who make and sell them their riot appurtenances and communications gadgetry.

… The current fear is not just that America is becoming an urbanized and suburbanized nation — in the manner that many of the Founders feared would make our nation a European replicant. Rather, what is strange is that so many who are not rural are becoming fearful of their cannibalistic own, and what they have in store for the suburbs and cities — and thus are becoming desperate either to graft the values of the countryside onto the urban sprawl or leave the latter altogether.

Unless the courts — and the Supreme Court in particular — are roused in time to salvage the election and declare Trump the winner, along with at least one GOP senatorial candidate who was robbed, Trump’s large and vocal base will not go quietly into the night. That is because the base is united not so much by its allegiance to Trump, but by a sense that it is the remnant of what was once a great nation. (I will nevertheless refer to this mass of Americans as “Trump’s base”, for the sake of convenience.)

Trump’s base, in addition to being rural is also (but not exclusively) working class, white, religious, and anti-cosmopolitan. There are many members of Trump’s base, including this writer, who do not conform wholly to that profile. But my working-class, religious upbringing is deeply ingrained in me, as it must be in many others who don’t conform to the stereotype of a Trump supporter.

I am also a person with the credentials and tastes of a cosmopolitan who is deeply anti-cosmopolitan. My anti-cosmopolitanism derives from long, direct exposure to the smug, over-educated elites who who deign to rule the unwashed by edict, censorship, and ostracism. Those members of the base who lack direct exposure to such elites are nevertheless aware of the elites’ superiority complex and dictatorial bent.

Trump’s base is weary of being told what to think, what not to say, what to do, how to do it, and for whom to do it by cosmopolitan (i.e., anti-American) elites and their surrogates. The elites and their surrogates populate and dominate government and corporate bureaucracies, academia, the “news” and “entertainment” media,, Big Tech, and (most insidiously) public “education”.

The sense of entitlement that propels the elites and their surrogates carries over into the impunity with which their protegees have been allowed to loot, riot, and attack Trump supporters (physically and verbally).

This sense of entitlement carries over into electoral fraud, which has long known to be an almost-exclusive practice of Democrats. (“We are supposed to win, so win we shall, by any means.”) Having been unprepared in 2016, because Hillary was a “sure thing”, the masters of electoral fraud took no chances in 2020, with the result that the election was stolen from Trump, blatantly and massively.

But our masters are confident in their success. Their media mouthpieces keep saying that there is no evidence of fraud when there is plenty of evidence (e.g., this). It’s just that the evidence may not result in reversal of the election. And so the fraud will go down the memory hole.

Trump’s base will seethe, grow more bitter, and abandon the electoral field in droves — allowing the elites to tighten further their grip on the legal, economic, and information levers of the nation. This will be done directly through the central government, through the control of information by the media and Big Tech, and by granting amnesty to of tens of millions of prospective new (and mostly Democrat) voters.

There will be much hollow talk about unity. But unity, to the left, means submission. And Trump’s base knows it.

The nation is almost certainly broken, and broken irrevocably. That leaves the question of what is to be done about it. I have offered options in the past. The only one that can deliver (a lot of us) from the evil that bears down is a concerted secession effort by many States, perhaps leading to a negotiated partition of the country. The choice is stark: either a breakup or a complete takeover by America’s domestic enemies.

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Related reading:

Theodore Dalrymple, “The Age of Cant“, City Journal, Autumn 2020

Theodore Dalrymple, “The Decline of Cultural Understanding“, Taki’s Magazine, November 27, 2020

“Tyler Durden”, “The Great Relocation: Americans Are Relocating By The Millions Because They Can Feel What Is Coming“, ZeroHedge, November 23, 2020

Mike LaChance, “After Four Years of Democrat Attack on Trump Supporters, Biden Can’t ‘Unify’ the Nation“, Legal Insurrection, November 25, 2020

Francis Menton, “Will Biden Denounce Efforts to Silence Dissent?” [No!], Manhattan Contrarian, November 23, 2020

J. Robert Smith, “This Is War“, American Thinker, November 24, 2020

A virtual symposium at The American Mind, November 30, 2020:

Matthew J. Peterson, “A House Dividing?“

Gregory M. Vaughan, “Madison Wins, Factions Lose“

Rebecca, “The Separation“

Tom Trenchard, “2020: A Retrospective from 2025“