Is it too late for the United States?

In an America shaken by the murder of Charlie Kirk and riven by extreme political polarization, Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has put an incendiary idea back on the table: a “national divorce”.

The murder of Charlie Kirk, a conservative media figure, has caused an earthquake in American politics.

This tragedy, perpetrated at a university gathering, has reinforced the already yawning political divisions between Republicans and Democrats.

It’s in this climate of grief and anger, where polarization is reaching a critical point, that controversial Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene sees only one way out: a national divorce.

By advocating a separation between red states and blue states, Marjorie Taylor Greene reactivates the spectre of a national divide.

His comments, considered provocative and dangerous by many elected officials, resonate with a section of the conservative base, galvanized by an unprecedented climate of tension following the assassination of one of its heroes.

It’s against this backdrop that Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican elected official from Georgia, has revived a concept she’s been hammering away at for several years. She presents this rupture as the only way out of a cohabitation that, in her view, has become impossible between Republican and Democratic states.

By 2023, Greene had already written, “We need a national divorce. We need to separate Republican states from Democratic states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says so.”

These words have a particular resonance today in the emotion aroused by Kirk’s death and in the anger of part of the American right. Bluntly, she declared, “There’s nothing left to discuss with the left… To be honest, I want a peaceful national divorce.”

Referring to the case of Charlie Kirk, she wanted to demonstrate that, in her opinion, this approach is the only possible solution: “They murdered our nice boy who actually was talking to them peacefully and debating ideas.”

While Taylor Greene claims that “Everyone I talk to says that”, the reality is different: most Republican officials refuse to endorse the idea of a “national divorce”. The rare endorsements come mostly from conservative influencers and commentators, with no real institutional translation.

His statement nevertheless provoked a wave of criticism. Moderate Republicans like Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney and even Utah Governor Spencer Cox, who back in 2023 had blasted Taylor Greene’s “destructive” and dangerous rhetoric: “This rhetoric is destructive, wrong and, frankly, evil. We don’t need a divorce, we need couples therapy.”

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder in Utah, Governor Spencer Cox renewed his call for unity, inviting Americans to take a “different path” to overcome political hatred, to find a “way out” of growing hostility, and denounced the toxic role of social networks, which he called “the cancer of our society”. and denounced the toxic role of social networks, which he called “the cancer of our society”.

“We have to find another solution. We have to find a way out of this growing hostility,” said Cox in his many speeches since Kirk’s assassination, also emphasizing the devastating effect of social networks in spreading hatred.

The murder of Charlie Kirk accentuates the image of an America locked in a never-ending culture war. In this climate, where the right is radicalizing its discourse and the left is denouncing cynical instrumentalization, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s proposal for a “national divorce” appears as an extreme extension of these fractures, fueled by an atmosphere of mourning, anger and generalized mistrust.