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.

[Fascinating, but it doesn’t give us anything we can’t already get from federalism, the founding principle of the American republic that has been diluted for decades by collectivism and centralization of authority in Washington DC. And that’s what we truly need — a return to federalism and decentralization, without the divorce talk. — Ed]