I’m going to commend you to this particular episode of Ben Shapiro, from a couple weeks ago.

He’s talking about the Republican Candidate debates – comparing the debates Republicans deserve with the one the nation needs.

The one we deserve? Well, the donnybrook between DeSantis and Newsome was a great one. In another time and place, it might have been a classic, like Reagan/Mondale.

But it was just another chapter in this nation’s formerly biennial and now permanent ritual of the tribes ceremonially throwing rhetorical (for now) bricks at each other, immune to any reason the other side may be throwing back.

The debate we need, on the other hand?

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It’s a bit of a cartoon – whenever you suggest that maybe it’s time to discuss, even think about, how this nation approaches the subject of perhaps having a “National Divorce”, leftists immediately chant “That was settled in 1865!”.

The only response to that that matters is “Well, no – it was settled in 1776”.

We’ll come back to them.

From the center right, the response is probably more rational, and definitely more frustrating: “we have to preserve the union”.

Why?

If the union’s moral and political compass decays to the point where “the union” has completely trampled on the Constitution, the RIghts of Man and the whole notion of Government being a free association of equals, what is the point?

Put another way – what is more important: The nation’s founding principles, or its political union.

I’ll take founding principles, and ditch the parts of the country that disagree, every time.

There are those on all sides who shy away from the topic, saying any national breakup will inevitably look more like Bosnia or Kosovo or Belfast than some Trulbert-like organic readjustment.

Again – why? If one had asked a typical political thinker in Europe in 1770 what would happen if a people threw off the monarchy and established a constitutional Republic, what do you suppose they’d have predicted?

Chaos. At best.

And given the moral and intellectual midgets who set the standards for our culture, the idea of the “peaceful divorce” just might be harder than it needs to be.

But as Dennis Prager correctly notes, America was less divided in 1861 than it is today. I believe a renewed commitment to federalism is the only hope to maintain a nation.

And a renewed commitment to federalism would require a huge bounce-back resurgence in Federalists in politics. We’re out there – but we’re nowhere near power, even in the GOP.

So our culture is rolling the dice. And the best way to assure that any future, uh, “civic readjustment” is absolutely a bloody debacle is to shame the conversation into the shadows, were only the crazies and the extremists will own, and consider, and be ready, for the split when and if it finally happens.