Does Marjorie Taylor Greene Like America?

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, March 01, 2023

 

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is a backbencher no more. She was one of the Republican Party’s biggest fundraisers even before the GOP retook control of the House. With her committee assignments restored and enjoying a perch on the House Homeland Security and Oversight committees, Greene’s big mouth isn’t the only way she can generate attention for herself. The American Right’s loudest voices seem to take their cues from the Georgia representative, which is troubling given the extent to which Greene doesn’t seem to have much affection for America.

 

Recently, Greene has taken her hostility toward Ukraine’s efforts to defend itself against Russian aggression and the West’s support for Kyiv’s sovereignty to something resembling a logical conclusion. “I’m completely against the war in Ukraine. I want to see it come to an end,” she told Real America’s Voice viewers. Nothing wrong with that, but Greene didn’t stop there. “You know who’s driving it?” she asked. “It’s America. America needs to stop pushing the war in Ukraine.”

 

This sentiment is redolent of the reflexive, addled chauvinism that was once found primarily on the far Left. It reveals the misapprehension that the United States dictates the course of events all over the world. It therefore stands to reason that the ugly things that happen in the anarchic international environment occur with America’s tacit or perhaps explicit consent. The war in Ukraine is a ghastly affair typified by indiscriminate attacks on civilians, grotesque human-rights violations, and the barbaric conquest of land and peoples. If America is responsible for these crimes, it must be a particularly nasty place, indeed.

 

“MTG” isn’t expressing a fresh opinion here. Near the outset of the war in Europe, Greene alleged that America’s support for Ukraine’s cause was designed only to secure the financial interests of American politicians like Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and Mitt Romney. Indeed, Ukraine’s government, with its stubborn refusal to be placidly ousted, detained, and slaughtered, “only exists because of the Obama State Department,” which “helped to overthrow the previous regime.” Again, we are confronted with a portrait of America as a malign and omnipotent presence in global affairs.

 

In assessing Greene’s views on America’s legitimacy, we might also look to the company she keeps. “They say about America, they say ‘diversity is our strength,’ you know. And I look at China, and I look at Russia. Can we give a round of applause for Russia?” the agitator Nick Fuentes told his audience at a 2022 rally before bringing Greene onto the stage. Greene later insisted she did not know Fuentes and never heard him speak, to which the Wall Street Journal editorial board responded by wondering whether Greene wasn’t paying attention when Fuentes was echoing the Iranian charge that the U.S. government “has become the Great Satan.” If that sounds implausible, it’s rendered more so by Greene’s indignant refusal to distance herself from the conference’s speakers, “even if I find those remarks unsavory.”

 

Always good for a ludicrous spectacle, Greene’s latest escapade involves a campaign to popularize the idea of a “national divorce.” As Wilfred Reilly capably demonstrated, it’s an idea so incandescently stupid that only those who have exceeded their safe lifetime exposure to Twitter would express their support for it in mixed company.

 

It’s unwise to invest too much confidence in the idea that Greene knows what she’s talking about. In remarks to Charlie Kirk, Greene dispensed with the idea that an annulment of the Union is a “civil war.” In fact, “it would be strengthening the federal government.” Somehow. But despite Greene’s redefinition of a word that describes dissolution, dissociation, and disengagement, and putting aside the historical and legal ignorance her remarks betray, we can at least assume that the fruition of Greene’s vision would put an end to the United States as it presently exists.

 

Even an amicable split along arbitrary lines predicated on what are today red and blue states — the fluidity of that condition notwithstanding — a “divorce” would produce two rump states, introverted and fractious yet utterly dependent upon one another. If you believe that America is the locus of evil in the modern world, its disintegration and withdrawal from the world stage might not be such a bad thing.

 

Nor are Greene’s grievances with the United States limited to its conduct of foreign affairs. What she finds most enticing about the prospect of national dissolution would be the states’ newfound ability to violate the conscience rights of American citizens that are protected by the Constitution.

 

“If Democrat voters choose to flee these blue states, where they cannot tolerate the living conditions,” she told Kirk last week, “well, once they move to a red state, guess what? Maybe you don’t get to vote for five years. You can live there, and you can work there, but you don’t get to bring your values.” One of the foremost propositions of life in this free country is the idea that disparate and even conflicting “values” can coexist within the American social contract.

 

Greene is that rare species of patriot that cannot summon a good word for the United States. Conservatives and Republicans should be able to recognize the duplicity in that sort of conditional patriotism since they spent so many years criticizing it in Democrats. One of President Barack Obama’s favorite rhetorical flourishes, for example, was his admiration foremost for America’s “capacity to change.” Even if the former president found more to love in a theoretical version of America that departs dramatically from its current iteration, at least Obama presupposed that it would continue to exist. That’s more than you can say for Marjorie Taylor Greene.