The true tragedy is that the fascist right thrives on the deception of the religious faithful and under-educated poor. At the same time, neo-liberals and moderates have gone along with underfunding education for half a century. All the while the liberal left has outright fought against multiple attempts at meaningful education reform and standardization.

Poor and middle-income conservatives are duped into policies that go against their own interests by fascists wielding less important culture war issues as weapons. While the left has been tricked into building those very same weapons, the culture war issues that are then very effectively used to destroy them.

Liberals have just as much to blame, if not more, for our current state as conservatives do. Decades of elitism, "fly-over country" politics, neo-liberal free trade policies, and economic decline in the heart of the nation have gradually alienated vast swaths of the country's electorate. The left's elevation of social policies over economic ones has left many voters out in the cold looking for anyone who will hear their voices about the issues they actually care about that affect their day-to-day lives.

The complete detachment of left messaging from the realities of life of the vast number of Americans is at the heart of the rise of politicians such as Trump, DeSantis and MTG. If the left hadn't begun to turn its back on the actual middle-class blue-collar moderate population in the '90s the right would have never gained the support it has.

So while the right might be the ones calling for a national divorce, the left are the ones that went out for a pack of smokes one afternoon and never came back.