Welcome (Back) to the Divided States of America

The U.S. is cracking along centuries-old cultural fault lines. We need quick action to mend its wounds.

As the United States celebrated its 241st birthday this week, its citizens would be forgiven for worrying that the union might not make it to its 250th.

Divided into increasingly hostile red and blue zones (places where one party and its ideas have been completely vanquished), humiliated by half-serious calls for its most populous states to secede, and governed by one of the most divisive and authoritarian figures in its history, this federation of ours is fraying, with enormous risks for ourselves and our world.

A Brief History of the Divided States of America

This is not the first time we’ve faced such a crisis. A hundred and fifty years ago, we couldn’t even celebrate the Fourth of July together, as hundreds of thousands of lowland whites in the defeated Confederacy turned their backs on the Stars and Stripes. For a half-century before that, they had celebrated the signing of the Declaration of Independence but extracted entirely different lessons than their counterparts in the Yankee North. Yankees venerated the second paragraph of the Declaration, with its proclamation of the equality of men, their inalienable rights, and government’s duty to secure them. Lowland Southerners preferred to pay homage to the first and last paragraphs: an assertion of…