Commentary
With the Civil War, America was split by region, north and south. Today it’s worse—the country is divided not just politically but by class, race, and sex, too. Left and right, blue and red, have different values and thus dream differently for themselves and their families and hold competing ideals for the country they share. It hardly comes as a surprise then that so many are asking whether we should part ways before the divide gets even worse.
“We are very much a divided country,” says F.H. Buckley, author of “American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup.” “We don’t agree about basic things. In the past, I think we all agreed about ends, about what we wanted of America, and we disagreed about how to get there. But now we disagree about ends; we disagree about the basic nobility of the American Revolution, about the founders of a country, about a lot of basic beliefs that formerly all were held in common, the idea that marriage is a good thing, and so on. And so, unsurprisingly, that’s led to people saying, ‘Do we really belong together in one country?’…