Bill McKibben at Mother Jones dipped his toe in the water yesterday with a piece titled “Will Trump Force America to Break Up?“.
It’s pretty good.
The closing paragraph does a decent job of summing up the current situation:
Maybe we’ll figure out something else to bring us back together. The American idea is worth fighting for. But not indefinitely. It’s possible we may honor it best by remembering that its early chapters were written by relatively small numbers of people in a relatively small place. Everything is bigger now, of course, except our ideas.
Yeah.
That’s about right.
The idea of the United States as he describes it is worth fighting for, though I think the time for that idea as a single country has likely passed.
When almost half the country votes for Trump after having already seen what he was like as President for one term, and a quarter or so of the country continues to support him even as he sends troops into Los Angeles (and claims success before they even arrive), I honestly don’t see how the situation can be salvaged as a single country.
And I’m not convinced that it should be.
There are many different conceptions of what this “American idea” actually is, and apparently a quarter of the country has come around to thinking that it can encompass a military dictatorship.
And I don’t really see a way to share a country with that.
