This Is Not One Nation
It’s not the first time the United States has been so divided, but putting this moment in the same sentence with the Civil War is distinctly not good.
When South Carolina seceded from the Union in December 1860, its leaders believed the state could do so on reasonable grounds: South Carolina had joined the Union by choice, and it could leave by choice. As the Confederacy formed around South Carolina, the South became, for a few years, a realized nation in all facets but the cartographic. Fighting to preserve the Union was partly about slavery as an institution but certainly about slavery as a political issue; if you can quit the nation when your side loses an election, then democracy is reduced to obsolescence.
The North, eventually and at great cost, won the war to save the Union. And yet, in a federation like the United States, the push and pull between local sovereignty and national authority is baked into the country’s DNA. This tension has lingered since at least the inception of the Continental Army in 1775, and it continues to stir our discourse now. The language has evolved, and the symbols have acquired new layers of meaning — there is certainly a deep irony in seeing Confederate flags at MAGA events — but the DNA remains.
Despite the easy narrative, North against South has never represented the singular dividing line in this country. It is merely one example (others include city-versus-rural and coastal-versus-interior) of a large nation separated by physical space — physical space that means something.
In civilizations the world over, geographic distinctions have the power to inspire or impose metaphysical sensations: community, tribalism, collaboration, distrust, perspective, oblivion. Now and throughout the history of this country, your inherited or chosen physical space says something vital about who you are and who you aren’t.
What distinguishes this moment are current social phenomena, like urbanization and digital citizenship, which have organized populations more homogeneously than before. The relationship between population density and Democratic vote share, for instance, is profoundly linear, as is its opposite. And these trends appear to be self-reinforcing.
Names, causes, and coalitions change. Maybe the South shall not rise again. But in its place, and in the place of forebears from the North, conservatives and liberals in the modern United States are proof that this is once more a country of more than one nation.
It’s not about maps.
Borders do not constitute a nation. In attempting to explain what a nation is, Benedict Anderson coined a vital term with the title of his 1983 book, Imagined Communities. In the case of, say, Chileans, Anderson would argue, they are not Chilean because they live in Chile, nor because they are governed by the government of Chile.
Chileans are only Chilean because they imagine two things:
- They are members of a political community called Chile; and
- There are other Chileans simultaneously imagining the same thing.
“Members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” (Anderson, 5–6)
Or: Teamwork makes the dream work.
You can look up “USA” and learn about its history, geography, demographic statistics, and cultural touchstones, but you won’t find a definition for it. What makes it a nation is that citizens accept the premise of its nation-ness and share a sense of belonging.
In dangerously straightforward times, like during World War II, or in the aftermath of 9/11, our unique thoughts about the country and each other are often not so unique: We’re in this together; Tolerate, if not love, your neighbor; Kumbaya. Polarization drops. Esprit de corps rises. Our civic imaginations overlap.
In less straightforward times, maintaining a familiar semblance of the nation still relies on our imaginations overlapping enough to allow for some kind of collective oneness. In this, a less straightforward time, we are watching the country, an enumerated collection of borders and laws, become less and less synonymous with the characteristics of a nation — which are what, exactly?
“America” is just a word.
Much has been made of the 2016 parallels between Trump voters and Brexit’s Leavers. While the circumstances were not entirely the same, both campaigns appealed to similar demographics (older, whiter, less urban, lower educational attainment), engaged in egregious acts of dishonesty, and sent shockwaves throughout the old world order by their victories. Each outcome carried with it an ever-expanding panoply of domestic concerns, but together they were products of their global time, signals of alignment in a cacophonously noisy world.
As humans, materials, and ideas circulate the planet with increasing speed, official national identities do less to create common cause between two people than age, race, education, and environment.
Being a nation, to a large extent, requires being able to see yourself in your fellow citizens, or what Anderson calls “communion.” Let’s say I don’t feel communion with people from other countries, like Iran or Australia. Perhaps, here in the United States, I don’t feel that exact brand of fellowship with every last Oregonian.
But what if I feel no connection to the entire state of Indiana and each person who lives there? Or all corners of the Deep South on principle? Or every city dweller? Or all Trump voters? Or anyone who could support the party of Satan-worshipping child torturers?
When the possibility of communion between two individuals extends beyond the capacity of their respective imaginations, they are no longer living in the same nation. At a certain scale, this is happening within countries at all times.
When the possibility of communion between large groups of people becomes similarly unfathomable, they, too, are no longer living in the same nation. At a certain scale, this is how democracy dies — like when, say, forces that would see election results overturned brand an entire state’s vote tally unconstitutional.
The constitution is bedrock Americana, a biblical text for US citizenship that is sanctified, adapted, twisted, or ignored as if it were scripture. Arguing to discount enormous numbers of votes on “constitutional” grounds is a coded, plausibly unconscious rationalization: The constitution protects American votes, and not all of us are American.
Today, which pair paints a clearer picture of a unified nation: Democrats and Republicans, or Trump voters and Brexiteers?
If, on a mission to learn more about us, aliens dock their spaceship in the United States tomorrow, they will have a wide range of definitions from which to select. After all, “God Bless America” and “This Is America” are both about the same country.
They’re just about very different nations.
