During my freshman year of college in my political science 101 class, the president of our university, a former governor and senator, asked me the following question, which kind of shocked me.

He asked,

what do you think the legacy of the United States will be

after it's gone?

Shocking to me because of that time the idea that the United States would ever cease to exist

had never popped into my mind. That almost felt blasphemous. I hadn't really

considered it previously but if you'd pressed me on the query, at the time I probably

would have said that, well, America will just stick around, looming large and kick an ass until

Jesus comes back to declare closing time.

Or, Starfleet and the United Federation of planets subsume it and render nation-states moot. But the idea that America might one day go out

of business or be conquered by the Visigoths or something was jarring.

And it's a notion which seems a lot less abstract

and hypothetical to me now than it did 20 years ago.

Polling increasingly indicates a populace which views their political opponents as evil-soaked

existential threats.

I have been on at least three dates in the last three years where I had no idea what the girl's

religion was or wasn't didn't come up but her politics that was front and

center and important I very much know the politics of most people right when I

meet them. They make it very clear to me. I do think garden variety Americans are

less ideologically rigid and more temperamentally moderate than we're led to believe, but that is not true of the political and media classes.

People and politics and media both are demonstrably more partisan than everybody else, hyper-ideological, and despise the enemy team.

Twitter pundits are bandying the term national divorce around, and I keep seeing think pieces about the probability of Civil War

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