First up, a NYT Op-ed
NY Times, Kurt Andersen, 9 Aug 2026: Has America Already Undergone a Soft Breakup?
(I see NYT now says I have “unlimited” gift articles to share, while for the past couple years at least it’s been limited to 10/month.)
This is by the guy who wrote a book I partially summarized about a month ago, here called FANTASYLAND: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History.
Here he discusses a familiar topic, how America is so culturally fractured it cannot survive, and might be headed toward some kind of “civil war” or breakup.
He discusses Rush Limbaugh, Charlie Kirk, Marjorie Taylor Greene.
A national divorce — let alone a civil war — is, for now, the stuff of fiction. But while loose talk from rabble-rousers has distracted us, the nation has sunk, almost unnoticed, into an unspectacular yet profoundly strange new arrangement. It’s not yet a divorce; it’s more like a bitter, loveless marriage in which the parties stay technically but less and less enthusiastically united because splitting up is too complicated or dreadful or expensive.
(The link is to Andersen’s next book, a novel, on this very topic.)
We’ve been here before: in the first half of the 19th century, when Southern states invoked states’ rights as a means to defend slavery against the will of the rest of the country. Yet as tensions rose over the next three decades, presidents focused on preserving the peace and keeping the states united. Today, by contrast, we have a president apparently determined to widen the divide — and who has made it clear again and again that he will reward those states and cities that voted for him and severely punish the others for their perceived disloyalty.
But whenever Marjorie Taylor Greene or even Kurt Andersen discusses this, I immediately wonder, how could this possible work? The true divide is between the blue cities and the mostly empty red states. How would any kind of divide work??
Well, apparently other countries have reached different kinds of solutions to similar problems. The essay ends:
Perhaps states and regions could become much more independent. Like the regional autonomous communities in Spain, some of which collect nearly all the taxes their inhabitants pay and then forward a negotiated share to the national government. Or the cantons of Switzerland, which can divide or reconfigure, and each one decides whether newcomers become Swiss citizens.
Even that might not be enough. Someday down the line we may decide we have no choice but to call it quits. If so, I hope we could follow the lead of post-Soviet Czechoslovakia, whose 1993 breakup into two nations was so calm, it was called the Velvet Divorce, a kind of conscious national uncoupling. For our huge, heterogeneous country, it would be extremely difficult and painful. But in the long run, it might still be better for the kids.
\\\
So, here’s my insight of the past couple days. Why is there a divide at all? Why do there seem to be such extremes on the spectrum of human nature? Until now I’ve discussed this as an effect of the human tribe expanding out of Africa and settling the world, and as local tribes expanded into communities and nations, and as the global population expanded, inevitably came into contact with one another. For the sake of trade, they had to learn to get along. Put very crudely, those who were able to get along with outsiders prospered, and built our global civilization; those who did not stayed home and stewed in their juices, clamped down on their religions and their presumed superiority of their local tribe over all others.
Something about reviewing the Harari books recently triggered this insight.
The divide goes back to the Agricultural Revolution. That’s when humanity, until then tribes of hunter-gatherers roaming the African Savannah, some having expanded into other continents, split off, with some tribes having “discovered” agriculture and thereby settling into villages, with all the work of maintaining crops and tending animals like sheep. The settlers and the hunter-gatherers developed different ways of thinking. (Harari) The agriculturists settled into communities, had to learn to plan by taking seasons into account for crop planting, inventing geometry to calculate lot sizes for tax purposes, that were then kept track of by a bureaucracy to keep track of all that paperwork; how else could it work? At the same time such settlements came with problems that, over the millennia, humans have gradually solved. This trend of solving problems has built our modern industrial world. The hunter-gatherers resented that reduction of “freedom”. And do so to this day.
Will expand on this.
