The Disunity Myth
America does not have a problem with so-called "disunity", because America is no longer a single nation. It has evolved into two nations governed by a single national government. Each election is hardly more than an effort by one of those nations to take power and depose the other. The hostility rachets up the tension before each election and makes it hardly more than a war of nerves carried on between sworn enemies.
The political parties do their best to gain control of our Supreme Court by proposing nominees who are little more than loyal party-hacks, to determine the judicial direction of our nation, in order to advance the causes favored by that party. That the nation's intellectuals and experts don't say more on this point should concern us. Should they persist in protecting the illusion that America remains a functioning nation? No way.
The Democrats call out the Republicans for enabling greed, racial injustice, inequality, and sexism, but they show more interest in dishing out payback rather than creating a separate nation from the Republican model. They have the theoretical nation already, based on a different-but-equal model, with a philosophical footing sharply differentiated from the Republican one; so why do they stay in an America that no longer works?
Americans live on borrowed time in this unstable situation. Again, America's intellectual giants do not want to rock the boat by serving up the mother of all reality-checks. Such negative talk would be bad for business—their business, anyway. Better to stay silent and hope it all blows over, which it won't, of course. No one wants to listen to Cassandra types.
The Jamaican Marcus Garvey grew up in poverty, but understood that nationhood is better than a minority status in someone else's country; so when he developed enough followers, the self-taught Garvey told them that "Nationhood is the highest ideal of all peoples." If they did not take the risk and declare independence from the Whites, they would be "at the mercy of the organized class for the next 100 years."
Nationhood provides for the protection of the individual as well as the community, Garvey said to them. The Slaves who fled the post-Civil War South established new lives in Liberia, a nation that defined their liberation in its name. The freed Slaves who remained in America, on the other hand, fell back into a second-class status in their relationship with the Whites, where they mostly remain today.
Americans from both political parties feel like minorities in someone else's country. They complain all the time about how much the government and the opposing party hates everything they stand for. From the serene disinterest of the stratosphere, it must sound like baby crows complaining about the feeding schedule. Nothing expresses helplessness like endless complaining.
The first-generation leaders of Israel were nearly all refugees of persecution in the Russian Empire and other nations in Eastern Europe. They had faced entrenched anti-semitism that deprived them of citizenship and a place in the networked society. They fled to Israel to escape the minority mind-set and to regain self-respect as citizens of a country. They experienced connectedness with their own passport, flag, and language—the tickets to first-classs citizenship. It gave them immeasurable self-confidence to regain identity and orientation.