We should drop the idea of the United States of America being one country

05 December 2022

Among the Editorial Board’s myriad mandates, as I see them, is bursting dogma, flaying stigma, and otherwise defenestrating ideas that make cohering American politics harder than necessary.

For instance: The United States is one country.

Nope.

That we are not one country is evident to anyone who has traveled widely around the country, who has lived and worked in various parts of the country or who has bothered to learn the country’s history.

Indeed, we are held together loosely by a constitution, but our founding document has been used to sow division as much as, or more than, to cement unity. Meanwhile, there isn’t really an America so much Americas that pretend to be more in line than they are. They pretend because those Americas might be different if they stopped.

Real sovereign units, made-up bigger one

That we are not one country is evidenced also by the early party primary states. Iowa (first) is different from New Hampshire (second), which are different from South Carolina (third) and Nevada (fourth).

Sure, voters there call themselves Democrats, but they are so distinct by geography, culture and politics as to be semi-autonomous zones. Their states, moreover, are more like countries in the European Union, nation-states inside a larger, overarching and made-up unit.

The differences quickly present themselves. Iowa Democrats want the party's national leaders to address climate change and secure human rights. South Carolina Democrats rarely share lofty goals. Theirs are defensive – eg, preventing GOP-controlled state governments from making their lives harder than they already are.

The national Democrats are rethinking the order of primary states. According to the Post, the president wants South Carolina first, New Hampshire and Nevada second, Georgia and after that Michigan.

But beyond the symbolic, which isn’t nothing, this order or that order probably doesn’t matter. Democrats in South Carolina are going to vote like Democrats in South Carolina, not like Democrats in Iowa.

We pretend the order influences the outcome, but it really doesn’t, because that would require the United States to be one country.

Nope.

A fictional community

If you do not understand that the United States not one country, you may find yourself confused and asking why, when national polls show overwhelming support for reproductive rights, the GOP is dead-set on the opposite. They seem bent of the ruination of young women’s bodies for the sake of protecting cell clusters that aren’t human yet.

A poll showing national support for, say, bronco busting, while popular in regions like Texas and the American southwest, won’t mean a thing to the highly concentrated and densely packed residents in the tristate area that links Connecticut, New York and New Jersey. If they outlaw bronco busting, nothing can stop them, though it contravenes the will of a national democratic majority.

States that have outlawed or restricted abortion don’t care – don’t need to care – about what a majority of Americans believes is right and good in a national survey, because a national survey measures the opinion of a political fiction, not a real political community.

Liberals by their nature envision a true e pluribus unum, but liberals should remember that that is, and may always be, an work in progress. Unity is a noble aspiration, not a concrete fact. As long as the United States is a de facto federation of (maybe) a dozen political zones – though not legal ones – unity might always prove elusive.

An artifice of law

Even the concept of states distorts reality.

There’s 50, but what’s the practical difference between Mississippi and Alabama, or Connecticut and Rhode Island or the Dakotas?

I’m sure residents there have strong opinions. But I’m also sure that, to national political figures, those distinctions are invisible. From a national viewpoint, there aren’t 50 states so much as (maybe) dozen political regions that, when cobbled together, form the United States.

The United States as one country comprising 50 states is an artifice of law and political convenience more than it is a description of how we function politically in our respective politically communities.

Don’t believe it? Why is the Mason-Dixon line where it is (the southern border of Pennsylvania and the northern border of West Virginia and Maryland)? It’s not a land mass like rivers or mountains.

It’s merely line drawn on the map – a legal and political demarcation – that once separated non-enslaving states from enlaving states. It is a product of democratic politics, not the result of natural causes.

Indeed, all borders are thus.

That goes for borders, too

What’s the difference between a border dividing American states and a border dividing nation-states, like the United States and Mexico?

None that are serious. They are fakes drawn for the convenience of leaders and communities to make sense of and identify themselves coherently, to administer and enforce respective laws and so on.

If you’re going to have a nation-state, which is what western countries have been doing since the Enlightenment, that nation-state requires national borders. Otherwise, there’s little point to it. Nation-states aren’t always artificial. (Eg, England.) But their land borders always are. They are products of politics, first and last.

Donald Trump was fond of saying that you don’t have a country if you don’t have borders. But Borders are the least important aspect of the character of any country, because they are legal and political fictions.

We pretend – well, fascists like Trump pretend - that the US-Mexican border is natural, as if God gave it to us, as if an abomination to tamper with it, as if a weak defense were a sin.

But the only thing natural about the US-Mexican border is the Rio Grande, and given the river dries up every year, it’s not even that.

We act like billions sent to the border, for the purpose of “securing it,” will somehow protect American values, identity, even destiny. That’s a lot to ask for, because the border was arbitrarily created.

Like the United States.

That the United States is not only one country doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think of it that way. But whatever utility there is to that idea is undermined by today’s United States Supreme Court.

It’s like the court won’t allow us to be one nation, indivisible.

The court’s rightwing supermajority has been on a tear lately, as in tearing up federal laws and federal court precedents like Roe that had in effect served as the glue that held the 50 states together as one.

The trend started in 2013 with the Shelby ruling. That’s the one that said states with a history of racial animus in government policy no longer have racial animus. Where once those states had to get clearance from the US Department of Justice before changing their elections laws, they can go ahead and so whatever they want.

Since then, states (mostly southern) have enacted laws that erode the power of racial minorities, deepen the white-power status quo and lay the foundation for what are becoming quasi-apartheid states that are being organized to deprive majorities of their political power.

The court has also aided in quasi-apartheid states by allowing them to gerrymander themselves so they can be run by a ruling minority party that does not fear the consequences of democratic politics.

This fact alone – that states such as Wisconsin, Ohio, Texas and Florida barely reach a definition of republican government – is another reason for the rest of us to drop the idea of the United States being one country. There is no America. There are Americas.

Pretending otherwise warps our ability to make sense of ourselves.

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