If Americans were more honest, they would drop the word United from the name of their country. The States of America are disunited from one another by diverse political preferences and social attitudes as much as by geography. Now, when we say that the states are disunited, we imply that they once held together better than they do today. But did they? Let’s not overstate the strength of their erstwhile union. Before the Articles of Confederation in the late 18th century, the union of the British colonies along the Atlantic coast of the North American continent was aspirational. Since the ratification of the Constitution in 1787, the status of the states as members of a federation forming a cohesive nation has hovered between the notional and the immaterial. When the Southern states seceded in the 1860s, the putative national identity that had bound them to the Northern states was proven to have been as thin and fragile as everyone had feared. True, interstate transportation and commerce burgeoned after the Civil War (1861-1865), and advances in communication technology now reinforce the longstanding trend. We might be tempted to say that “cooperation among the states” has promoted American prosperity. But that would miss the mark: distinctions between the states are slight and irrelevant for many practical purposes. Americans can easily buy and sell over vast distances, driving from Seattle to Miami without having to certify their identity to border officials. Not since the 1960s have Americans argued and fought in the streets among themselves with such vehemence. The revival of interest in secession is understandable. Arguments for secession specifically by states, however, are misplaced. In Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union, published in August, journalist Richard Kreitner cites Calexit, the fledgling secession movement in California, and refers to “the increasingly geographic nature” of the partisanship that afflicts the nation. Of course, the geographic lines along which Americans are divided are far more numerous and intricate than the bright borders between states. Furthermore, one could argue, contra Kreitner, that the political and cultural polarisation that worries him (and all of us) transcends all manner of geographic boundaries as never before. For many Americans, perhaps most, especially those under 40, a state is more an incidental, legal construct than an organic sovereignty with a unique history and body of customs and traditions. A Republican suburbanite in Huntington, New York, may well feel a stronger kinship with his political brethren in Huntington Beach, California, on the opposite coast, than with his Democratic neighbours who belong to the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn, just down the road. For a geography of political polarisation in America today, look to demography. Where the population is dense, people are more likely to vote Democratic; where it’s sparse, Republican. We speak of “coastal elites” and think “left wing”, but Surf City, North Carolina, population 2,400, is as conservative as any small town in central Missouri, while St Louis is as left-leaning as any big city on the Eastern Seaboard. To represent Red (Republican) and Blue (Democratic) America on a map accurately, we would need to use dots or pixels, instead of filling in each state with a solid shade of either colour. That the Reds and the Blues find it so difficult to wall themselves off from each other, either in their physical environment or in cyberspace, exacerbates their mutual animus, which is no less destructive for being so often petty. History abounds with examples of the narcissism of small differences – the Irish versus the English, the Croats versus the Serbs. In Europe as well as in America, the centrifugal impulse opposes the centripetal impulse with increasing urgency, as the United Kingdom leaves the European Union, while Scotland threatens to leave the UK. Catalans clamour to secede from Spain. As it watches the national governments in Budapest and Warsaw lapse into forms that resemble more their Warsaw Pact precursors than the liberal democracy that the European Union espouses, Brussels discusses the possibility of excommunicating Hungary and Poland.