A popular truism of the day is how divided we are as a nation. President-elect Joe Biden ran his winning campaign on the promise to unify and heal. Yet internal disagreement and accompanying fear and suspicion have been present throughout much of our history.
We can, in fact, see these fears as having structured the very Constitution that we use to define ourselves as a country, and thus it structures our contemporary political conflicts. For example, the recognized need for a stronger national government motivated the constitutional convention , but the fear of such a government helped create the system of federalism that strives to divide and share powers between the federal and state governments.
We were therefore moving toward becoming one nation at the same time that we were creating a system that preserved our separation. The United States remained a plural, and not a singular, noun until the Civil War’s conclusion nearly 80 years later. Lincoln transitioned from referring to the country as a collective “union,” to a more unified “nation” over the war’s course. While the language might have changed, the reality and structure of separation remained, and it has enabled the means and organization for […]
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