I’m 30. I feel like no one around my age can possibly believe in American exceptionalism anymore. We’ve seen nothing but massive failure. These colossal national failures rendering the myth of American exceptionalism conclusively dead — the book took this as an assumption. I do think this myth of national unity lingers on in this sense of getting rid of Trump, getting things fixed, and that Joe Biden will unify the nation, which is malarkey, as they say. Other countries have these same massive social divisions that we do. I write at the end of the book that we point at countries like Syria or Iraq or Sudan as these post-colonial creations of former imperial masters who drew lines on a map and that perfectly well explains the U.S. Yes, we’ve survived for 250 years, I think that’s to some extent a fluke or based on odious moral compromises, but that’s what we are — a post-colonial nation that has these very arbitrary lines drawn. I think we’re much less exceptional than we thought, or it’s because of that inherent fragility of the union that it’s constantly threatening to break apart.TV: “United we stand, divided we fall,” like we’re all in this together. And that’s never been true. The slogan is kind of a shorthand for national unity but it was coined by a guy named John Dickinson who hoped it would raise support against British taxes. When push came to shove, he refused to sign the Declaration of Independence. He was the only person who refused to sign the declaration because he thought we would fall! And eventually there was this vicious civil war. I also mention in the book Hillary Clinton saying the country was more divided than we thought; I think that’s because politicians like her and everyone else they insist we are united, that we had a widely accepted liberalism or sense of good for the country. And obviously her defeat was shocking because it showed how deeply divided we really were. Trump had a better sense of this; he knows that we’ve always been divided. he has some other con in mind. Maybe doing these interviews just scratched his itch for feeling important. Maybe, asPolitico reported Those episodes caught my eye, and I wanted to bring them back to life because they suggested to me the contingency of American history and the chaotic nature of it and the ever-present possibility of it going to pieces. Only in the last three months have we seen that it’s possible it could happen again. The fact that there’s parallel and resonance between past and present is what really suggests to me there’s something to this idea of disunion. We use lots of different words, like fascism or authoritarianism, but we should also use disunion because there are all these hints we are going back to territory we were in before.TV: