I agree completely. It’s hard for us to imagine seeing it break up but there is nothing that prevents that except our general desire to live together.
I think large democracies with functioning governments are very unstable over long time horizons. The reason I mention functioning is that if the government of a large democracy is largely non-functional than you can mostly keep doing whatever you want with whatever cultural norms you have where you live. But a functional one will actually pass laws and actually enact things that affect your life that you may disagree with - look at the current abortion stuff. There is no reconciliation to be had on many of these issues. Or look at the Republicans rhetoric around the debt limit “they’ll have to do it without us” - yikes.
The US has lasted as long as it has because for most of the time the country was somewhat homogenous and where it wasn’t you could “go fuck off into the woods” and nobody would bother you. With that being less of a possibility the country was always on a collision course for instability, but WW2 and the Cold War kept people united around a common enemy that threatened basically held beliefs. With that gone we will either have a new uniting enemy, or we’ll eventually just form some different governments.
1: https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2012/11/14/good-question-can-...
> It’s hard for us to imagine seeing it break up but there is nothing that prevents that except our general desire to live together.
That thing that prevents it is evidently the [EDIT: Supreme Court's interpretation of the] Constitution, so it's not just a matter of losing that general desire to live together. We'd have to at the very least go through the difficult process of amending the Constitution to allow it, in order to actually legally break the union up.
Laws don't prevent things.
Laws provide a justification for people who want to prevent things fo act to prevent them.
If there is no will, the law does nothing.
The former Spanish colonies from Mexico to Argentina were part of the same empire, speak the same language, derive their legal systems from the same framework, but they shattered into 20 different states and even led wars against one another.
The only attempt to build something bigger out of them, Greater Colombia, only lasted from 1819 to 1831, and the country split precisely on the centralist vs. federalist question.
In contemporary intellectual climate, it is almost a heresy to say this aloud, but American political model proved to be messy but durable. Of course, it may yet split on the social network toxicity much like it did split in 1860, but its longevity is pretty significant.
Of course, it helped that U.S. is isolated from other powers of the world by two great oceans. Invasion by an external enemy was by far the most frequent cause of problems in my corner of the world. Being located right in the center of a historically violent continent is a recipe for trouble.