I think I released my book about 18 months too early. I was talking about dangerous American divisions well before it was cool. In the last 10 days we’ve seen two stories go wildly viral, one in The Atlantic and the other in the New York Times, making the rather emphatic case that the United States is splitting in two. Red America and Blue America aren’t just divided, they’re separating politically and culturally into two different nations. 

Writing in The Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein highlighted a provocative thesis by Michael Podhorzer, a union strategist and chair of the Analyst Institute:

“When we think about the United States, we make the essential error of imagining it as a single nation, a marbled mix of Red and Blue people,” Podhorzer writes. “But in truth, we have never been one nation. We are more like a federated republic of two nations: Blue Nation and Red Nation. This is not a metaphor; it is a geographic and historical reality.”

Brownstein wrote before the Dobbs decision. Jonathan Weisman wrote in the NYT after Dobbs, and his diagnosis was also dramatic: