Ok, but none of that actually answers the question, does it?
What does it mean to ‘have a country’? What is ‘a country’, other than just lines on a map?
Is it common identity? Is it common culture? Is it shared purpose? Group identity is always a tension between in-group similarities and an out-group to contrast and oppose. The greater the perceived relative strength of the outside threat (or imagined threat), the stronger the internal cohesion. The greatest moment of recent internal cohesion we’ve had in the last 40 years was Sept 12, 2001, as people were forced to take the step past the initial reactions of the horrors of the previous day.
That’s not coincidental. Human beings, like other primates, are social creatures, but only within a certain group size. Past that Dunbar’s Number-type of scale, there needs to be externalities that force common interest.
And again, I’m not trying to start a fight, or lecture anyone. It’s a serious question that’s been weighing on my mind a lot as I consider things like ‘how do we move past MAGA?’ and ‘what can possibly come next?’, you know?
Historically, when great powers get to the point of being unchallenged… or feeling unchallenged… that seems to signal their fall… at least for a while. And it’s not to a real external threat, it’s to internal upheaval. The Fall of Rome came from the goths, sure… but from Visigoths already in the Empire, in essentially breakway provinces transitioning into the Visigoth and Ostrogoth kingdoms. Constantinople falls because of Ottoman cannons, but also because the Byzantines were weakened 150 years earlier when the city was sacked by Christian crusaders. China, over and over, fell to periods of dynastic upheaval from within.
The US has gotten into a lot of wars. For most of our history, we didn’t have the kind of military that let us feel unstoppable. We didn’t have a massive technological edge. And the information getting to the public was pretty well centralized into the large publication houses and ‘paper(s) of record’ of the day.
Since the end of the Cold War, we’ve had… moments, really, of unity. But now we’re into a period where… look, ignore Trump. Trump’s not the mastermind of anything. He’s the somewhat charismatic snake-oil frontman, but we all know it’s the Miller/Vance/Noem/Musk/Bovino etc crowd whispering in his ear to get him to put things into motion.
Most of them came of age at a time when US dominance was more or less a given. Sure, the older members of the cohort, the ones in their mid-50s, remember the tail end of the Cold War, but the US was the dominant partner in the West (and look at how they like to curry favor w/Putin, too. ‘Russia’ is a familiar dance partner for them). But the rest? The Wall came down while they were in middle school. They’ve lived in a unipolar world for longer than they’ve had fully-developed brains.
And since the 1980s, our cultural outlets have been fracturing and splintering. We’re not all watching the same 3 networks to provide those cultural moments. There is no ‘the last episode of M*A*S*H’ moment for them, or anyone younger, except 9/11. And at the same time, the growth of the internet has made us (in general) less connected to our immediate neighbors, more connected to the rest of the globe… but in a more diffuse, remote way.
In that framework… what is a ‘country’? How reasonable is it to even begin to expect unity and cohesion? And what’s to be done?
Serious questions. I wish I had anything even vaguely resembling an answer.
