On Nov. 6, President Obama won four more years in the White House, but what nation are we, exactly? This is the question New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow parses as he runs down the states, like Mississippi and Texas, where locals have signed secession petitions following the last election.
The gap is growing between liberals and conservatives, the rich and the not rich, intergenerational privilege and new-immigrant power, patriarchy and gender equality, the expanders of liberty and the withholders of it. And that gap, which has geographic contours — the densely populated coastal states versus the less densely populated states of the Rocky Mountains, Mississippi Delta and Great Plains — threatens the very concept of a United States and is pushing conservatives, left quaking after this month's election, to extremes.
Some have even moved to make our divisions absolute. The Daily Caller reported last week "more than 675,000 digital signatures appeared on 69 separate secession petitions covering all 50 states," according to its analysis of requests made through the White House's "We the People" online petition system.
Read Charles M. Blow's entire piece at the New York Times.
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