Rhetoric of National Dissolution

Is it time to disolve these dis-United states?

I wrote this as an exercise: put the call down as if in earnest and see what the words alone could do without a policy behind them. That’s worth saying plainly, because what follows treats the call to dissolve these dis-United States as if I’d delivered it in dead seriousness—and it should. The rhetoric doesn’t check my sincerity before it starts working on the reader; a line built to convert frustration into historical mandate performs identically whether I post it in earnest or type it to test it. The hyphenated unmasking of the official name, the declaration that the hour has come—these do most of the work through three small lexical choices that deserve attention before any question of my intent.

The verb dissolve is what you do to a body of salt in water, to a marriage in court, to a parliament before new elections, to a corporation that has outlived its usefulness. The Declaration of Independence used precisely this verb when it announced that the colonies would dissolve the political bands which had connected them to another.

The proposal is therefore recursive: it turns the founding instrument’s own language against the entity that instrument founded. The republic was assembled by an act of dissolution, and the same operation is now proposed against the assembly. Whether this is poetic justice or empty parallelism depends on whether the conditions that justified severance the first time are credibly present again, or whether the rhyme is doing the work that argument should.

The hyphen in dis-United is the rhetorical hinge. By splitting the proper noun, I unmask a little of what the official name conceals. Compressed into that punctuation mark is the argument that union is the fiction and division is the fact, that the name has become the kind that lies, that honesty now requires the typographical surgery. This is powerful because it asks the reader to assent to a description before considering a prescription. Once you have accepted the dis-, the dissolve seems merely to formalize what is already true. The trick: any continental polity at any moment in its history could be hyphenated this way. Britain is dis-United, India is a dis-Union, France is dis-Republican. Disunity is the permanent condition of any state large enough to contain disagreement. The hyphen names something real but does not by itself argue that this real thing has reached a different threshold than in 1798 (the Alien and Sedition Acts and the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, the first serious argument that a state could nullify federal law), 1860, 1919 (the Palmer Raids and that year’s race riots), or 1968, each a moment when the union was visibly not united.

What “it is time” smuggles in is the claim that the threshold has now actually been crossed, that legitimate cohabitation is no longer possible, that further attempts at it are willful denial. This is the timer-has-run-out frame, and it has a long pedigree in revolutionary rhetoric, where the function of “now” is to convert ambient frustration into the feeling of historical mandate. The claim is rarely defended; it is performed. The signal that someone is making this move rather than arguing for it is the absence of any criterion by which the timing could be wrong. If it was not yet time in 1968 but is time now, what changed, and what would need to be different for the answer to revert? Without that, the temporal claim is decoration on a desire.

The harder condition underneath deserves to be heard rather than dismissed. Something real is being named here: a politics in which neither side believes the other is operating in good faith, in which institutions are experienced as captured by enemies, in which the sense of shared fate has thinned to the point that compromise feels like collaboration. People who call for dissolution are usually not strategists with maps of post-secession arrangements; they are expressing the exhaustion of imagining further accommodation with people they have come to regard as opponents rather than countrymen. That exhaustion is a fact about the country whether or not its proposed remedy is serious.

The remedy is rarely serious in the way it would need to be to survive contact with consequence. Dissolution of a continental power with integrated infrastructure, intermarried populations, a shared currency, a global military with nuclear weapons, and a federal benefits system that pays out to some sixty-seven million Americans a month through Social Security alone is not an act of housekeeping. It is the precondition for a humanitarian catastrophe whose victims would be disproportionately the people on the wrong side of whatever lines got drawn: the queer family in the rural county, the evangelical family in the coastal city, the immigrant household in either, the Indigenous nation whose territory would now be bisected by a new border. The clean image of two or several Americas dividing cleanly is the fantasy of people who imagine themselves and their kind as the median residents of the post-dissolution territories. The actual median residents of dissolved states are refugees.

The country has already answered this question once at terrible cost. The Civil War was the practical adjudication of whether the constitutional order permits unilateral exit, and the answer enforced at gunpoint was that it does not. To call again for dissolution is, whether I intend it or not, to reopen the file that Appomattox closed. That does not make the call illegitimate; history’s verdicts can be revisited. But it does mean that anyone issuing it owes the listener some account of how this iteration would not require what the last iteration required. Without that account, the call is a mood rendered as a proposal, an aesthetic of giving up dressed in the syntax of decision. That the mood behind these particular words was play rather than exhaustion changes nothing about what the words did on the page—which is the point of running the test at all. The rhetoric doesn’t ask, and doesn’t need, me to mean it.