Although we take our nation-state for granted, it is good to remember that a nation-state is not an organic creature. It does not form naturally from its constituent parts. A nation-state is very much a mass fiction, held together largely by a history, a language, a set of values, a religion, a common project, an economic system, a cultural heritage, a political arrangement, and a shared regard among its members. The Southern states whose leaders and symbols are now roundly despised seceded from the still fledgling American nation-state not one hundred years after its birth. But those Southern states had more in common with the North than any of us have in common with one another now. The nation-state forged in civil war is crumbling around us in pre-civilizational recrudescence.
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