One Nation After All
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/06/25/books/one-nation-after-all.html
THE NEXT AMERICAN NATION The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution. By Michael Lind. 436 pp. New York: The Free Press. $25.
TRY the following thought experiment: Suppose the United States to have been overrun or forcibly dismembered as a state. Would that much-invoked nation, "the American People," persist in maintaining and upholding its proud identity, as did the Poles between 1795 and 1919? Or would it become fissile and splintered, like the former Yugoslavia after 1991? If you incline to the second answer, then you are a Balkanist: one of the pessimistic tendency that sees pluribus emerging from unum in a welter of competing sectional, regional, ethnic and linguistic claims...
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