The psychologist John Gottman said that nothing is so destructive to a marriage as contempt. Couples can come back from many sorts of conflicts, but not festering disgust — a sense, by one or both people, that the other is beneath them. That’s why, if blue and red America were spouses, the relationship would look hopeless. Call it irreconcilable differences.
For at least the last decade, a florid, aggressive contempt has been a constant in our politics. Donald Trump, after all, doesn’t just shower liberal cities and states with insults (and, in a demented A.I. video he posted, with excrement). His presidency has been devoted to punishing the places that didn’t vote for him, including by withholding health care and disaster funding. One of the things his voters have long loved about him is the humiliation and despair he causes their fellow citizens.
Many of those Trump partisans are still smarting over Hillary Clinton calling some of them “deplorables.” For decades they’ve been seething at the disrespect they feel emanating from America’s cultural capitals. It seems obvious to me that blue America is more abused than abuser, but that doesn’t really matter; the impossibility of coming to any agreement about the commensurability of our grievances just underlines the toxicity of the relationship.
Conscious uncoupling, however, isn’t easy with deeply intertwined populations that have no neat border between them. The idea of a national divorce periodically crops up in our politics — Marjorie Taylor Greene repeatedly called for one when she was in Congress — but it never goes anywhere because it’s unworkable. Unfortunately, the status quo seems unworkable, too. We are mutually hostile communities yoked together in a way that thwarts each faction’s ideals about a decent society. In the absence of any clear path forward, fiction becomes the outlet for this sense of intolerable stuckness, for imagining either violent catharsis or escape.
Two buzzy new novels take place against the backdrop of an American crackup — Kurt Andersen’s “The Breakup,” published this week, and Emily St. John Mandel’s “Exit Party,” out in September. They join a small canon of fiction about American dissolution created in the last decade, which includes novels like Omar El Akkad’s “American War” and Catherine Lacey’s “Biography of X,” the TV version of “The Handmaid’s Tale” and Alex Garland’s film “Civil War.” What makes “The Breakup” and “Exit Party” different from other recent civil war speculations is a sense that coming apart might be for the best.
Marriage is an oft-used metaphor for the United States, and Andersen, a founder of Spy magazine and a former New York magazine editor in chief, takes it as a starting point. Set largely in 2045, “The Breakup” follows a politically heterogeneous couple, Asher and Natalie, whose separation coincides with America’s national divorce. Part of their rupture stems from their differing attitudes toward what the book calls Disunion. Asher, a Jewish progressive most at home in cities, is basically glad to be rid of the right-wing territories that break away to form the Free American Republic. Natalie, the sort of anti-woke classical liberal who in our time might write for The Free Press, mourns the end of America. Unable to bear their smug San Francisco environs, she decamps to Tennessee, where she grew up.
A few things about “The Breakup” irritated me. It’s full of likely anachronisms: I find it easier to believe that the United States will come apart than that people in 2045 will still text one another fire emojis or say “spill the tea” when they mean gossip. The book is also rather too full of pat liberal wish fulfillment. Cut off from blue-state largess, the Free American Republic struggles with economic crisis and emigration. Montana, suffering “secessionists’ remorse,” tries to rejoin a United States that has just elected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez president.
But I appreciated Andersen’s attention to the banal bureaucratic details of Disunion. There’s a civil war in “The Breakup,” but a relatively small one; Americans just aren’t that dedicated to keeping the nation together. The problems of unwinding the country are primarily logistical, like how to link blue cities in red states — called I.M.R.s, or independent metro regions — to the United States mainland. Many of these questions are handled, in typical American fashion, by lawyers who find in Disunion a lucrative new market.
So while national divorce in “The Breakup” is sad and at times gruesome, it’s not completely cataclysmic. In the universe of the novel, the United States is most dystopian when it’s still together.
The same is true, more subtly, of Emily St. John Mandel’s “Exit Party.” St. John Mandel wrote gorgeously about a postapocalyptic world in “Station Eleven,” her 2014 book about a civilization unraveled by a pandemic. Given that book’s prescience, it’s a little unnerving that she has now written about civil war. “The United States had come undone following a coup d’état,” she tells us on the first page. The story begins with a party in Los Angeles to celebrate the lifting of a curfew in the newly independent California Republic.
St. John Mandel’s post-civil-war America is a brutal place. Los Angeles is full of shantytowns and refugees. In the middle of America, we soon learn, things are worse, as rival militias scrap over territory. Still, there’s hope in the new configuration. “I know countries don’t last forever, and there’s always going to be new ones,” says a guest at the party, “but it feels like a miracle, right?”
During the first Trump term, people often said they felt we’d veered onto a bad timeline. “Exit Party” dramatizes that notion, and as the book goes on, it starts to seem that the timeline in which America cracks apart might not be the worst one. “There was a world where my homeland had fractured into disarray, and another where my homeland had closed like a fist,” says one character.
Our constitutional system protects us from each other, but its rigidity — the near impossibility of passing constitutional amendments, the structural bias against cities — has also come to feel like a cage. “The Breakup” and “Exit Party” suggest that it’s easier to imagine a future full of possibility outside this system than in it. “It does seem like people are getting increasingly impatient, and I think the novelists are picking up on that,” Richard Kreitner, the author of “Break It Up: Secession, Division and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union,” told me.
Kreitner pointed out that stories of disunion proliferated during other moments of national strife. He wrote in Slate that years before the Civil War, Southerners wrote novels about secession and sectional bloodshed. Amid the upheavals of the 1970s, there was another spate of books imagining the end of the United States, including “Ecotopia,” about a breakaway West Coast environmental paradise, and the white supremacist “The Turner Diaries,” which continues to inspire the far right.
Fiction doesn’t necessarily show us the future, but it can be an early warning system, one that detects volatile, taboo longings well before they turn into a political program. There’s probably no way for red and blue America to get free of each other, not without a level of bloodshed and ruination that would leave everyone far worse off than we are now. If fantasies of ending the union look tantalizing, though, it’s a sign of how loveless it’s become.
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