Will the United States Disintegrate? | National Review
What is now conventional wisdom, however, was nothing of the sort when my essay came out early in 2001. Numerous commentators, among them David Brooks and Andrew Sullivan, dismissed my claim as alarmism. In Brooks s words: There is no fundamental conflict. There may be cracks, but there is no chasm. Except for Michael Barone, who spotted the cultural split first and wrote about it prior to the election, the only prominent person to think otherwise was Gertrude Himmelfarb, the great cultural and intellectual historian, who wrote in Commentary, I entirely (well, almost entirely) agree with Terry Teachout. While she was reluctant to go so far as to declare that America had split into two nations, preferring instead to say that we were one nation, two cultures, the title of her 2000 book on the subject, Himmelfarb was in no doubt that the country was undergoing a profound and fateful cultural transformation, and differed with me only in what to call it.
RTWT