I could reduce my post to a more simplistic metaphor, by suggesting that America could simply have grown into too large a creature to stay completely healthy for so long (biological organisms don't scale up in size either) under the kind of stress being placed on it by the higher order effects of breakneck technological progress.
If not for the political events of the 19th century, and if we weren't a superpower with a massive military-industrial complex, I'd say we'd have gone back to being a bunch of mostly sovereign states (or confederacies of 'states') by now....
If the United States seems to be held together politically only very haphazardly, it's simply because many of the pieces which now hold it up were retrofitted out of some perhaps temporary but dire necessity, onto a not-so adaptable foundation. So when things don't work out for the best for everybody, it is tragic but not surprising that there are parties who would react to the less than beautiful resulting structure of our politics by tearing large chunks of it down....
If not for the political events of the 19th century, and if we weren't a superpower with a massive military-industrial complex, I'd say we'd have gone back to being a bunch of mostly sovereign states (or confederacies of 'states') by now....
If the United States seems to be held together politically only very haphazardly, it's simply because many of the pieces which now hold it up were retrofitted out of some perhaps temporary but dire necessity, onto a not-so adaptable foundation. So when things don't work out for the best for everybody, it is tragic but not surprising that there are parties who would react to the less than beautiful resulting structure of our politics by tearing large chunks of it down....