Bands, Bonds, and Affections

Nearly as soon as human societies began organizing themselves in nations, they adopted a word to describe getting out of them. Although secession and separatism remain thorny concepts to define, as the era of revolutionary nationalism began, secession began denoting a people and a place, a demos attached to a space, a group leaving a nation and taking part of it with them. Separatism, both in practice and imagination, has been conspicuous in the American national experience. Questions about the boundaries of national union, about the consent to be governed, about the limits of freedom, and about remedies to polarization sprout in every democracy. Those questions are given particular shape in the key words, narratives, lines of argument, shared histories, vaunted heroes, fallen villains, and nation-defining acts of particular political cultures. Since the beginning, separatists have used distinctly American symbols to unmake the nation.