"Turning to the United States, he points to several possible fractures. He notes that bankruptcy is often a feature of national crackup, and right now the U.S. current account imbalance, and the deficits in the federal budget, are seriously big. Then there is the whole red/blue thing. More originally, he notes that the many treaties that the U.S. government wrote, signed (and then, mostly, broke) with various native groups, including hundreds of Indian tribes and Native Hawaiians, could come back to haunt us, as they have in Australia and New Zealand."

"He also touches on the pressures of a large Hispanic immigration, and the difficulties many of these residents are having in terms of success in America (as seen, for example, in high school drop-out rates).

"There are lots and lots of pressures here: Is it inconceivable, he asks, that some combination of all these stresses could fracture the American polity? In an example of kind of oddball factoid that Enriquez can come up with every other paragraph or so, he notes that not a single American president has been born and died under the exact same flag (because the number of stars on it kept changing)."

"There's a lot of ties that continue to bind in the United States, even when the national political atmosphere is toxic (at local and state levels, it is considerably less so). What are some of these ties? Well, a common language; a common belief in freedom; a strong work ethic; and simple patriotism."

Arf