“We are one American nation. We must unite. We have to unify. We have to come together.”

Every faction in our irreparably fractious and fragmented country calls for unity, following events that demonstrate just how disunited the United States of America is.

They all do it.

Calls for unity come loudest from the party of submissives—the GOP. The domineering party is less guilt-ridden about this elusive thing called “unity.”

Democrats just blame Republicans for its absence in our polity and throughout our increasingly uncivil society.

These days, appeals to unity are made by opportunistic politicians, who drape themselves in the noble toga of patriotism on tragic occasions. The latest in many was the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre of Oct. 27.

In the name of honesty—and comity—let us quit the unity charade.

The U.S. is not united. Neither is America a nation in any meaningful way. It hasn’t been one for a long time.

Consider: In the late 1780s, Americans debated whether to nationalize government or keep it a decentralized affair. The discussion was one in which all early Americans partook, nationwide.

Think about the degree of unity that feat required!

The eternal verities of republicanism and limited government were understood and accepted by all Americans. The young nation’s concerns centered on the fate of freedom after Philadelphia. (The Anti-Federalists, the unsung heroes who gave us the Bill of Rights, turned out to be right.)

Around the time The Federalist Papers were published in American newspapers—Americans were a nation in earnest.

For it takes a nation to pull that off—to debate a set of philosophical and theoretical principles like those instantiated in these Papers, Federalist and Anti-Federalist.

The glue that allowed so lofty a debate throughout early America is gone (not to mention the necessary gray matter).

The Tower of Babel that is 21st century America is home not to 6 million but 327 million alienated, antagonistic individuals, diverse to the point of distrust.

Each year, elites pile atop this mass of seething antagonists another million newcomers.

Democrats, who control the intellectual means of production—schools, social media, TV, the print press, the publishing houses, think tanks, the Permanent Bureaucracy—they insist mass immigration comports with “who we are as a people.”

The last is yet another hollow slogan—much like the unity riff.

Modern-day Americans, some of whose ancestors were brought together by a “profound intellectual and emotional attachment to individual liberty,” possess little by way of social capital to unify them.

We don’t share the same core values, morals or mannerisms. We don’t revere the same heroes. We tear down other countrymen’s historic monuments. (As governor, Nikki Haley, hardly a member of The Mob, led the charge in South Carolina.) We display different regalia. Our attachment to one language, English, is tenuous at best, and waning.

Surveys suggest Americans today would rather avoid one another, choosing instead to hunker down unhappily in front of the telly.

As Americans, what unites us most is our passion for, and patterns of, consumption. America is an economy, not a nation.

Unite we Americans do over the state of our sovereign debt—it’s bad! But not over what it means to be a sovereign people.

For half the country, sovereignty entails hordes of defiant scofflaws breaking the border. For the other half, sovereignty means borders. (And some respite, maybe even a moratorium on the incessant influx.)

People become rightfully resentful of others when forced into relationships against their will.

Signs of the attendant, endemic civil unrest are already evident.

Don’t knock the cliché. Good fences (or walls) do indeed make good neighbors, within countries and between them.

A sense of security and sovereignty are essential to the health of individuals and nations alike. Developmental health in kids is predicated on respecting their bodies and their boundaries.

Wait a sec: Kids need boundaries but the communities in which they reside don’t?

Why do boundaries or borders become cardinal (racist) sins when staked out by communities? And why is trespass a praiseworthy creed?

A peaceful society is one founded on voluntary associations, not forced integration.

By extension, if the Christian pastry man doesn’t care to bake a cake for a gay wedding; leave him be. There are plenty cake-makers who’ll cater for your event.

Where’s the morality and munificence in compelling a service from an unwilling service provider? Servitude not service iswhat the gay master is extracting from the baker subordinate.

People are harming nobody when they withhold their wares. It’s their right. The baker owns his labor and his property. Leave him alone.

Currently, our overlords in Deep State D.C. insist that because we’re so rich and innately mean, they should decide what to do with the lion’s share of our earnings (including to distribute it to the world.)

No need. Americans are terribly generous—and most generous when left to choose their charities.

We are most generous to strangers in need when they, in return, don’t encroach on our space, and respect the natural rights we have in our person and property.

Besides, people get mad, even murderous, when Big Brother tells them who to shower with brotherly love.

An uneasy co-existence, not coerced unity, is the only hope for calm in our country.

Respectful disunity is the only way forward.

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Ilana Mercer’s weekly, paleolibertarian think piecehas been going strong since 1999. She is the author of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa” (2011) & “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016) &. She’s onTwitter, Facebook,Gab & YouTube