One hundred and fifty-five years ago this week, Abraham Lincoln traveled to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to give a two-minute speech. He and other dignitaries gathered to honor at least 23,000 Union soldiers who gave their lives on the field of battle that summer. Those young men fought, Lincoln said, so that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” They died so that the Union and American democracy itself could live.

This week’s New York magazine offers a rebuttal of sorts. Journalist Sasha Issenberg published a lengthy meditation that asks whether the United States should be broken up. He readily admits that this is not a new idea. Contrarian writers revisit the idea every few years as they fret about the nation’s political divisions. Fringe secessionist movements in Alaska, California, and Vermont wield virtually no political influence. Presidential elections, where the nation’s red/blue divide is laid bare, often lead to an uptick in chatter on whether our politics can long endure.

Issenberg, to his credit, adds a new twist on the concept. Most of the article is framed around interstate compacts, a constitutional mechanism that allows the states to create binding legal agreements amongst themselves. Issenberg fleshes out the idea that Congress could effectively transfer its interstate policy-making powers to the states by giving them a blank check to write these compacts. (Currently, Congress has to sign off on any substantive agreement between the states.) Red states and blue states could then band together with like-minded neighbors to pass their own common laws on healthcare, organized labor, housing, the environment, and more.

This doesn’t sound like secessionism, of course. But Issenberg acknowledges that it may lead there. “It may be time to take the country apart and put it back together, into a shape that better aligns with the divergent, and increasingly irreconcilable, political preferences of its people—or at least to consider what such a future might look like, if for no other reason than to test our own resolve,” he wrote. “An imagined trial separation, if you will.”

Yet it’s hard to look at this hypothetical and not come away convinced that a truly united United States is vastly better than the alternative: Many of the problems Issenberg identifies can be tackled through existing mechanisms, albeit with some effort and organizing. Separating the states would instead entrench partisan divides into American political structures, giving permanence to what may be fleeting political moods. It would diminish the social and cultural influence of millions of Americans, particularly communities of color in the red states. And it would raise the specter of armed conflict on North American soil for the first time in a century.