Don DeBats is Professor and Head of American Studies and Director of the Jeff Bleich Center for the US Alliance in Digital Technology, Security, and Governance. His research interests cover contemporary and past US politics; he is a frequent commentator on current US politics and has written extensively on US political history.

In this episode we discuss the idea that the current political and social division in the USA is somehow unprecedented. This always struck me as very strange and ahistorical, if you know anything about US history. Furthermore, isn’t the USA constitutionally constructed to BE divided? And isn’t the entire idea behind the constitution to allow for this kind of division, without endangering the Republic? Problem is, of course, that the constitution didn’t prevent one civil war… but surely there could never be another?