America has never been a “united” country, now less so than ever. Perhaps its time political arrangements were changed to reflect that fact. From the Zman at theburningplatform.com:
“Familiarity breeds contempt” is an old expression that like many others, remains true even though it is widely ignored. Proof of this is all round us, as Americans know more about one another than at any time in history. The more we know, the less we like about one another. The reason for this is we have never been one people or anything close to a nation. For most of our history, we have barely been a country. Now we get to see this reality every day on our media platforms.
From the very beginning, from the first settlement, America was a land with people, rather than a people with a land. The people who settled New England were very different from those that settled the South. In fact, those were groups of Englishmen with a long history of not liking one another. The Puritan settlers were on one side of the English Civil War, while the people of the South were on the other. To this day, that animosity shows up in a million little ways.
Even within states there is not a lot of unity. Pennsylvania is a big state with at least three distinct cultures. The people that populated the western part of the state are different from those in the east. That was true from the beginning. It turns up today in cultural habits and especially in voting habits. You could break the state into three smaller states and the people would not care. The fact is, they have never been a unified people loyal to one another.