Frank H. Buckley’s highbrow yet quick and lively new book American Secession comes with the foreboding subtitle The Looming Threat of a National Breakup, but the conservative George Mason U. law professor and Trump family adviser is sanguine.

In Buckley’s view, a Trump reelection combined with Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death might trigger a Calexit movement by aggrieved Californians (a state where Hillary won by 4.3 million votes, while she lost by 1.5 million in the other 49 states) enraged at having to share a country with Trump voters.

Or perhaps the deplorables, offended by the Democrats’ smug “that’s not who we are” rhetoric, will call a new Constitutional Convention (which would require only 34 state legislatures) at which who knows what might happen… The last one, in 1787, tore up the existing Articles of Confederation and invented a federal system.

And would the U.S. breaking into two or more chunks be so bad? Buckley writes:

We’re overly big, one of the biggest countries in the world. Smaller countries are happier and less corrupt. They’re less inclined to throw their weight around militarily, and they’re freer. If there are advantages to bigness, the costs exceed the benefits. Bigness is badness.

Against the Left: A Ro... Rockwell Jr, Llewellyn H Best Price: $2.84 Buy New $8.00 (as of 01:07 UTC - Details) Born in Saskatoon, Buckley (no relation to William F.) imports the Canadian assumption that territorial unions, like political parties, come and go. Canada evolved into independence from Britain over a long, mostly peaceful expanse of time. Newfoundland didn’t join Canada until 1949, and the people of Quebec very nearly voted to secede in 1995.

In the U.S., however, the idea of secession has been off the table since roughly the Battle of Gettysburg. Likewise, the same two parties that led the United States into disaster in the Civil War are still utterly dominant here.

But growing bad blood between the two American parties now makes a territorial split-up seem conceivable once again. After all, the United States occupies a huge expanse of longitude and latitude. Perhaps America is just too big these days for 330 million residents to get along?

In his breezy style, Buckley makes the case that a geographic split, such as that of the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1992, wouldn’t be so bad, before finally recommending as a compromise the kind of super-federalist “home rule” that Britain granted Canada and that Prime Minister Gladstone wished to offer Ireland in the 1880s.

On the other hand, would any kind of regional division actually cure what currently ails America during the Great Awokening?

For instance, perhaps the worst cause of the recent unhappiness explosion in the U.S. since the Obama reelection campaign revived identity politics in 2012 is the much-exacerbated war between the sexes. But how would secession solve the problem of men and women getting on each other’s nerves? Nobody besides Andrea Dworkin ever thought a single-sex country would solve anything.

Similarly, red and blue American states are divided less by race—while California is now only 36.8 percent white, Texas isn’t far behind at just 41.5 percent white—than by white vs. white animus.

And are Americans most irritated by their fellow Americans whom they encounter in real life, or by those they clash with in cyberspace?

And if they divided up into separate geographic countries, would they then cease taunting each other online? I doubt it: The truth is, it’s fun.

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