Reading The Age of Skin by Dubravka Ugresic, a Croatian essayist now living in Amsterdam. One line struck me. After a description of ex-Yugoslavia as a place of ruin and brutalist kitsch, she says to imagine the best-known museums in Paris, London, and New York with all the art thrown out and replaced, "with all the blessings of the powers that be," by plastic pink flamingoes and garden gnomes. "The illiterate (it is they, for God's sake, who are everywhere ascendant!) are visiting their terror upon the literate (haven't the literate always been a minority, anyway?)" It would seem that the events of 1/6, and the movement of which it was an expression, were and are nothing unique to these disunited States. Actually it's the line about "the blessings of the powers that be" that is crucial here.
There is a certain strain--not a dominant one--of anti-trumpist thought that says we should have let the South go, and might welcome a Yugoslavian-style fracturing of the U.S. And, well, that didn't go too well for Yugoslavia. The trouble is, the divide, there and here, is not strictly regional, not when you've got Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo, Croats in Serbia, Bosnian Muslims in Macedonia, progressive college towns in Montana and Arkansas.