We’ve been here before: in the first half of the 19th century, when Southern states invoked states’ rights as a means to defend slavery against the will of the rest of the country. Yet as tensions rose over the next three decades, presidents focused on preserving the peace and keeping the states united. Today, by contrast, we have a president apparently determined to widen the divide — and who has made it clear again and again that he will reward those states and cities that voted for him and severely punish the others for their perceived disloyalty.

As far as our national union goes, the United States is definitely past the good-faith couples therapy stage and onto continuous mutual mistrust and contempt. Each side is engaging in what therapists call triangulation, enlisting friends and family members who take their sides. We have fully entered the judicial stage of marital hostility, with mediation, custody fights, restraining orders and all.

Still, the unhappiest couples can stagger on together for a long time, living together in one household with shared assets but separate calendars, friends, bedrooms and lives, occasionally engaging to scream at each other before returning to their default postures of silent, sullen loathing. Even in the lead-up to the Civil War, decades passed between 1832, when South Carolina declared a federal law “null, void and no law,” and 1861, when Confederate troops fired the first shots. So what is the path out of today’s angry domestic standoff?

Built-in tensions between Washington and the states make periods of soft secession to some degree inevitable. The century of relative domestic tranquillity between the Civil War and civil rights depended on the awful compromise of Jim Crow. When that finally proved unsustainable in the 1960s, the national confrontation was fierce. A measure of calm returned and lasted for half a century. But it, too, was bound to end.

A peaceful national consensus and more or less well-functioning democracy aren’t going to spontaneously revive. A generation ago, a little-known junior senator named Barack Obama bucked us up with his heartfelt insistence that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America,” only “the United States of America.” He encouraged us not to “slice and dice our country into red states and blue states,” because “we are one people.” Isn’t it pretty to think so? Since then we have sliced and diced ourselves thoroughly.