That this Balkanization of the American electorate might have been avoided comes as cold comfort. Whether it was at the 2004 Democratic convention, or Election Night 2008 at Grant Park, or Inauguration Day 2009, or the memorial ceremony for the victims of the Tucson shooting in January 2011, or the televised address on the killing of Osama bin Laden that May, Americans have always responded to Obama when he speaks to them as the leader of the entire nation, not as the leader of a political party or of the progressive movement.

Time and again, however, Obama has missed opportunities to seize the ground of national unity and possibly split the GOP. He could have for example included defense funding in the stimulus bill, or decided to go back to the drawing board on health care after Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts, or embraced fully the Bowles-Simpson Commission’s recommendations in January 2011. He did none of these things. What we got instead was a mobilization of the center-left coalition toward partisan ends that had been on the agenda for years and in some cases decades. What we got was an unshackled and unhinged country whose people are at each other’s throats.

“Alongside our famous individualism,” Barack Obama said in 2004, “there’s another ingredient in the American saga, a belief that we’re all connected as one people.” That sentiment may have been true once. It certainly isn’t true now. Barack Obama’s America is an America coming apart.