In a country where people follow their senators into restrooms and disown family members over political differences (or at least need to read essays about how to talk to them every Thanksgiving), it is easy to see why people doubt whether the center can hold. Yet the nation’s federal constitutional system is set up to maximize the ability of people with different views to live together.

That is, until progressives decide that institutions like the Senate should be scrapped as undemocratic, letting massive changes be implemented by razor-thin margins, or right-populists begin to see a federal government that barely got Donald Trump elected to run for a single term as the only institution capable of defending conservative values. The things that made the American system capable of accommodating true diversity are under assault by the forces of one-size-fits-all rule just when we need them the most.

Some might conclude the desire for a federal government strong enough to guarantee liberal abortion policies in red states or ban transgender bathrooms in blue ones makes national divorce inevitable. But if the existing constitutional design of the country can’t protect us, it’s hard to imagine an amicable breakup creating a better one soon.