One of the reasons journalistic coverage of US elections is so interesting is because of the scale of reach required to communicate what is at stake and what preoccupies so many different voters in disparate places. British journalist and historian Godfrey Hodgson’s US travels saw him visit 48 of the 50 states during his journalistic career. His stocktaking resulted in numerous books, including, 50 years ago, America in Our Time, an excavation of the post-second World War “liberal consensus” and its perceived breakdown. He suggested US citizens, for the first time, were asking “not how to solve their problems, but whether problems could be solved”. Decades later, in The Myth of American Exceptionalism (2009), he challenged the “distorted and selective narrative of exceptional virtue” in the US, driven by “hubris and self-interest into what is now a dangerous basis for national policy and for the international system”.

There is a multitude of other state-of-the-nation theses, none definitive, but they are a reminder of the preoccupation over decades, and well before the era of Donald Trump, with a “Disunited States”. In 2009, for example, a year after Obama won the presidency, New York Times journalist Roger Cohen wrote: “These are the worst of times for those who believe the United States has a special mission to further the moral and........

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