Pat Buchanan's concise column yesterday, “Is America Coming Apart,” is garnering a good deal of attention. It occurs to me that a similar column could have been written in the late 19th century, and probably was. We are not more partisan today. Then, there was also an urban-rural divide. And we may be arguably more homogeneous today than in the 1890s, if one does not limit the definition to race and religion.

I believe there was a movement in 19th century Wisconsin by German immigrants, for example, to make German an official language. My city, New York, was littered back then with innumerable newspapers of every tongue.

Yet Buchanan is also right. Past immigrant generations did generally attempt to Americanize. They held onto their ethnic or religious identity but they did want to feel a part of that “melting pot”--a many melting to a one. By the 1970s, difference was celebrated. By the 1990s, we were hyphenated Americans.

The recent deaths of Michael Jackson and Walter Cronkite also remind us that the age of unified popular culture is likely receding. Cronkite told Americans what was news and what mattered in the news. Today, ever increasingly, people consume what I term Echo Chamber Journalism--agenda news that only hardens readers' agenda. We no longer share the same news filters, and some are grateful for it.

Michael Jackson's reach--across generation, race, nation--also seems impossible in this new age of fragmented media.

People always unite in tragedy. I believe it's an Arabic saying that goes, "I against my brother; my brother and I against my cousin; I, my brother, and my cousin against the stranger”—or the world. Common enemies breed unity. And we are a long way from the unity in the months following September 11, 2001.

We are today indeed agog over silly debates on whether the president can speak to children or this shouting match or that, but we have lived here before. There remains a vast moderate public that has swelled to the highs of 1992 and remains under covered. But that's just the way these things are. Car accidents earn spectators, and so it goes in politics as well.

It does often feel like we are our own non-compatriots. This is indicative of the politics in the time of Clinton, W. Bush and Obama. It is only Obama's failed promise to unite the two tribes that highlights our divisions.

The irony of Buchanan surveying what splits us--and he did so well--is that he was one of the innumerable architects of this divisive age. As an advisor to Richard Nixon in 1971, Buchanan suggested Nixon separate the majority from the radicals, and unapologetically seek "the larger half."

Obama is not Nixon. He is not a political Napoleon attempting to divide and conquer. But Obama now too seeks "the larger half" on health care reform. And to be fair, health care was always going to be a partisan debate. Still, we remain entrenched in the red and blue America that Obama promised to take us from. But one should step back as well; it would have been more historically peculiar if the exaggerated promise and media analysis of Obama, vintage '08, would have proven correct (at least so soon).

A landslide today, after all, is 53 percent. Obama never had a landslide by historic standards. But he was compared to the giant presidents of past, in part, because our expectations are far lower. We are still in a political culture that seeks "the larger half." This is why Buchanan captures our time so well.

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