J.B. Shurk – Make the “United States” plural again. Is that so much to ask? Up until the Civil War, that was the customary grammatical construction. “The United States of America are committed to…” “The United States of America have declared war upon…” “The United States of America stand together…”

Ah, there’s the rub. These United States of ours do not really stand together anymore on anything, and only the linguistic shrewdness of treating the “United States” as a singular entity provides the fictitious veneer of national unity. In a world filled with fake news, fake markets, and fake elections, ignoring proper grammatical rules to pretend the states are united in purpose as one nation is just par for the course.

The story has been told to schoolchildren since the nineteenth century (all the way to the near present, when American history was abandoned in public schools altogether) that the change from plural to singular reflected the significance of the Civil War. Before that conflagration, there was much constitutional disagreement as to whether individual states had the sovereign power to decide for themselves whether they would continue to consent to the authority and jurisdiction of a national government. Continue reading →