The United States is ungovernable. Half the population wants a country in which rich white men hold all the power, women stay home to raise babies and bake cookies, and everyone else is ignored or deported. The so-called Red States are so emboldened that they accuse anyone who disagrees with them of racketeering when they suggest that humans should reduce their use of fossil fuels in order to decrease greenhouse gas emissions.

The current administration is so besotted by its quest for power that it is sending some Americans dressed in full battle armor with masks over their faces to arrest other Americans and throw them into detention centers with not enough beds or toilets and keep them there incommunicado for days, weeks, or even months. Clearly this is not what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they drafted the Constitution, and would be appalled by what they see if they were alive today.

So let’s start with the premise that the American Experiment has failed, that We The People have in fact been unable to keep the republic we were given by Benjamin Franklin and his compatriots when they wrapped up their deliberation in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. Let’s put aside all the talk of healing America’s wounds and admit the country is broken. Fine, now that that’s out of the way, where do we go from here?

I have a few modest suggestions, starting with a short discussion of the transition from monarchs to what has come to be called “popular sovereignty.” In the briefest terms, popular sovereignty is based on the idea that a nation can govern only with the consent of the governed. This was a radical idea in Europe, where entire nations were deemed to be the property of monarchs.

The reason a hungry peasant could be imprisoned for eating an apple plucked from a tree was because all the trees — and their fruit on them — belonged to the ruling monarch. Therefore, eating that apple was stealing from the monarch and needed to be severely punished. That notion was the basis of the infamous Potato Famine that led to the suppression of the people of Ireland by the British.

All potatoes belonged to the King and his minions dutifully harvested all the good potatoes, leaving the rotted, shriveled ones in the ground for the peasants to eat. Those who stole the King’s potatoes were hanged or banished to a penal colony in Australia. For more on this topic, I recommend reading The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes. It is a history of the founding of Australia, which is fascinating, but the first third of the book describes the horrors the British crown visited on its own citizens in defense of its claim to own everything and everyone in the British Isles.

The United States was founded on the idea of “popular sovereignty.” It is right there in the beginning of the very first sentence of the Constitution — We the people of the United States…..” The people are the owners of the new country, not a monarch, and the government exists only with the consent of the governed. So, does that mean the people — or some of them — can withdraw their consent? Arguably, the answer is yes.

Let’s run with that idea for a while. If the people of certain states decided to withdraw their consent to be governed by the central government, they should be free to do so, shouldn’t they? Otherwise, the notion of “popular sovereignty” is just a fiction, is it not? Can consent, once given, ever be withdrawn? Should the consent conferred by our ancestors bind US all forever and ever?

These are not easy questions to answer. Clearly Rhode Island should not be able to withdraw from the Union on Monday and jump back in on Friday. These are momentous decisions that have consequences that will ripple though history for centuries and are not to be made lightly.

For the sake of discussion, let’s assume all the states were given a do-over. Stay or go? Which do you choose? We can assume Texas would choose to be its own country — it pretty much is already anyway. We can imagine that most of the South would agglomerate into a reprise of the confederacy. An argument can be made that perhaps the southern states should have been allowed to secede when they wanted to, instead of wasting all that treasure and human life on the Civil War.