IN LAST WEEK’S COLUMN, I asked an important question: Has the United States become ungovernable as a single, unified entity?

The question arose in my mind because of the tense wait, as I wrote that column, to see whether Republicans in the House of Representatives were actually going to allow the United States to default on the national debt for the first time since the country’s founding.

As we now know, everyone stepped back from the brink, and the situation was at least temporarily resolved — with some evidence that the Republicans have done enough staring into the abyss enough that they will not use that tactic again.

While I am currently left of center (and let’s acknowledge that the American “center” has been moving rightward for more than 30 years) I have read lots of political philosophy from all over the political spectrum — in part because I was once a staunch conservative in my wild, misspent youth, but mostly because I just enjoy well-argued polemics and essays from whatever perspective. Even in my Reagan-voting days, I still read the Utne Reader, lefty alternative weeklies, and even took a shot at reading “Das Kapital.”

After I became a Democrat in the 1990s, I enjoyed reading Bill Buckley Jr.’s writings in National Review (a conservative journal he founded in the 1950s and managed for most of its existence) and watched his PBS debate show whenever it was on, even though I had come to profoundly disagree with him on many of his policy positions. Conservative humorist P.J. O’Rourke’s books are a guilty pleasure of mine — it helps that he can be hysterically funny, but he’s also a good reporter and a very good writer.

So, I’m proof that amicable disagreement is possible; I would argue it is essential both to the health of our society and to the viability of our system of government.

I read a fair amount of writing from both the left and right on the Web, where people say that the opposition must be “destroyed.” “Conservatism must be excised from the body politic.” “The left is bent on destroying what’s left of America. They must be stopped.”

I’m sure that if I searched diligently enough, I would be able to find people on both the left and right whose dream vision of America would actually destroy the country if they were allowed to enact it unimpeded, but in my experience they are few and far between. In my travels around the United States, I have always found that, in dealing one on one with my fellow citizens, the vast majority of those in and out of government love this country, and their views, for the most part, are in some sense comprehensible to me. I’m sure that given time one on one with any of them, they and I could find some sort of consensus on some issues, and even agree on some solutions.

So why can’t we all do some national version of that? What is keeping us apart, and even widening the rifts that divide us?

I believe the current weakness of our institutions (both political and economic) has some roots that are social and even spiritual, but I also think many of the roots are political and economic. The sources of the present divisions go pretty far back in our country’s history — even to its founding — and those divisions have for the most part been relatively manageable. But they have become significantly worse in the decades since the end of the Cold War.

I’m reminded of something Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said back in the 1980s about the international consequences of the liberalization and reforms he was enacting in his country: “I am going to do something terrible to America: I’m going to deprive her of an enemy.”

Lest anyone think I’m indulging in nostalgia, let me say here that the end of the Cold War in 1989 was a good thing in almost every respect. After 40 years on the knife-edge of nuclear annihilation, it was nice to be able to relax and realize our civilization was no longer one miscalculation — and 30 minutes of ICBM flight-time — from ceasing to exist.

That said, I now understand better what Gorbachev was getting at.

He realized that having the Soviet Union as an enemy against which we could unite was in some respects a good thing for America. We naturally put aside our differences, or at least dialed back their intensity, in the presence of an existential and external menace. Having an enemy that stood ready to foment and exploit revolution made it necessary to take concrete steps to prevent one. Roosevelt’s New Deal was in large measure enacted to prevent revolution, especially in the context of the economic failures that culminated in the Great Depression, failures that had made communism an attractive prospect for a significant fraction of a desperate population.

But even after the Depression, given the threat posed by a competing ideology, restraining capitalism’s worst features was a continuous exercise. As I’ve mentioned before, capitalism has a structural tendency to self-destruct, since it concentrates wealth in a smaller and smaller slice at the top of the income scale, which leads to everyone else not having enough spending power to keep the economy growing. In the absence of income growth, the economy goes into a lurching boom-and-bust mode: booms fueled by easy credit, following by long, grinding busts when everyone’s credit cards are maxed out.

Much of progressive economic and social policy of the Cold War era can be understood as an attempt to impose some restraint and stability on an economic system that had previously lacked those features.

But in the years since the end of the Cold War, the economic and social policies that were a necessary bulwark against an energetic rival system have come to be seen as unnecessary restraints by our economic elites, who had been relatively disadvantaged by those policies.

The unraveling of those restraints has destabilized the economy, restored the wealth disparities to what they were in the Gilded Age, and severely destabilized our society.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works for a tech start-up in San Francisco.