Whoever wins on Nov. 4, few Americans will harbor any illusions about their national unity. No matter which pairing one chooses—red and blue, Right and Left, coastal elites and flyover salt-of-the-earthers—there is no getting around our status as a country divided, a people set apart from one another as much by regional culture as by religion or political ideology.

A perfect time, in other words, to talk about secession—which is what will happen when the Middlebury Institute’s Third North American Secessionist Conference convenes in Manchester, New Hampshire a week and a half after the election. Thomas Naylor, whose Second Vermont Republic is one of the country’s most active secessionist organizations, is candid about the motive for the scheduling: “The date was set,” he tells me, “on the assumption that Hillary Clinton would be elected—and of course that’s not going to happen.” Nevertheless, the post-election time frame is “looking more and more important every day” as popular outrage against the Wall Street bailout and anxiety over impending recession continue to build.

The Manchester conference brings together secessionists of all types. Writing in Orion, Bill Kauffman described the crowd from 2006 as “ponytails and suits, turtlenecks and sneakers, an Alaskan gold miner and one delegate from the neo-Confederate League of the South who wore a grey greatcoat, as if sitting for a daguerreotype just before the battle.” Despite—or perhaps because of—their ideological differences, they all share a common cause: to regionalize, to decentralize, to debunk the myth of a nation indivisible and replace it with a story that gives difference its due.

That story is by no means a new one. The idea of political separatism is, as Middlebury Institute founder Kirkpatrick Sale puts it, “as American as America.” From the 13 colonies declaring their independence from the British Crown in 1776, to the rash of state-splittings that took place during the early years of the Republic, to Norman Mailer’s secessionist 1969 campaign for mayor of New York City, the aura of divisibility has long been a part of the American tradition.

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