The terms “Latin America” and “coup d’état” used to be synonymous. Between 1907 and 1966, the twenty republics stretching from Tierra del Fuego to the Rio Grande saw a total of 105 coups, an average of one per country every dozen years. For some, it was even worse. Ecuador experienced one coup every four and a half years, while Bolivia witnessed one every seven.

Since then, the problem has not so much subsided as migrated north. Today, the new center of instability is the United States. Once as solid as Gibraltar, the US has entered a constitutional Twilight Zone in which Republicans and Democrats accuse one another of wiretapping and collusion with a hostile foreign power, a New York Times columnist calls for the Trump presidency to be put on “pause,” and the Guardian reports that an entire “intellectual class — our own — [is] on the brink of a nervous breakdown.”

Rival military factions are not yet shooting it out on Pennsylvania Avenue. But it’s without doubt the strangest period in US history since Henry Adams’ Great Secession Winter of 1860–61, when the new republic literally came apart at the seams.