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by
David French
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September 14 - November 14, 2020
It’s time for Americans to wake up to a fundamental reality: the continued unity of the United States of America cannot be guaranteed. At this moment in history, there is not a single important cultural, religious, political, or social force that is pulling Americans together more than it is pushing us apart. We cannot assume that a continent-sized, multi-ethnic, multi-faith democracy can remain united forever, and it will not remain united if our political class cannot and will not adapt to an increasingly diverse and divided American public.
The class of Americans who care the most about politics is, perversely enough, the class of Americans most likely to make negative misjudgments about their fellow citizens. Our political and cultural leaders are leading us apart.
How then does a functioning nation manage the challenge of faction? Madison has the answer—pluralism. A broad diversity of interests and groups across a federal union helps prevent any one interest or group from attaining dangerous dominance.
Thus, one of the core projects of a healthy American constitutional republic is to protect not just individual liberty, but the federalism and freedom of voluntary association that allow a multiplicity of groups and communities to flourish.
When the variety of parties increases—when more voices are heard—the power of the most dangerous faction (or of any faction) decreases.
America was built from the ground up to function as a pluralistic republic. It can flourish only as a pluralistic republic.
It’s time for our warring tribes to understand a simple reality: that to embrace illiberalism and intolerance is to court dissolution.
And perhaps most importantly, it requires an act of common citizenship—extending yourself to fight for the rights of others that you would like to exercise yourself.
Our nation’s angriest culture warriors need to know the cost of their conflict. As they seek to crush their political and cultural enemies, they may destroy the nation they seek to rule.
By the end of 2019, contrasting American abortion laws began to roughly mirror the North/South divide at the start of the Civil War.
political dissenters sometimes feel as if they’re trapped behind (ideological) enemy lines.
Church isn’t a social club. Religious faith isn’t a political ideology. It’s a statement of belief about nothing less important than eternity itself. So when you review the geography of faith, you’re seeing the extent to which our states (and entire regions) are populated by people with fundamentally different beliefs about life, death, sin, and redemption.
California is now the heart of Democratic political, economic, and cultural power in the United States. In 2018 the state possessed the fifth-largest economy in the world—larger than Britain’s and only smaller than those of Germany, Japan, China, and the rest of the United States. Add Washington and Oregon to the mix, and this three-state western nation would challenge Germany for the world’s fourth-largest economy.4
Texas plus Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. But it also includes a vast unbroken region located north and west of Texas. Democrats haven’t won the states of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah since 1964. This conglomeration of states represents yet another immense economic entity. Combine those economies—rich with natural resources—and they would quickly rival Japan for the third-largest economy in the world.
The line of states running up the eastern seaboard from Maryland represents yet another blue wall and yet another culturally distinct economic powerhouse, representing the fourth-largest economy in the world.
each of these geographic regions contains a key state, a cornerstone economic and cultural power: California in the West, Texas in the South, and New York in the Northeast.
To put this immense time period in perspective, the Thirteenth Amendment—which abolished slavery—was ratified on December 6, 1865. We will have to live on this continent more than eighty additional years before the time after slavery will match in length the time during slavery. And if you include the century of Jim Crow that existed before the passage of the Civil Rights Acts in 1964, formal legal subjugation of African Americans endured for a stunning 345 years.
to actually fracture the country, the secessionists needed something else. They had to create a sense of emergency. Secession required a very real fear. And it required a belief that powerful citizens in the North actually hated the citizens of the South—hated them enough to want them dead.
The end result is that both sides receive direct evidence of violence inflicted on their allies but are often entirely unaware of violence inflicted on their opponents. So the narrative builds. “They” are violent. “They” are dangerous. And “we” are innocent.
But what if the group begins with what Sunstein calls a “predeliberation tendency”? In other words, what if they begin with a bias? What if you’re not working with people who have a diversity of views but, rather, you’re deliberating with people of like mind? In that case, Sunstein says, “in a striking empirical regularity, deliberation tends to move groups, and the individuals who compose them, toward a more extreme point in the direction indicated by their own predeliberation judgments.”
in certain circumstances—when the peer pressure is severe enough—“individuals were willing to abandon the direct evidence of their own senses.”
In other words, group pressure—the predeliberation tendency—was so strong that individuals would rather be clearly wrong than clearly alone.
By 2016, Evangelicals had flipped. They outraced secular Americans to be the religious group most likely to accept an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life.
I’ve heard countless progressives mock Evangelicals for their “groupthink” and their “herd mentality.” Yet it’s a simple fact that many urban centers are less politically diverse than your average Evangelical megachurch.
For a largely Christian country committed since its founding to religious liberty, it’s disheartening to see the hostility against Christianity in many progressive enclaves—especially when orthodox Christianity butts heads with the political movement for LGBT rights that is so vital to many progressive Americans.
A motivated segment of the group is exerting pressure in the group deliberations, and the group as a whole is responding—even in the context of the most vital questions of life, death, heaven, and hell. The law of group polarization is so strong that it can change religious beliefs. It can alter faith practices on a large scale.
Would you believe me if I told you that there is now evidence that political affiliation is becoming so important that for some people it is trumping every other aspect of their identity?
Republicans think almost half of Democrats are black. The real number is 24 percent. They think a whopping 38 percent are lesbian, gay, or bisexual. The real number is 6 percent. They also think 44 percent of Democrats are union members. The real number is 11 percent.3 Democrats aren’t quite as misguided about Republicans, but they still get several characteristics substantially wrong. They think 44 percent of Republicans are sixty-five or older. The real number is 21 percent. They think 44 percent are Evangelical and 44 percent are southern. The real numbers are 34 and 36 percent,
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But we cannot and must not forget human nature. We cannot and must not forget the deep and profound need for human companionship. In his book Them, Nebraska senator Ben Sasse discusses the incredible power of loneliness in American society. We are “social, relational” beings, he says. We need tribes, but—he argues—too many of the tribes that have sustained us are in a state of collapse. Families fracture, Americans disconnect from civic institutions and church attendance, and stable jobs are harder to find. It’s hard to find a sustainable, thriving community of friends and colleagues. So we
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And it’s the very collapse of other cultural and tribal institutions that is going to make our group polarization so very difficult to stop. We can’t rebuild the family overnight, and multi-generation family fragmentation means that tens of millions of Americans don’t know what a functioning nuclear family even looks like. They have no experience with family stability. None.
In other words, Sunstein posited that group polarization could grow so profound that, given enough time, entire groups could grow more extreme than the most extreme member at the commencement of the movement.
But in those short years there has been a staggering change in attitudes about fundamental cultural values. In three years of heated debates about marriage and sexuality during my time in law school, I don’t recall a single person arguing that, for example, a politician should be disqualified from running as a Democrat if he or she opposed gay marriage. I don’t recall a single person arguing that Title IX protected the right of boys who identify as girls to participate in girls’ sports. And I certainly don’t recall a single person who would argue that it was a violation of federal civil rights
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The Sunstein theory is so thoroughly vindicated that it’s self-evidently true. When like-minded people gather, they tend to grow more extreme. The group will sometimes grow more extreme than the most extreme member. The result, over time, has been a flattening of the American bell curve. The left moves left, and the right moves right. We are moving away from each other at increasing speed.
Pluralism, in other words, becomes to the pure partisan mind an instrument of injustice and civil liberties a barrier to progress. Because when one is righteous, the very existence of dissenting communities is proof that justice is thwarted and evil exists. And why should any person protect the existence of evil?
The term is “Overton window.”1 Developed by the late Joseph Overton, a former vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, the “window” concept refers to the range of acceptable political discourse on any given topic.2 As the Mackinac Center explains, “The ‘window’ of politically acceptable options is primarily defined not by what politicians prefer, but rather by what they believe they can support and still win re-election.”3 The key to shifting policy lies not so much in changing politicians but in changing the terms of the debate. In other words, “the window shifts to include
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the gun control debate isn’t a matter of policy but of Kulturkampf.
And if you believe your opponent’s views are outside the realm of acceptable discourse, it’s a very short trip to conclude that they shouldn’t enjoy the right to speak at all.
Madison’s embrace of pluralism, whereby “the increased variety of parties comprised within the Union, increase [its] security.” By protecting the liberty of our citizens, including by protecting their rights to form free and voluntary associations, we are not only increasing the ability of diverse human beings to find community and purpose within the body politic, we are limiting the ability of the state or any private faction to gain the overwhelming power necessary to reasonably believe that it can achieve dominance.
No citizen should feel that their only recourse to achieving the justice they deserve or the liberty that is their unalienable right is by picking up the rifle in their closet.
When you wed liberal democracy to intact families, strong civic engagement, and virtues of self-discipline and self-restraint, you can unleash prosperity and innovation unlike anything the world has seen before.
When there’s nothing to forgive, nothing to overlook, and no patience required, there’s no tolerance.
Most people mistake tolerance for fellowship, agreement, or tribalism. The result of this flawed understanding is that millions of people believe—to the very marrow of their being—that they’re something they’re really not. They have taken the vice of their particular brand of tribalism and transformed it into the false virtue of fake tolerance.
You have to embrace the idea that your fellow citizens—even those who disagree with you—should feel at home in this land. George Washington was particularly fond of a biblical passage from the book of Micah. He used it almost fifty times in his writings. The passage even made it into the wildly popular musical Hamilton. The words represent a clarion-call challenge for a nation that sometimes feels as if it’s coming apart—“Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid.”
Even worse, the rise of the alt-right and other right-wing online mobs means that critics of the Trump administration often face consequences much more serious than “mere” social sanction or threats to their careers. They often face direct, malicious harassment that threatens their very lives.
To this day, Americans do not appreciate the sheer scale of the harassment and threats directed at Trump critics.
Fox has become the prime gatekeeper of conservative fame, the source of conservative book deals, and the ticket into the true pantheon of conservative influence.
one of the ways that it makes money is through a very deliberate strategy of counterprogramming the mainstream media.
There are now men and women who spend their entire careers in academia without encountering a single socially conservative colleague.
For too long in American politics, the committed few have been disproportionately drawn from the ranks of the angriest and most vindictive Americans. The people who truly drive American political polarization represent a small slice of the overall population, but they set the tone for national political discourse.
According to this founding principle, government exists for the very purpose of securing these rights. This truth made manifest in our constitutional republic is the heart of the American idea. It represents the notion that our shared liberty binds us together more surely than soil or blood. Indeed, if we rely on soil or blood to bind us together, our union quickly starts to fray in the face of two questions most nations (far more homogenous than ours) don’t have to answer. Whose blood? Which soil?
