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Had an interesting discussion with an apolitical working friend in his early 20's. I'm hardly apolitical and am much older. Yet we agreed that the best course for the United States is probably a National Divorce. We discussed that maybe revived Federalism and States Rights would work better, but we both doubted it.

I'd rather the U. S. stick together and return to sanity. But a country this divided cannot long stay together except through brute force.

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Follow the link in the post to my column to the David French book. He is convinced that Federalism is the only way out of this mess. Texas doesn't have to be California, etc. Read the column and let me know what you think!

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Ha, that would be the first time in a long time that I've agreed with David French. :)

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He remains a First Amendment liberal and strong defender of religious liberty. That book is amazing. You read my column?

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Okay I read it. Very good and fair article. But we still disagree greatly on the integrity of French. So no need to get into that.

I am among those who used to read newspapers voraciously but now gets his news from a number of sources online, most of them not newspapers.

Oddly, the only newspaper I subscribe to is The Telegraph. AND when I visit the UK, I do read the newspapers voraciously there. I find their "European model" of being biased but open about it much preferable to the U. S. model of fake objectivity and really "fake news." And UK papers are just better even if most of them don't have a clue about Trump. I even like the Guardian's UK election night coverage.

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It’s the book French haters need t read. Then you can go back to disagreeing with him on some issues and agreeing on others.

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I will. I promise!

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The political has turned theological as we've started disagreeing not on means but on ends.

At a micro level, this renders cross-party marriages harder to manage.

At a macro level, it makes politics less a debate of ideas and more a holy war.

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What fascinates me -- as a guy with a graduate degree in church-state studies -- is how old First Amendment liberalism (pro-free speech, freedom of association and freedom of religion) is now considered CONSERVATIVE since it protects "bad" religious people, as in ancient/traditional forms of faith. The heart of old liberalism is now "conservative."

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Every major political movement in American history has been rooted in Enlightenment liberalism. Even the so-called conservatives were liberals. The anti-slavery GOP of Lincoln was a liberal, big-federal-government party. So was Wilson's progressivism. The fusionist GOP of Reagan was a liberal, small-government party.

That's why the current Left is so jarring to many people -- they reject liberalism. They no longer worship at the altar of Smith and Locke and Mill. They reject universal claims of morality. They are unabashedly Nietzschean: "good" is our tribe gaining power and taking stuff from your tribe. By any means necessary. If the law protects you, the law is bad; if the law protects us, the law is good. A few people like Lewis and Chesterton warned us this would happen, but we didn't listen.

The contemporary opposition to Locke's Enlightenment liberalism was Burke. And he failed. The highest profile Burkeans today are Deneen and Amari and they call themselves postliberals.

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