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God Is Great, Beer Is Good...

You finish it. I know that Dr. Murray has been telling us that class divisions are becoming more pronounced, and technology allows us to wall ourselves off from ideas and people we don't like. This is the reason our politics is so nasty: we lack a shared culture, and we are not motivated by reason, but by emotion.

Each coalition looks over and says, "They aren't like us," and so no method or tool of destruction is off the table. One side thinks the president is a secret Muslim who hates all that we stand for, and the other side thinks their opponents are constructing gulags for racial minorities, gays, and poor people. That's what really bothers me: I don't have to exaggerate that much.

I wish it were just a plea for civility, but it can't be. The Democratic Party is the abortion party. That's what they exist to defend. Democratic elected officials can compromise nearly every other tenet of progressive thinking, but not that one. This is why Republicans will have to take the lead on traditionally liberal issues like criminal justice/capital punishment; pro-lifers not unjustly throw the high-sounding rhetoric right back in the Democrats' faces. This is why interventionism is now a "conservative" thing. The party that can't be bothered to defend defenseless babies has no moral authority to advocate for the victims of genocide. I have trouble listening; I'm just being honest.

That one remaining blunt instrument for the progressive is the apparent hypocrisy of conservative religiosity, combined with the robust defense of an obviously broken, unjust economic order. But with "liberalism" being the driving force behind the destruction of the family, they bear some of that guilt as well.

One the one hand, no amount of sermonizing on virtue will wish our system of social support out of existence. One the other hand, no degree of devotion to that system will make it work on behalf of free people, in the absence of virtue.

You will forgive me if I state the obvious. What's obvious isn't terribly popular these days.

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