To solve the culture wars, turn to federalism

It seems like America’s culture war is reaching a fever pitch. Politics has become a grudge match between the reactionary right and the radical left, and trust in government is at an all-time low. Many are looking for extreme solutions. In February, for instance, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) called for a “national divorce.”

In their wisdom, the American Founders foresaw the danger of this kind of division. They knew that human nature would lead to disagreement and disunity in a country as large as the United States. And, what’s more, they built safeguards into our constitutional system to mitigate the effects of a cultural war between citizens with competing views.

Unfortunately, political centralization and the rise of bureaucracy have eroded those safeguards. As politics becomes more and more national, the culture wars have become more and more intense because the stakes get higher and higher. To break this vicious cycle, it is essential that Americans understand the theory of self-government behind the original U.S. Constitution – and that they fight to restore it to the system today.

Above all, the threat to liberty the Founders feared the most was faction. In Federalist 10, Publius defines a faction as “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” Examining the history of earlier republics, Publius said that all of them failed because one faction or another governed without regard for the common good.

Read more at American Habits.