https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/founders-feared-tyranny-more-partisan-rancor-bruce-thornton/
Maybe it’s the Christmas season, or maybe it’s the grotesquely rabid partisanship of the Democrat impeachment follies, but we’re hearing a lot of moaning and groaning about “partisan rancor” and what a threat it is to our “democracy.” But tyranny, not “partisan rancor,” is what we should fear, for freedom is the foundational good that our government was designed to protect.
An example of this misunderstanding about partisanship can be found in some comments by a very smart political analyst. He writes that the “partisan bitterness that is dividing us into two warring camps . . . is the greatest threat American democracy faces today. Democracy cannot exist when a country is divided into two camps, each of which sees the other as an enemy rather than an adversary. Democracy relies on the suspension of partisan rancor in the interest of the nation.”
First, this common claim that we are at a moment of unprecedented partisan division ignores a lot of history. What about the Civil War and the decades leading up to it? We were divided into two literally “warring camps,” and that divide culminated in over 700,000 dead Americans. Yet our democratic republic not only survived, but became a world power, which was made possible in part by the lancing of the moral infection of slavery, and the confirmation that the union could not be broken into vulnerable sections and become easy prey for foreign powers.