By Ron Mock

By late May 2016, Donald Trump had divided and sidelined the Republican Party’s establishment wing. He looked invincible in the race for the Party’s presidential nomination.

Quintessential establishment Republican William Kristol was desperately looking for someone anti-Trump Republicans could unite behind to prevent Trump’s nomination. Various names floated, but no suitable candidate emerged. As the last trickles of Republican anti-Trump hope were disappearing into the sand, Kristol dramatically announced he had identified a formidable candidate who could unite mainstream Republicans – but he didn't say who it was.

Kristol waited a day or two to let the suspense build. Then he made his big reveal: the man who would save the GOP was his friend, David French.

I was one of many – many tens of millions, I would guess – who had never heard of David French even though he was a fairly prominent political commentator. He had not held major public office nor had he been considered a candidate for President before. Kristol insisted it didn’t matter, because French was smart, thoughtful, perceptive, and dedicated to the common good whereas Trump’s lack of experience came with undisciplined utterances, racist overtones, and personal immorality.

It was never clear to me whether French was willing to accept the mantle Kristol was trying to drape around his shoulders. The balloon never got off the ground, and Trump’s path to the nomination remained uncluttered.

On the other hand, a lot of us learned who David French was.

So when he came out with a book last year, Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation, I bought a Kindle copy. But I didn’t get around to reading it until the week after the January 6 rampage through the US Capitol.

In the middle of the book, French spends three of his nice, short chapters imagining how America might actually split into two (or more) nations. Had I read those chapters last summer, I would have scoffed. But reading them only a few days after January 6 had the opposite effect. What was happening on the ground didn’t exactly match French’s scenarios, but they had a similar feel. It was pretty easy to imagine how this relatively small Capitol insurrection could lead, step by step over a few months or years, to an outcome like French’s hypothetical Calexit or Texit.

Those scenarios come in chapters 12-14. The eleven previous chapters explore the dynamics that create the incentive (and opportunity) for secession. And the succeeding eight chapters outline ways to save America.

Here I will be frank – the first part leading up to the pivotal secession scenarios is far more convincing than the part about how to save America from secession.

The first eleven chapters are built around compelling ideas and data. We’ve seen much of it before: the growing convergence in identity-clustering, where key elements of our various identities are more likely to align and reinforce each other than cut across barriers and keep us in touch with people different than us. Americans -- both as citizens and as political leaders -- are isolating themselves into political bubbles more now than any time in at least a century. We not only vote in separate camps, we are likelier to live in separate neighborhoods, and less likely to marry -- or even have friendships -- across political lines. We are also more likely to worship in separate churches.

We’ve seen this trend documented in many places – including Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized, addressing the causes of America’s polarization as perceived from a mainstream Democrat (and earlier reviewed on this site here.)

But French adds to this picture in two important ways. First, drawing on research by Cass Sunstein, French explains how groups with homogenous views on a topic will tend to migrate away from the cultural consensus around them to more distinct views – often arriving at more extreme or radical positions than any member of the group had when it started.

This is a result of the group paying less attention to those with opposing views, and gradually filtering out and even forgetting countervailing arguments that used to tether them closer to the surrounding community’s center of gravity.

Then French brings in another notion, from venerable political scholarship, of the “window of acceptable political discourse.” This is the range of views on an issue that the critical mass of people are willing to include in their discussions. The size of this window (how broadly it will tolerate various views) and its location (what part of the total range of possible views it centers on) are influenced by opinion leaders and media gatekeepers, but also by where the bulk of the population is in its understanding of the issues.

For example, the idea that one can change their gender identity was never discussed in my hearing 40 years ago. Changing gender identity had never occurred to me as a possibility. It was entirely outside the window of acceptable discourse. Then the United States went through a sudden shift, taking less than a decade, from the Defense of Marriage Act (1996) declaring marriage to be between one man and one woman as a matter of federal law, to Obergefeld v. Hodges (2015) deciding it was unconstitutional to outlaw same sex marriage. In that same tumultuous decade, transgenderism moved from being entirely outside the window of acceptable discourse for most Americans, bursting onto the national radar most dramatically when Caitlin Jenner came out as a trans woman, also in 2015.

Whatever one thinks about the felicity of these changes, the rapidity of such a dramatic shift in the window of acceptable discourse is remarkable from a political science perspective – very interesting times, indeed.

But French adds an observation that compounds the drama, and the stress on America’s political system: the window of acceptable political discourse changes at different speeds in different places.

And if the polity in question is politically polarized to the point of alienation, AND those polarities are reinforced socially and geographically, the window of acceptable discourse can split into multiple windows moving in different directions. What’s ok to talk about in New York City may not be what’s ok to talk about in the intermountain west. Which, according to Sunstein, will result in those communities continuing to move away from each other, making it even harder for them to hear or even see each other, and so on, in an accelerating cycle.

Which brings us to the final section of Divided We Fall: what to do about all this. French offers two broad approaches: re-learning tolerance, and reviving federalism.

The point about tolerance is good advice: work on valuing people despite disagreement. It is not true that we are morally or logically required to hate people for disagreeing with us. We can be friends with people we disagree with. We can even marry them and stay married. To do that we have to recognize, welcome, and gladly move into the space between agreement and alienation, where we treat disagreement no worse than any other foible, remembering to be thankful that our loved ones love us despite our flaws.

This is good advice, but it doesn’t have enough relentless driving motivation people like me need to put much energy into toleration. We need more about how to do this in concrete ways offering their own motivating rewards. French mentions the possibility of reviving mediating institutions that put us into contact with people we disagree with, but doesn’t mine this thought further than its surface.

The second main remedy French suggests is, oddly, enhanced federalism: trusting people in other states and communities to govern themselves and make different policy choices about the issues that divide us.

I find this remedy odd partly because the history of state and local autonomy is mixed. Respecting state autonomy led to a century of the rankest Jim Crow regime in the south. It was the main argument against enactment of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, without which practices ranging from segregating private public accommodations, to perpetuating vast disparities in funding for men’s and women’s sports in college and high school, to tolerating sexual harassment might prevail unabated today.

Furthermore, enhancing federalism would do the very thing French describes as the heart of the problem in the first half of the book: it would sharpen America’s political divisions by reinforcing them with clearer geographical and jurisdictional divisions. If bright red Idaho is free to go as far right as its conservatively-cocooned dominant voters want to go, and deep blue Oregon is free to do the same in their leftward cocoon, their windows of acceptable discourse will accelerate away from each other, and the two populations will move into uncharted extremist waters.

Perhaps we need more than tolerance. Perhaps we need to embrace disagreement. Perhaps it would be better to develop an appreciative taste for disagreement as a feature of human life God designed into us on purpose. The diversity of tastes, nurture and experience that drives humanity to expand out over the entire face of Creation and explore it from a billion angles, is precisely what propels human progress and unleashes God’s created providence.

And perhaps we need to find ways to interact MORE with our political and social opponents, rather than less, so we can expand our windows of acceptable discourse until they overlap, making it possible to find projects we can work on together.

Maybe these should be central goals for the George Fox Civility Project:

· Help followers of Jesus trust the love of our omnipotent God and embrace the disagreements designed in us.

· Help followers of Jesus find (or make) venues in which they can get to know those with whom they disagree and find projects they can work on together.