Thank you for the thoughtful feedback on my last post concerning identity, both your through comments and e-mails. I've been thinking about them while traveling and spending time with family, and I would like to share some of the fruit of that thought. First of all, one reader helpfully asked which political identity did I have in mind. On the one hand, there is national political identity. Lilliana Mason has written a book (which I have not read) about how our complex political parties, composed of individuals with many identities, have collapsed into "Mega-identities." After listening to the thoughtful interview between Ezra Klein and Lilliana Mason , I think I can summarize this adequately to advance our discussion. If you go back to c.1960, you would find significant regional variations in the political positions within card-carrying members (and elected officials) of the Republican and Democratic parties. For example, in the South, Democrats were generally more co...
Attempting to make sense of the present and the past in light of faith and reason.