AGAINST iDENTITY FROM THE BEGINNING:

When George Washington sought to warn Americans about the most fearsome threats to their liberty, he did not cast his eyes toward Europe, where nations were waiting, like vultures, to pounce upon the carcass of a failed experiment in self-government.

Instead, Washington challenged Americans to look within. Their greatest enemy, he wrote in his Farewell Address (1796), was "the spirit of party." By that he meant the relentless desire to form political tribes, or factions, in order to gain advantage over others. "This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature," Washington wrote, "having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind."

Here we are reminded of one of the great forces tearing apart contemporary America: the scourge of identity politics and the "cancel culture" that supports it. And herein lies the genius of the American Founders. They anticipated this threat to self-government because they took seriously both the nobility and the tragedy of human nature. They remained deeply sober about the prospects of liberty, even as they described their experiment as a "new order for the ages." Like no other generation of political revolutionaries, the Founders lived in the shadow of the biblical doctrine of the Fall.

In The Federalist Papers--the political essays defending the U.S. Constitution -- James Madison defined a faction as a group of citizens "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." Echoing Washington, he insisted that "the latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man."

When Alexander Hamilton, another contributor to The Federalist Papers, asked why governments were formed in the first place, he answered his own question thus: "Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint." Hamilton denied that benevolence was the natural drift of political societies. "Has it not, on the contrary, invariably been found that momentary passions, and immediate interests, have a more active and imperious control over human conduct than general or remote considerations of policy, utility, or justice?"

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