A lesson learned from A REVOLUTIONARY FRIENDSHIP: WASHINGTON, JEFFERSON, AND THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC, by Francis Cogliano
Some friendships are not meant to survive politics. In our intensely divided modern world, it is a common assumption that an ideal America once existed where intense political divisions did not drive us apart to the extent they do today. On some level, this myth has always been just that, a romanticization of the past. It is true that ordinary Americans could more readily ignore politics during the (relatively) more peaceful days of the 1980’s and 1990’s, but that did not mean that intense divisions did not bubble just under the surface. As ancient political philosophers pointed out, politics by their very definition are a struggle over who gets what and how, and those types of disputes tend to inevitably have periods when they are ugly and explosive. No American generation learned this lesson harder than the Founding Fathers, who had assumed they were building a better and more peaceful nation away from Great Britain, only to realize they had radically different visions as to what