1. The purpose of government is to promote the common good. The great danger of any Republic is the loss of the sense of commonality between different parts of the populace. This, of course, can happen under any form of government, but it is a particular danger for Republics, because elected governments incentivize animosity and fear-mongering between different parties. If you can convince your constituents that the other guy wants to steal their rights and destroy the freedom, they’ll vote for you every time, even if they don’t care for you personally. If this is well-entrenched enough, the result is a practical monoparty (either that or a civil war: remember that the South seceded because they thought they couldn’t trust Lincoln and the Republicans to respect their rights), which of course destroys the whole point of having a Republic in the first place, while continuing to employ the same rhetoric.

So, Republics fall when one side or both are able to frame the other as being too dangerous or too extreme to allow into power (of course, that can be because one or the other other actually is too dangerous etc, which is sorta the rub). This is true whether the threat is framed as being from that other party or from an external threat the other party can’t handle.

2. The only way to protect against this, it seems to me, is to have an alternative source of national unity, like an established Religion, which both sides refer to and pledge loyalty to and which sets definite limits to what is and is not acceptable policy.

We used to have something like that in the American Civic Religion: the dream of the ‘Land of the Free’, the glorious tale of American exceptionalism, and so on (what we generally think of as old-school patriotism). Unfortunately, that broke in the 1960s – though the cracks were forming from the Great Depression at least, and if we’re honest it was never especially effective since it was by nature underdefined – and can’t be used as a source of unity any longer.

Indeed, I would argue that what we call our political divide today is less a matter of political policy than it is between those who still believe in the old Civic Religion and those who reject it in favor of a new interpretation; basically, Orthodox Americans vs. Reformed Americans.

3. By the way, that old Civic Religion was also broken during our second civil war (we tend to forget that the Revolution was also a civil war of neighbor against neighbor), but miraculously was put back together again. This, I think, is really one of our greatest triumphs as a nation: that we actually managed to genuinely reunite following a massive civil war. It wasn’t like our first civil war, where the losers either left or became politically non-existent; you had half the nation rising up against the other half, being brutally crushed, and within a generation the two were back to working side-by-side for what they saw as their common interest. Not just their children either; the actual men who fought each other embraced and called one another countrymen (e.g. Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston – General Sherman’s opponent during the Georgia campaign – served as one of Sherman’s pallbearers).

That doesn’t happen in history very often at all (again, see our first go round).

Of course, now the Reformed Americans are going back and trying to cancel it retroactively….

4. Me, of course, I’m neither Orthodox nor Reformed: I’m one of those politically-non-existent losers of the first civil war. But yeesh, there’s no question which side I prefer.

5. Switching subjects completely, this is a pretty good video from Pax Tube (whom I found through Pilgrim’s Pass and who also has some good history videos from what I’ve watched so far) on why westerners are drawn to anime girls (so to speak):

6. In addition to the points he mentions, another aspect of it that I’ve noticed is just that anime girls, from what I’ve seen, tend to feel more human and natural than western heroines: less idealized (yes, I said less idealized). Just the fact that anime heroines so often end up the butt of jokes or in compromising situations or are generally shown to be imperfect in different ways.

Like in My Hero Academia (yes, citing that one again), we have chief love interest Uraraka zoning out and drooling as she falls asleep trying to study because her grades are substandard.

Or in another scene, she’s shown gazing at the food at the class Christmas party with a hilariously ravenous expression, prompting a look of slight concern from her best friend, Tsu. Nothing comes of it, it’s not a sign of anything dramatic, it’s just using a character’s established trait (she’s relatively poor and so tends to overreact to luxuries) for a quick visual gag, just as you’d do with any other character. It’s the kind of odd, individual quirk you would find from a particular person amid a large group.

That is to say, anime heroines, at least of the ones I’ve seen, generally seemed designed according to their place in the story’s world, not ours. In a western show, Uraraka would probably be one of the top students in the class, or at least a particularly powerful fighter, and she would be more poised and confident because we need to ‘create role models for girls’ (which is kind of patronizing when you think about it…). Instead, she’s a middling student, has a very non-offensive super-power that she explicitly doesn’t want to use to hurt people with, and though she’s outgoing and confident, she’s prone to embarrassing herself through lack of self-awareness.

All this, of course, just serves makes her super-charming, along with the rest of the cast.

7. Huh, I’m realizing this topic really deserves more attention. One could talk about anime girls for hours!