American politics just can't abide intellectual or philosphical thougjt. We can't abide the dual nature of some things, the yin and the yang, and certainly we can never see anything through more than one prism.

I nearly got fired once, because in the light of the breakup of the USSR, i said I saw some limilarities between that and the act of secession by states in the South. The Confederacy bears the legacy of slavery, even though many in the states to the north also practised it, condoned it and profited from it hugely.

The Civil War was about slavery, and we should never lose sight of that, but it was about other things, too, as explored by Webb.

In politics, though, there are forbidden words and forbidden thoughts.
This circumstance makes us shallower, and in many ways, it makes us dumber.