The past year in US politics has been full of more alienation
and polarization than at any time since 1861, all of it now
capped off in the Arizona shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
As in 1861, today's divide has opened up over a single deep
question. But this fundamental collision of values doesn't mean
violence is inevitable. One hundred and fifty years ago,
American passions over politics blew off the lids we usually
keep in place on our political debates and turned a war of words
into a war of arms. By its end, the US Civil War had taken the
lives of 620,000 Americans – the population equivalent of 6
million today. And despite the emancipation of more than 3
million slaves, the war ended up replacing slavery with a
century's worth of racist Jim Crow laws. The reasons for war
were many and complicated, but the fundamental issue was how to
define liberty. "We all declare for liberty," Abraham Lincoln
said in 1864, but after that, all similarity evaporated. "With
some the word liberty may mean for each ma