minority of the population. it was the cessationist, slave holding interest in the 1850s. today it was this vast swath of people who have found a home in the republican party who are no longer part of a coherent and constructive and good-intentioned conversation about the future of the country. and when you turn politics functionally into religion and i believe that s what s happened is you have your own holy books, you have your own prophets, your own path to salvation that is a terrible, terrible blow to free government because a democracy fundamentally depends on our capacity to see each other not as adversaries or heathen but as neighbors. and so i really do believe that the divisions we re enduring now
capacity to see each other not as adversaries or heathen but as neighbors. and so i really do believe that the divisions we re enduring now are a difference of kind and not degree of certainly those that have affected us since the 1930s. and, doris, when you look at a period where there is no question that we re deeply divided and you look at the 1850s, what gets the country out of it? what changes the phase? does it take, i mean, a terrible c c conflagration like the civil war, does it take what lincoln displayed? what do you think? i think what it takes is a combination of the people on the outside pressuring in and the leadership that s there. at the end of the civil war when lincoln was called a lib rerate