Steven Paulikas

To be honest, I had never read George Washington’s farewell address until last year’s election. It was then that dismayed citizens like me found a sense of justification for our fears in his warning that excessive partisanship leads to despotism. Yet as I read and reread Washington’s prose, I kept returning not to his thoughts on party politics, but to his argument about the centrality of religion in the preservation of a moral society. He writes: