A divided party is weaker than a united party. A party can unite around common goals or principles. Or it can unite against something.

The Democrats were divided in 2016. When I was in Philly during the DNC, the divisions were clear despite the attempts to paper them over. The Bernie Sanders supporters hated Hillary and her allies. And the Democrats feared the Sandernistas. The Democrats were able to spend all that time fighting each other because they didn’t think that Trump posed a threat to their inevitable supremacy.

When they learned otherwise, a four year orgy of insane hatred and plotting really got underway that united them against President Trump. A common enemy.

Republicans now have to decide if they want to unite around a set of principles and goals. Or unite against the Left. Or do neither in which case the Left really wins. 

“We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately,” Benjamin Franklin supposedly said at the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

The Founding Fathers had to make difficult decisions in uniting around a common cause, overcoming deep moral divisions, over slavery and interstate territorial disputes, to build a nation. They postponed some of those most difficult decisions to fight a common enemy and build a nation. History is not just a matter of the past, but of the present and the future.

The alternative to hanging together is hanging separately. And the gulag debates over whose fault it was will be most enlightening.