Moreover, it could easily stand as a summary statement of the attitudes that created the impeachment debacle. In fact the abortion issue is not the soul of the Republican Party but rather its most divisive issue. In comparing abortion to slavery, moreover, Bauer conveniently overlooks the fact that the slavery issue was too morally divisive to be resolved by the political process. It took a bloody civil war to do that. Everyone who subscribes to the idea of American pluralism thereby accepts the idea that there are limits to what politics can accomplish, and to what is proper advocacy in a democratic society.
Democracies work through coalitions, achieved through compromises that are both moral and political.
Compromise is the condition of civil stability and peace. To articulate what is, in effect, the political equivalent of a call for civil war in a democracy like ours is nihilistic and destructive. The fundamental premise of pluralism is that morally incompatible communities agree to live with each other and respect their differences, and work together through political compromise. That is why the new sober turn in religious conservatism is to be welcomed. But now several of its leaders are beginning to acknowledge that the movement may be approaching the limits of what it can hope, politically, to achieve.