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These excised lines from the Farewell Address serve not only as a warning but as a prescient prophecy of the political turmoil and factionalism that would later shape the nation’s history.

The Achilles’ heel of large democracies—their very diversity, if channeled into blind factionalism—could become the instrument of their undoing.

The irony stings: In preserving Washington’s unifying legacy, perhaps those words that could have unified Americans in a more important way—against the very factionalism now threatening our republic—were erased.

Law professor Gregory Elinson observes that “intraparty conflict can immunize our constitutional system from the pathologies that arise when partisan warfare is overlayed on the Madisonian model of separated institutions sharing power... Today, as was true at the Founding, Americans have no great love for intraparty conflict or party factionalism.”

This, I am told, will lead to more factionalism and fights.