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We have with us today Joshua Mitchell, who is Professor of Political Theory at Georgetown University,

author of many books, including Tocqueville in Arabia, as well as pieces in first things. His new book is

American Awakening, Identity Politics, and Other Affliction of Our Time. Welcome, Joshua.

Thank you very much for having me, Mark. Now, one of the first things that's going to strike

people is they read the first few pages of the book, is your alignment of three things that seem disparate. Identity politics, bipolarity, and addiction.

We'll get into the specifics of those, but what led you to bring those three things together,

just in a broad sense? What happened was I wrote the section on identity politics, and I thought,

well, if we get rid of this,

everything's going to be fine. And then I realized in some of the things I'd written earlier,

in point of fact, there were additional problem. And so I thought, no, let's put together a book in which I address all three of the problems that I think we have. And so I think probably

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