I think the reflective nature of this draft was precisely the right step. You've seen why "proving" a constitutional proposition on an originalist premise, whether tendentiously or not, isn't much of a contribution to the political conversation with your father. This led you to a deeper conclusion, partly emotional and partly intellectual, wholly correct, that political conversation with your father deprives you of connection rather than contributing to it. Both of these are valuable steps, in differently important directions.

I don't know whether you care to continue on this line. If so, I think the next draft would deal not with the substance of your political differences, and not even with the underlying similarities in commitment to what you call "principle" in daily life (what on the basis of your examples I think Veblen would have called "instinct of workmanship). It is rather the different roles that thinking about politics plays in your two lives that would be the additional subject.

Your father has accepted an invitation offered by forms of mass media that grew up after the demise of the Fairness Doctrine: he has made politics the domain of team confrontation. He brings to the interpretation of politics around him the same unmeasured emotional investment, the same external projection of visceral motivations, that twentieth-century American men largely invested in spectator sports. This is not a characterization he would accept: he is, after all, The Thinking Man. That he is manipulated, in his role of Republican-rooting Thinking Man, into supporting governments and policies that are not only bad for him but bad for you, is what he must not allow himself to see. This is achieved via the process Arnold described. Creed, which defines the boundary between inside and outside social organizations, is redefined to put "outside" anyone who would challenge the thinking man's "conclusions." The "libs" become not merely people with different ideas, but people trying to destroy what can only be kept safe by not thinking too hard.

Your emotional structure for thinking about politics is different. I leave you to characterize it for yourself, if you're so inclined.