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.