Political Argument in a Polarized Age

Reason and Democratic Life

Scott F. Aikin, Robert B. Talisse

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509536542
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

From obnoxious public figures to online trolling and accusations of "fake news", almost no one seems able to disagree without hostility. But polite discord sounds farfetched when issues are so personal and fundamental that those on opposing sides appear to have no common ground. How do you debate the "enemy"? Philosophers Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse show that disagreeing civilly, even with your sworn enemies, is a crucial part of democracy. Rejecting the popular view that civility requires a polite and concessive attitude, they argue that our biggest challenge is not remaining calm in the face of an opponent, but rather ensuring that our political arguments actually address those on the opposing side. Too often politicians and pundits merely simulate political debate, offering carefully structured caricatures of their opponents. These simulations mimic political argument in a way designed to convince citizens that those with whom they disagree are not worth talking to. Good democracy thrives off conflict, but until we learn the difference between real and simulated arguments we will be doomed to speak at cross-purposes. Aikin and Talisse provide a crash course in political rhetoric for the concerned citizen, showing readers why understanding the structure of arguments is just as vital for a healthy democracy as debate over facts and values. But there's a sting in the tail - no sooner have we learned rhetorical techniques for better disagreement than these techniques themselves become weapons with which to ignore our enemies, as accusations like "false equivalence" and "ad hominem" are used to silence criticism. Civility requires us to be eternally vigilant to the ways we disagree.

1
Democracy in Dark Days

This is not another how to save democracy book. Perhaps you are familiar with that type of book – the author laments the decline of some democratic norm, intones gravely about where the current trajectory takes us, and then outlines a set of fixes. There is, unsurprisingly, a small industry of books that follow this formula. They sell. They function as a kind of self-help for the political class. Now, that’s not a bad thing by any means, but we think there is a false premise behind it all. Democracy can’t be fixed.

So this clearly isn’t a book about how to save democracy. What is it, instead? Well, it’s not a case against democracy, either. Just because democracy can’t be fixed, it doesn’t follow that we should do away with it. This is because doing away with democracy requires that we put something else in its place, something that there’s sufficient reason to think is superior to democracy. But this comparative work is fraught. Notice that the relevant comparison is not between real-world democracy and some idealized nondemocratic alternative. Instead, the relevant comparison is between democracy as it presently functions and some envisioned alternative as it would function were it instated. When the comparison is performed properly, democracy comes out on top. So this isn’t an anti-democracy book; we think there is no better political arrangement than democracy, even when it is functioning poorly.

This isn’t a saving democracy book, and it’s not a down with democracy book. So what is it? Well, it’s complicated, but that’s what happens when you ask tough questions that do not admit of simple answers. In fact, we hold that one of the problems with democracy is that it encourages citizens to expect there to be simple answers to complicated political questions. Hence the popularity of the two genres we have mentioned; the literature of both saving democracy and down with democracy is driven by the demand for easy answers.

Still, something should be said at the start about what this book is about. The view we will present can be sketched as follows. We understand democracy to be the proposal that a stable and decent political order can be sustained by equal citizens who nonetheless disagree, often sharply, about the precise shape their collective life should take. On this view, political disagreement among political equals is central to democracy. Disagreements of this kind are the engine of collective self-government. However, the practices associated with political disagreement and the freedoms guaranteed to citizens that enable them to engage in political argumentation – particularly, freedoms of conscience, expression, and association – create the conditions under which the democratic citizenry fractures into hostile and opposed factions. For reasons we will explain in these pages, political factions have a tendency to transform their members into polarized extremists who grow incapable of seeing their political opponents as fellow citizens. Yet maintaining a commitment to the political equality of our political opposition is the central demand of the democratic ethos, the ethos of the democratic citizen.

Note the tragic irony. Our enactment of democratic citizenship leads to the kind of polarization that dismantles our democratic capacities. We recognize the central democratic freedoms precisely because collective self-government among equals needs citizens to deliberate and argue together about matters of public concern. But in order to argue well together, citizens must be able to access and process the reasons and evidence that are relevant to their disputes; and they must engage with one another. The need to engage in argument with those with whom one disagrees prompts certain forms of democratic dysfunction. In particular, we will focus in this book on the ways in which the need to engage in such argument creates the occasion for simulated argument, mimicked political engagement. These are processes and practices that are designed to look like political argumentation among equal citizens that are in fact strategies for avoiding and shutting down such engagement. When authentic political argumentation is successfully shut down in this way, opposing factions polarize, democratic capacities are dismantled, and citizens become increasingly incapable of the real thing. Democracy thus is undermined from within.

It’s important to emphasize that this dysfunction is a product of democracy, not the work of some alien and counter-democratic political ideal. And it is not an accidental product of democracy. It is a product of democracies as democracies. The fact is that we factionalize and polarize as a consequence of sincerely trying to enact democratic citizenship properly. It’s not a fact of disproportionate wealth distributions or caused by racism or regionalism, though these factors certainly hasten it. No, it’s a feature of democracies as democracies, because this kind of disagreement is central to the democratic project, and the pathologies of political argument are consequences of democratic freedoms. This is why democracy cannot be saved, at least not in the way that animates much of the current literature devoted to saving it. Fractious disagreement is an essential cog in the machinery of democratic politics. Fixing democracy cannot be a matter of quelling or sidelining our political disagreements. A political order without real disagreement and disputes in which participants get heated is no democracy at all. The trick is to find a way to conduct disputes of that kind while also sustaining our respect for the political equality of our opposition. Although we employ the term advisedly, we claim here that the task is to formulate a workable conception of civil political disagreement. More on that term shortly. But, again, however, this is not a promise of saving democracy, but of managing the symptoms of its core problem.

Civility and the Owl of Minerva Problem

We actually agree with the folks who write those how to save democracy books, at least about one thing: contemporary democracies are failing to handle political disagreement properly. Political divisions and antagonisms have reached such a pitch that citizens indeed find it difficult to see why their political opponents are their equals. They are growing increasingly inclined to regard those with whom they disagree over politics to be not merely incorrect, but depraved, dangerous, and threatening to democracy itself.

It seems that if the problem lies with the level of antagonism citizens have toward their political opposition, there should be a fix. But we have already indicated that we think there is no fix. Why? Again, our answer is complicated, and the central task of this book is to spell out the problem we find with reparative strategies. Here’s a thumbnail version. Our attempts to correct democratic practice requires creating new rules and norms for democratic citizens to follow, or perhaps reminding citizens of rules that they implicitly endorse and wish we all could follow. However, partisan divisions are at present so severe that any such proposal will be received by some significant segment of the citizenry as biased against their own political allegiances; thus, our strategies of correction are transformed into tools of partisan attack. Any tools we might devise for fixing democracy will become additional instruments for its dysfunction.

Part of the trouble is that we are trying to understand something while we are doing it, and the resulting theorizing and prescriptions that follow from that effort in turn change what we are aiming to understand. Accordingly, our explanations are always at least one step behind the phenomenon to be explained. We call this The Owl of Minerva Problem. The mythological Owl of Minerva brings understanding, but it flies only at dusk, after the dust has settled. So our understanding of democratic argumentation applies only in retrospect, because once we make that understanding public, we change the practice of democratic argumentation.

To grasp this, think of all the ways that “tone policing” in the name of civility has become a way of attacking the other side for not adopting the correct tone. A norm is identified for democratic arguers to embrace in conducting their disputes, but then that very norm itself becomes a tool for expressing one’s contempt for the other side. We dismiss the other side’s views by impugning the ways in which they are expressed. Think of all the times that, in a heated exchange, the tone with which one side puts their point becomes the topic of discussion, a stand-in for their view. Now, we have two disagreements: what we’d originally disagreed about, and also how we’ve been managing that disagreement. Anyone who’s been to family therapy or taken part in team-building exercises can recognize that the tools of these ways of bringing us together can be turned into new and cruel weapons. In this way, the norm is turned against itself: the attempt to make explicit a way to get along becomes a tool for not getting along. This point generalizes: certain kinds of incivility are possible only once we’ve tried to model civility. That’s the Owl of Minerva Problem in a nutshell.

Hence a recurring theme of this book: civility produces its own discontent. Political argument, even when civil, has challenges that branch out to our larger culture and that loop back on themselves. Our attempts to conduct ourselves properly amidst political disagreement create the possibility for new modes of incivility, precisely by way of the norms they instantiate. Notice that this phenomenon is at work in the case of the very concept of civility. Here’s how. You have political views, and lots of other citizens in your city and country have political views as well. Many of them have political views that are inconsistent with your own. Moreover, many of those folks have views you think are not only wrong, but benighted or abhorrent, and in any case not worthy of serious consideration or respect. And they think the same of you and your views: they see you as adhering to political ideas that are ridiculous and ignorant. But here’s the deal with democracy: our commitment to collective self-government among political equals means that sometimes these other folks will get their way, and the government will shape policy in light of their views. And, although democracy permits you to enact your opposition to the prevailing policies in various ways, you still have to live with the fact that your side lost and the other side won. For the time being, and of course within the standard constitutional constraints, your political opponents get to decide how things will go. That’s simply how democracy works. Equal citizens have equal input into the decision-making process, and we all abide by the results of that process. After all, you expect your opponents to live with it when your views prevail, so you have to do the same. That’s largely what political equality is.

But in cases where the political stakes are high, many democratic citizens entertain the following background thought. Maybe there are views that are so wrong, so abhorrent and foolish, that holding them disqualifies a person for democratic citizenship. Surely there are views of this kind; they are views that are themselves inconsistent with democracy and its commitment to the political equality of all citizens. Managing citizens who adopt such views is a special problem for democratic theory that we cannot address in this book. The trouble is that factionalized and polarized citizens begin to regard any deviation from their own preferred political position as tantamount to adopting an intolerable view. Thus they come to see anyone who is not a fellow partisan as not only incapable of democratic citizenship, but a threat to democracy itself.

What we will be calling civility is a set of norms that enable citizens to manage their political disagreements, even in cases where the stakes are high. Civility in general is the disposition to regard fellow citizens as politically equal partners in collective government even when they hold political views that you regard as fundamentally mistaken, injudicious, and even reckless. However, civility is not capitulation. And it needn’t mean social etiquette, like conversation with soft tones and maintaining a veneer of niceness. Rather, civility as we understand it in this book is composed of the dispositions needed to disagree well even when disagreeing vehemently, to hear each other’s reasons, make the stakes clear, and look at the various positives and negatives in ways that get to the bottom of the matter. Civility is a commitment to norms of proper argument.

Now, if civility is a matter of good argument, then logic has a political edge. Our examples of arguments that live up to these norms and those that break them will be drawn from politics in the United States – we are writing about the democratic environment that we know best. But we think that the cases are generalizable. The terms and trends of logic and critical exchange show up in political debates well beyond America – “fake news” and “whataboutery” are now global terms. Our overall objective in these pages is to make a case for ways to repair our arguments piece by piece, and repair our culture of civil exchange in the process. Thus, this is not a recipe for fixing or saving democracy, but rather a method for managing the vices that democratic politics engenders. It is an outline of the work that democracy requires of us.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Democracy in Dark Days
• 2 Civility and Its Discontents
• 3 Evaluating Argument
• 4 Our Polarization Problem
• 5 Political Ignorance
• 6 Simulated Argument
• 7 Fake News
• 8 Deep Disagreements
• 9 Civility as a Reciprocal Virtue
• 10 Repairing Argumentative Culture
• 11 Democracy at Dusk
• Index
• End User License Agreement