In Defense of Disagreement

The 2022 mid-terms are finally in sight. Like at least the last seven rancorous national election cycles, it has been unpleasant, revealed ever deeper fissures in our democracy, and revived fringe groups which not long ago had seemed rightly regarded as an historical asterisk. All this has weakened the Republic itself. Polls consistently find that a majority of Americans are repulsed by politics, significant numbers of Republican voters in particular questioning the legitimacy of elections, and other voters worried about the state of our democracy yet driven by every day matters like inflation. The very foundations of the Republic need concerted shoring up, as does confidence in the future of our civilization itself.

Americans are grumpy, and most politicians are either detested or grudgingly tolerated. But, as in the last several cycles, the most derided aspect of the season is not a candidate per se, but rather the very basis of self-government: politics itself, and by extension those labeled with the ultimate slander — politician. This antipathy is an artifact of long efforts by pressure groups, the media and politicians themselves to undermine the validity of disagreement and to vilify the give-and-take compromise which enables any democracy to function. From the mid-1990s (and, depending on how one measures it, perhaps since Barry Goldwater’s titanic loss to LBJ in 1964), this subversion has been largely a feature of the right, championed in the last several years by Mr. Trump, although similar reactionary movements on the left now sport similar themes.

For centuries, the West has been driven by a handful of powerful and revolutionary ideas. Even though they form the foundation of so much of the modern world, they are weaker today than at any time since the end of World War 1, which shattered the psychology of the West in ways hard for us to grasp today. Two of these ideas are that humans can command their own fate, and that largely uninterrupted progress is not merely possible, it is normal. The power of these ideas, particularly in combination, cannot be overstated. But by 1900, cracks began to appear in Western societies about the irrepressible progress of humankind thanks to another interesting feature of the West — its inexhaustible capacity for self-criticism, which lives awkwardly alongside its arrogance. The Great War turned those cracks into canyons. Twenty years later, the West’s capacity for self-destruction (enthusiastically joined by Japan’s empire in the East) plunged the world into another global war. After six years of war and 60 million deaths, the post-war order of overlapping, rules-based international structures were understandably built to avoid a third, this time nuclear, global conflict. In large part this worked by constraining national ambitions and building shared structures that were more advantageous to leverage than subvert—at least most of the time. All this was also on the overwhelming power of the United States, the urgency of the Cold War, and a measured, plodding renewal of confidence in the future. Then the Soviet empire crumbled, and the self-assuredness, bending toward arrogance, of the West spiked, and then began to wane again. Not everyone laments the end of supreme Western confidence of course, inasmuch as it was this confidence that fueled Western imperialism and the litany of injustices it spawned. But whatever its vices, Western confidence is fueled by belief in our agency to design the future and the inevitability of progress. The pairing is essential, too. Agency unsupported by broadly-shared progressivism feeds environmental catastrophe, conflict, and dystopia. The signs of that are all around us. The weakening of both of these ideas translates into a great number of voters who fear the future, fear their neighbors — particularly if those neighbors are ethnically different — elevate opinion over fact, and blame their heightened woes on politics writ large. But the system by which Americans and a great many other people govern themselves is politics.

Moreover, our political environment and the societies which it has produced have persisted through many upheavals, many twists and turns of history. Why do they seem so fragile now? And why only in some parts of the West? Canada, Japan, Australia and Ireland, for example, seem to be avoiding the implosion of angst dogging Britain, France and America. The questions are more clear than the answers, but surely part of it is the rise of populist movements (usually on the right) and demagouges to lead them in the three latter examples.

It’s worth taking a moment to remind ourselves of what politics is, why it matters and ask why it appears to be so reviled in a society that has gained immeasurably from it.

Although it’s hard for us to imagine now, real politics, one of the most important and ubiquitous features of the modern world, did not always exist. For most of human history, power in communities, tribes, empires and the like was closely held within a small group or autocratic within a single person. Taking place within these closed systems, the intrigues of Game of Thrones, for example, are not politics in the sense we now think of it in the West. But politics bubbled up from the West, first in ancient Greece, then during the Roman Republic, but it atrophied after republicanism in Rome gave way to empire.

To our first question then — if not Game of Thrones, what is politics? Historian J.M. Roberts poses a good answer. Politics is “a way of managing collective affairs so that different interests could be given a hand in them without falling into violent conflict.” This view is wrapped up in the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the existence of national sovereignty and, significantly, the idea that different interests are entitled to share political power — a revolutionary idea if there ever was one. Roberts’ definition also implies a number of concepts which underlie modern politics and which we take for granted even though some of them are now under threat. First is that a collective or public good actually exists, which is apart from the private good of a ruling elite and represents more than simply the amalgamation of individual ambitions; also that the public good can reasonably be determined and that the purpose of government is to forward it; that a forum for argument, discussion and decision should exist and that the public should have a hand in selecting the people who represent them in such a forum; and perhaps most important is the legitimacy of disagreement on public matters. Without recognizing the legitimacy of disagreement, none of these other ideas really matter. Indeed, wide recognition of the legitimacy of political disagreement is rare in history, and so these ideas would have been alien to the vast majority of people who have ever lived anywhere on Earth. Yet over the course of a few mere centuries they became the foundation of politics in the West.

This was the result of many influences, but notably the English (1688), American (1776) and French (1789) revolutions, each of which in different ways established mechanisms for sharing power, recognized the need for processes by which disagreement can be resolved short of violence, and created rule by consent of citizens and limits on government power. Earlier groundwork for this shift was laid by the Reformation (1517), which had created the need for new legal structures that could settle disputes about who held ultimate spiritual authority (within what was then called Christendom). So while politics as we know it remains comparatively adolescent on the scale of recorded history, it still has deep roots.

In order for politics to work, everyone has to recognize the legitimacy of disagreement and the legitimacy of the processes by which disagreement will be resolved without resort to force. This of course is one of the great contributions of republican government — in a different political system with an absolute ruler, a monarch or other despot, disagreement is generally not legitimate and often not safe. And disagreement need not be limited to trivial matters. It was part of Abraham Lincoln’s genious that he did not try to minimize the import of slavery as a paramount issue in his efforts to stave off civil war — instead, he argued that in a republic, we must be able to disagree about important things, resolve them peacefully and preserve our political union.

Structures that translate the popular will into government action also have theoretical limits in Western societies based on Enlightenment ideals, and we are still living with the consequences of that. There is an obvious tension, with which the writers of the Federalist Papers and others grappled, in a society which equally prizes both popular rule and universal rights. Leaders of the French revolution tried (more than once) to enshrine a list of universal rights to which everyone was entitled and which lay beyond the grasp of popular will; in America, the Bill of Rights filled this role. This is one of the great paradoxes of Western republicanism — the popular will can, and often has, extinguished the rights of individuals and whole groups, usurped free press, religion, dissent and so forth. As Roberts put it: “What popular sovereignty could do, it could undo.” These impulses had to be checked through the identification of universal rights not to be infringed.

But now, the Enlightenment, long unchallenged as a wellspring of the West, faces setbacks which would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. We are now confronted with the urgent matter that many people who occupy or are standing for (and likely to attain) high political office no longer recognize the legitimacy of politics itself (conflict resolution without violence, within structures set by law), popular rule and portions of the Bill of Rights, all while continuing to enjoy the enthusiastic support of millions. One does not have to look very hard to see the field tilting towards authoritarianism. Millions of voters are clearly of a mind to tip the scales toward unfettered executive power, at the expense of principles and rights that Western civilization has long held to be universal and not subject to the whim of public opinion.

The current batch of politicians did not create the war on politics but have done their utmost to stoke its resentments. A central feature of this has been volume before thought, and toxic language without boundaries. The language itself will have long lived consequences. As de Tocqueville put it:

“The last thing a political party gives up is its vocabulary. This is because, in party politics as in other matters, it is the crowd who dictates the language, and the crowd relinquishes the ideas it has been given more readily than the words it has learned.”

Our choice of words defines us in obvious and subtle ways. Those words will frame the soul-searching ahead about who we are and where we are headed. The idea that civilization is headed someplace is a defining feature of the West. Since at least the late Middle Ages, we have believed ourselves to be headed someplace better, even if slowly. Many moments lay ahead to ensure that belief has not been misguided.