Political Argument in a Polarized Age. Scott F. Aikin
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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