Second, disagreements were understood as natural and healthy; disputes civilly aired were believed to reveal the better way forward. Dialogic discourse rather than dictatorial narratives held pride of place. Socrates, not Plato’s philosopher-king, prevailed.
Third, defeat in political contests came to be seen as inherently provisional and temporary; there is always the next election. That realization, in turn, conduces to compromise and conciliation, other means of rendering politics something other than a continuously zero-sum proposition.
I strongly recommend reading the whole thing.
It is possible for people who disagree about politics to conduct a dialogue in order to clarify the nature of the disagreement. However, that notion has been discarded. Instead, the objective is to get the other guy to shut up. This intellectually inferior and divisive approach pervades the culture on campus and on line.
I don’t see a link to the Garfinkle article.
I think:
http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/04/07/politics-as-bloodsport/
It requires intelligence and integrity rather than blind belief impervious to evidence that you just know has to be true, but when the evidence isn’t on your side and you are incapable of coherent argument why it isn’t, it is the last resort, but this shouldn’t be confused with its rejection. Lamentation of debate is often a defense against it and saves from having to offer it.
Those are a lot of words and run-on sentences just to say, “sometimes yes, and sometimes no”.
Disagreement without rancor requires something remarkable – a commitment to logic and individualism. A rational man’s facts and reasoning are statements not about himself, but about things out in the world.
The Left, since perhaps the 60s and definitely now, is no longer about logic, it is about emotion. In the era of trigger warnings, the source of understanding is no longer skeptical inquiry but empathy.
The personal, as they say, is the political.
To question a leftist is now no longer to question her reasoning, but to challenge her felt experience. To disagree with a leftist is to invalidate her emotions. To refuse to comply with her demands is now a sign of lack of empathy.
Individualism, reason, law, the nation-state, and federalism were tools designed to set aside considerable space (personal, religious, and property) where we agreed to disagree.
When we replace reason with empathy and individualism with communalism, we reject that separation, and we return to the endless religious wars before 1648.
“When we replace reason with empathy and individualism with communalism, we reject that separation, and we return to the endless religious wars before 1648.”
That is, “when everyone (in power) agreed with me (after all, I am Reason), there was peace; but when people dare to disagree with me, the horror! the horror!”
It reminds me of the joke about a student who wrote that Athenian democracy worked because dissenters were sentenced to death, it’s the Conservative “thought” in a nutshell.
“The Left, since perhaps the 60s and definitely now, is no longer about logic, it is about emotion.”
In a time when American Right is all about rabble-rousing and yelling the loudest, that sentence is simply ludicrous.
Thiago,
For my money, sam makes the comment of the year. You disagree with a sentence or two.
I simply can’t imagine conservatives doing to university speakers what liberal groups are doing, for example.
I also demand anonymity on line because I can very easily imagine liberals attacking me in my real life for my comments in a way I have trouble imagining conservatives doing. Ymmv.
“You disagree with a sentence or two.”
No, I disagree with every single sentence because every single sentence is a fantastic lie designed to give Stalin’s Moscow Trials a run for their money.
For instance: “Individualism, reason, law, the nation-state, and federalism were tools designed to set aside considerable space (personal, religious, and property) where we agreed to disagree.”
“Federalism” meant slaves, Abolitionists and post-Civil War blacks had to “agree” with Slavery and restrictions on Civil Rights in the South if they knew what was the best for their health. When people stopped “agreeing”, the USA got a Civil War (part of the political dialogue, I guess), Reconstruction, Federal troops in Little Rock and the Civil Rights Act. Conservative mythology aside, this is how “States Rights” became the favorite mantra of the Jim Crow crowd.
The rest of the sentence is just more self-congratulatory non-sense that can be summed up thus: “Conservatives (even when they engage in stupid policies and the most vile rabble-rousing) have a monopoly of Reason and Law just because I said so”.
Reading American rightists’ books showed me that their main characteristic is their totalitarian conception of politics, always yearning for an idealized past America where people who disagree with them didn’t exist or knew their proper place, and there were “good” laws in place to remind them if they ever dared to forget.
“I also demand anonymity on line because I can very easily imagine liberals attacking me in my real life for my comments in a way I have trouble imagining conservatives doing.”
It is a funny thing to say when the Conservative hate machine is working overtime. Well, you know what they say, “I am firm, you are obstinate, he is a pig-headed fool.” By the way, in the good old times of the fine “art of political dialogue”, things much worse than the ones that can put a Conservative to trouble nowadays were frequently said about (or done to) Jews, Catholics, Blacks, Hispanics, Gays, Liberals and, in fact, were official policy. Thus I dare to say that it is not “Civility” or “Reason” that you miss, but the ability to attack the “other” with perfect impunity.
“Ymmv.”
Some people may have more reasons for nostalgia than others, I think.
Or, whoever is winning the culture war doesn’t care about niceties, and whoever is losing laments the aggressiveness of the winners. That explains the current and past situation best, IME.
Once upon a time, engaging in political dialog took some work. If I read an article by you in National Review, say, with which I disagreed and wanted to register objections, I had to pull out my typewriter, compose a letter and mail it off to National Review, where some editorial minion would form his own judgment as to whether it was worthy of seeing the light of day, and perhaps in two or four weeks my comments would appear in the magazine’s letter column.
This took some work from me, some work from people at NR, even some work from readers, who had to retrieve the back issue of the magazine to re-inform themselves of the topic of the debate. And because of this need for effort, a lot of dross got filtered out.
Today, I can read your latest post in a couple of minutes, blow my stack in a few seconds, bash out a comment describing your hatefulness and submit it to your blog within five minutes or so, and then blithely go about way. Ten minutes hence I can be bedeviling Brian Caplan or Craig Newmark or Tyler Cowen, or sending an ‘Attaboy to Paul Krugman. Or all of the above. And with improving technology, I can now dispatch my opinions with less than 140 characters using just a single hand. Oh, bliss it is, to be a troll alive in such an age!
In other words, the internet shifts political “dialog” in the direction of bottom-rung intellects. I’m not really sure what the cure is — do away with anonymity and pseudonyms? require commenters to login? make the original matter so esoteric or Straussian that none but informed readers are inclined to comment? put comments behind a paywall? My sneaking suspicion is that all these have problems as well, and that some other solutions will evolve. By the mid- 2020’s the age of open-access internet blogging may be behind us, as quaint appearing to contemporaries as the front page “Letters from a Correspondant” that used to appear in Victorian newspapers would seem to us.
Libertarians are no less dogmatic and emotional within their circle of wagons, when they shout “voice is the problem” and base their refusal to join reality, i.e participate in politics and the state, on a false confidence in markets as the sole source of legitimate social order, and being obsessed with a thoroughly distorting, arbitrarily truncated idea of spontaneous order (SO) which they dogmatically confine to the economic sphere, with no sense at all of SO and “invisible hand”- like phenomena in the political sphere.
For more see: http://redstateeclectic.typepad.com/redstate_commentary/2015/04/the-libertraian-triangle-of-oblivion.html
If you think libertarians only confine spontaneous order to the economic sphere, congratulations.
You are just the latest to demonstrate very little understanding of libertarianism because you think that “if the state doesn’t do it, it doesn’t exist”.
In fact, libertarians think almost all social interaction can be handled by spontaneous order. That is the whole point of the NAP.
Political order has some elements of spontaneous order, but that is swamped by the coercion and central planning of the system.
When I’m not participating in the political process, you will know it.
I’m pretty sure public choice came out of classical liberal economics. Oh nevermind.
Ouch, that is about as efficient a destruction as I have seen.
For there to be civilized political dialogue between opposing parties, the two sides have to share some moral premises relevant to the issue being discussed. On many issues, there are no such shared moral premises in the US, just as there has never been any shared moral premises between, say, Israeli Jews and Palestinians with reference to the Israel/Palestinian conflict (now more than a century old). Hence, civilized, constructive debate has vanished from American politics on most issues.
It should also be noted that many over-estimate the civility of political discourse in past eras of American history. I have the impression that many people take the relative decorum of American politics (apart from the South’s opposition to civil rights) from the downfall of Joe McCarthy until the anti-war movement blossomed around 67 to have been the norm throughout American history. It was not; rather, during that period of less than a generation, there was a high degree of consensus in the society and among elites. In 1960, for example, the policy differences between Kennedy and Nixon were not great. Perhaps we tend to take the debate of that period as the norm because we are influenced by the older baby boomers and those just a bit older than they, who are now retiring and became politically active or politically conscious during that period.
Indeed.
Just to mention some examples: what about the slanderous pamphlets of old, the denunciations of Abolitionist Republicans as “nigger-lovers” and the denunciations of Democrats as the party of “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion”, not to mention the skirmishes leading to or arising from the Civil War, including a liberal use of violence against -among others- blacks?
Yes, and the alleged good vibes and bipartisanship got us HERE..
Andrew’,
Are you suggesting some previous era was better than this one? If so which one? And better for who?
Exactly right djf.
Sadly, it’s the period of relative harmony after WWII that is the historical anomaly.
That’s true, and I think, in no small part due to the unusual across the board growth in prosperity post WW2.
True, but it is also true that the 1945-1967 era was hardly peaceful or decorous in the South.