Yuval Levin argues that Americans need more frequent political disagreements to help address the nation’s sharp partisan divisions.
Americans are divided, but not in the way most people imagine.
When we say we are divided, we often mean that we disagree too much and have too little in common. In reality, Americans don’t disagree nearly enough. Even most politically engaged people don’t actually spend much time in active disagreement with people who have different views. We spend most of our time cocooned away with people we agree with, talking about those terrible people on the other side, but rarely actually talk to those people.
This feeds the common misimpression that disagreement is a mark of civic failure, and that the very existence of people who don’t share our goals and priorities is a problem to be solved. The distinctly 21st-century institutions of our civic life—not only social media but the polarized political press, the one-party university, the one-party church, and an increasingly performative political culture—are all grounded in that misimpression. They are built to let us avoid exposure to conflicting views. People we disagree with are the subjects of our lives as citizens, not the content of them.
This is a perverse distortion of the American political tradition. Our Constitution is premised on the assumption that our neighbors aren’t always going to share our views, and that dealing with each other through those differences is what politics is for. …
… Legislatures and courtrooms are places to argue with each other. So are universities, properly understood, and newspaper opinion pages. The forms and rules of those institutions are designed to make the arguments that happen there constructive.
The same cannot be said of our digital partisan cocoons. They are not there to facilitate disagreement but to facilitate division.
