How to disagree
What Damon Linker, Michelle Goldberg and Jonathan Chait taught me today.
It's hard to disagree.
Or, at least, it's hard for me to disagree. Generally speaking, I like people. I don't like hating them. So in a lot of cases where I'm interacting with somebody and we have a big disagreement, I instinctively look for some common ground.
Sometimes this is a good thing: Taking "yes" for an answer is all too rare in our current discourse. But sometimes it makes it difficult for me to recognize when the disagreements are irreconcilable, or when the other person maybe isn't acting in good faith. I struggle with this. And I know my friends sometimes struggle with that aspect of my approach.
Anyway, I want to highlight three pieces of writing today that I think are good models of disagreement, that is both thoughtful and forthright without resorting to cruelty and anger.
The first comes from my friend and former colleague Damon Linker, who writes about his friend Rod Dreher. Dreher -- who blogs at The American Conservative -- has spent recent days trying to defend and explain way Viktor Orban's recent comments decrying "race mixing" among Europeans.
Damon writes directly to Dreher, urging him to reconsider that defense:
Our own moment is unusually bewildering, with intense polarization, dramatically shifting ideological lines, and blurred partisan distinctions. Your own constant engagement with critics on your blog, Rod, shows your good-faith struggle to find your way through the intellectual and moral thickets. That’s one reason I’ve admired your writing for so long, despite the fact that we often find ourselves on opposite sides of political fault lines.
But even in a time of shifting and blurred lines, we need to hold fast to some fixed standards. If a politician delivers a speech in which he combines talk of European collapse with ominous references to the dangers of mixing races and the existential threat posed by Muslim immigration, and then also plugs a book that warns about precisely the same thing in racist terms, he has delivered a flagrantly racist speech.
This isn’t complicated. It’s as clear as day, right there on the surface, and it’s bad.
Here's Michelle Goldberg, writing in NYT about pro-lifers who are denying some of the consequences of their new laws:
It is always painful to grapple with realities that contravene your most deeply held beliefs.
A major theme of recent feminist writing has been the chasm between the rhetoric of sexual liberation and many women’s depressing experience of casual sex. I’ve met many idealistic Jews, raised to always give Israel the benefit of the doubt, who’ve been floored when they saw the occupation of Palestine up close. Plenty of people convinced themselves that because the impetus behind pandemic school closures was noble, the results wouldn’t be devastating.
Perhaps some in the anti-abortion movement are wrestling with a similarly discomfiting gap between intentions and effects right now. That, at least, is the most sympathetic reading of the angry denial of prominent abortion opponents when confronted with a predictable consequence of abortion bans: delayed care for traumatic pregnancy complications.
And finally, here's Jonathan Chait writing about how much progressive rage was directed last year at Larry Summers and his prediction of inflation. Only Summers turned out to be right. That means we should learn a few lessons:
(1) Intellectual humility can be a virtue. Some questions have fairly clear answers, but progressives have gotten overinvested in the notion that every political question has an undeniably correct answer. You saw this during the pandemic, when progressives began applying the label “deniers” not only to people who questioned the vaccine (which was kooky) but to people who questioned the cost-benefit value of any public-health intervention.
(2) Assumptions about motives are often wrong. Once you assume every position you hold is obviously correct and good, it is easy to believe that everybody who disagrees is evil or corrupt. Summers was not trying to sabotage Biden — he was trying to steer the administration away from what he genuinely believed was a risky policy choice.
I'd urge you to read all three pieces.
What they share is not necessarily an ideology, but maybe an outlook: One that tries to honestly imagine how the people they're critiquing see the world -- even in the midst of sometimes-profound disagreement. They lean toward persuasion instead of castigation.1 Which means they share a bit of humanity that's frequently missing in our arguments and debates. That doesn’t mean they’ve disarmed themselves in disagreement — it just means they’ve brought a little humility to the arena. These are rare virtues, and I hope to emulate them.
Once again: If we’re to have any hope of saving our democracy, reviving our atrophied persuasion muscles is going to have to be part of the process. Maybe that’s impossible, but that doesn’t mean it’s not necessary.