United We Fall: Ending America's Love Affair with the Political Center

(Greenwood Publishing Group, 2008)


Greenwood's blurb about the book: "United We Fall argues that today's harmful levels of polarization in American politicscan be ratcheted down only by giving up the twin notions that the center is the sweet spot for political efficiency and that all differences deserve equal weight in the democratic balance. The American people need instead to embrace a political credo of civic engagement, confrontation with open ears, and spirited debate. The commonplace 'United We Stand' must be supplanted by the insight that democracy is strongest where it acknowledges and formalizes real division. But surely bipartisan rancor in America and extremist violence around the worldare symptoms of too much disagreement--not too little? No, asserts the author: The root cause of political violence of all stripes is the failure of opposing camps to engage each other openly and persuasively on their genuine andirreconcilable differences."

About the publisher’s blurb:   Greenwood summarizes my thesis as if I am asking for a reduction in polarization. That's not wrong but it might be misleading.  What I argue is that polarization isn’t a bad thing at all if it means that strong – perhaps irreconcilable – differences persist, even amidst heated argument. On the other hand, polarization is a problem if it means that argument is not even taking place because the various advocates consider talking with their opponents to be inherently unacceptable and pointless. Polarization is also a bad thing if it refers to different sides being frozen in place because they radically misunderstand their opponents and their views. How many leftists decide what conservatives believe by reading or listening to conservatives? Not enough. How many cultural conservatives get their ideas about what a feminist is by talking to anti-feminists? Too many. If we engaged our opponents in respectful disagreement we would know more about them, and we might find ourselves, and our views, changed for the better in the process.

Chapter Summaries:

1. Disagreement Today: Americans often approach political, philosophical, and religious disagreements with hesitancy, denial, hostility, or avoidance. These attitudes are reinforced by a misplaced faith in the validity of the political center and by a lack of cross-border communication. The result is frequent “disagreement failure.” On the other hand, U.S. politics features many examples of “disagreement success,” meaning public and private conversations that include opposing extremes, where unity is neither the goal nor the result, and where important learning and community-building takeplace. 

2. A Mixed Disagreement Legacy: U.S.disagreement history up to and including World War Two and the immediate post-war period reveals a mixed legacy. New England town meetings, barn raisings, the rise of professional political parties, the commercialization of resorts, Progressive reforms meant to “clean up” politics: all feature pro-disagreement and anti-disagreement elements. Of special note is the rise and fall of the urban democracy movement, a Progressive experiment in public discussion that showed great promise but suffered from the faulty assumption that reason provides only one right answer to each and every question. By the time the modern state-managed, market economy emerged after World War II, an anti-disagreement “interest group liberalism” had firmly taken hold.

3. Argument after World War II: Today’s unproductive political polarization is rooted in major understanding gaps that developed during the 1950s and 60s, and these gaps have staying power because America continues to be segregated along lines of race, political point of view, ideology, and economic class. While it’s commonly believed that the “culture war” came about because the excesses of the 1960s were followed by a 1970s backlash, the real story is that a Democrat-dominated administrative state appeared to be helping groups it was actually hurting and this engendered a conservative reaction based on significant misunderstandings and half-truths. Thus posing and conversation-stopping myths are now the order of the day and public political talk tends to stroke identities and mobilize select constituencies while doing little to illuminate or guide the actual process of governing.

4. United We Stand and Conspiracy Thinking: Disagreement is currently hampered by two powerful myths. The first is the notion that freedom and good government policy would arrive automatically, with no need for support from ongoing processes of public disagreement, if the “command centers” of malevolent power-holders were somehow “taken out,” thereby allowing unified, benevolent leaders to assume power. The second myth holds that a nation must be unified to be strong, especially when dealing with other nations and external threats. Both of these ideas are false. Power, both good and bad, is created by the same political and economic systems that provide many blessings, and the proper control of power requires healthy disagreement, not a posse riding into town to get rid of bad guys. Likewise, a nation is strongest when disagreement flourishes.

5. The Strange Case of the Mass Media: The truly problematic bias of the mass media is not liberal or conservative. It’s a bias against the appearance of bias. The mass media lean toward politically safe topics, they rely on official sources and heavily managed or overly staged debates, and their presentations of political arguments tend to be constructed to provide entertainment. As a result they turn disagreement into a spectacle and a character-show. All in all, the U.S. mass media mirror the wider society’s misgivings about disagreement.

6. Democracy as Conversation: The scholarly work known as deliberative democracy offers a convincing response to those who argue that theUnited States currently suffers from “too much” disagreement and those who claim that ordinary citizens are not, and will never be, interested in making political argument into a regular and accepted part of their lives.  On the other hand, some versions of deliberative democracy are overly enamored with the fantasy that reason can overcome conflict and public space can be turned into a consensus-generating, classroom-like sphere of decision-making. The best versions of deliberative democracy are those that call for multiple public spaces where people encounter each other across various borders in various ways, where they fail to come to agreement but nonetheless cultivate more generous understandings of each other.

7. Multiculturalism with Principle: Multiculturalism is both a fact of life and a badly needed form of public action. Unfortunately, some fly its banner atop kitschy, patronizing, and/or manipulative celebrations of “difference.” Meanwhile, social conservatives often misuse the word to name an imaginary enemy; they conjure up the idea of a hedonist, power-hungry “liberal elite” so as to have a foil for their “back-to-values” politics. The best multiculturalism is one of “principled listening” and “disagreement patriotism.” These ideas offer the best hope to break the logjam between people’s desire to be generous to the views of others and their insistence on the existence of firm principles of right and wrong.

8. Disagreement Practice: The form taken by disagreement practice ought to be adjusted to fit different situations. Is there a specific issue and how contentious is it? Do the potential participants share an affiliation or a goal? Will the talk be open to the public or only to a select few? Will a decision be made at the end of the day? On the other hand, certain basic principles and ground rules apply in every case and certain issue areas and arenas of social interaction cry out for the application of these principles. For example, issues of race and the problem of terrorism call for a pro-disagreement approach, with extremists invited and guilt-tripping left at the door. And the nascent civic education movement holds great promise but badly needs reform in a pro-disagreement direction.

9. Freedom and Disagreement: The only way to combine community and freedom is to embrace disagreement, both in theory and in daily life. To put it another way, humans can avoid the dangers of absolutism without sacrificing principle if they redefine community to include disagreement as one of its essential features. Disagreement is connected to freedom because it’s essential to the process of reflection and because reflection – disagreement with oneself – is essential to choice. Without disagreement experience a person can’t act on choices that are fully their own.