Have an Argument
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.
“As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed,” as James Madison bluntly put it. To eliminate disagreement from a free society you’d have to eliminate the air we breathe, and that would obviously be a cure much worse than the disease. The purpose of politics is not to solve the fact that people who disagree with us exist, but to solve shared, concrete public problems in light of that fact.
The older, more traditional institutions of our politics exist to facilitate disagreement in that light. 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. They separate us into distinct subcultures which they then do their best to keep from mixing. They want us surrounded by people we agree with, but obsessed with people we disagree with.
Most days, the outrage motivating progressives on Bluesky is about something conservatives on X haven’t even heard about, and vice versa. Politically active people are at war with caricatures of their opponents, but they are not forced to actually confront those opponents as human beings with priorities of their own, or to acknowledge the possibility that what the two sides want might be the starting point for a negotiation toward an outcome they could both tolerate.
And the cultural gravity of these technologies is remaking our traditional civic spaces in their image. The culture of Congress, and of many college campuses, increasingly resembles that of social media. It fosters not disagreement (which inevitably involves mixing with the other side) but division.
Breaking through our divisions and lowering the temperature of our politics therefore doesn’t call for less disagreement and argument but for more. And it will require us to make those arguments concrete, and not just symbolic—to define substantive, tractable policy goals and then submit ourselves to the structured negotiating processes of our political system and our civic life to achieve them.
But above all, lowering the temperature will require us to recognize that the people we disagree with are not the problem to be solved. Each of our major political parties now behaves as if the other party is the country’s biggest problem. We need to see that this is just a way to avoid dealing with the country’s actual problems, and that dealing with those will require negotiation, accommodation, and a lot of patience for opinions that aren’t our own.
Our politics does not consist of friends and enemies. It consists of fellow citizens who share a future in common and disagree about how best to shape that future. Those disagreements are serious. But no resolution to them could be absolute or permanent. Our political adversaries will still be here tomorrow; they will be part of any future we build. Any politics not premised in that reality will be dangerously delusional and can only point us down.
The American political system is firmly rooted in that reality. It advances the counterintuitive notion that we can turn down the temperature of our politics by disagreeing with each other more directly and concretely. Its forms, and its history, can teach us how.