Political Argument in a Polarized Age

Political Argument in a Polarized Age
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From obnoxious public figures to online trolling and accusations of “fake news”, almost no one seems able to disagree without hostility. But polite discord sounds farfetched when issues are so personal and fundamental that those on opposing sides appear to have no common ground. How do you debate the “enemy”?<br /> <br /> Philosophers Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse show that disagreeing civilly, even with your sworn enemies, is a crucial part of democracy. Rejecting the popular view that civility requires a polite and concessive attitude, they argue that our biggest challenge is not remaining calm in the face of an opponent, but rather ensuring that our political arguments actually address those on the opposing side. Too often politicians and pundits merely simulate political debate, offering carefully structured caricatures of their opponents. These simulations mimic political argument in a way designed to convince citizens that those with whom they disagree are not worth talking to.<br /> <br /> Good democracy thrives off conflict, but until we learn the difference between real and simulated arguments we will be doomed to speak at cross-purposes. Aikin and Talisse provide a crash course in political rhetoric for the concerned citizen, showing readers why understanding the structure of arguments is just as vital for a healthy democracy as debate over facts and values. But there’s a sting in the tail – no sooner have we learned rhetorical techniques for better disagreement than these techniques themselves become weapons with which to ignore our enemies, as accusations like “false equivalence” and “ad hominem” are used to silence criticism. Civility requires us to be eternally vigilant to the ways we disagree.

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Scott F. Aikin. Political Argument in a Polarized Age

Contents

Guide

Pages

Political Argument in a Polarized Age. Reason and Democratic Life

Copyright page

Acknowledgments

1 Democracy in Dark Days

Civility and the Owl of Minerva Problem

2 Civility and Its Discontents

Democracy as a Society of Equals

Political Disagreement among Equals

Civility in Political Disagreement

The Demands of Civility

3 Evaluating Argument

Argumentation and Its Values

Abuses of Argumentation

4 Our Polarization Problem

Two Kinds of Polarization

How Does Belief Polarization Work?

The Polarization Dynamic

Polarization Undermines Democracy

Note

5 Political Ignorance

Ways of Being Ignorant

Tribal Citizens

6 Simulated Argument

Argument as Rhetoric

Argument as Group Affirmation

Memeology

7 Fake News

What is Fake News?

An Institutional View

The Demand for Fake News

The War for Your Mind

8 Deep Disagreements

Deep Disagreements and the Good, Bad, News

Charity and Disagreement

Calling Disagreements “Deep”

Depths of Disagreement

Note

9 Civility as a Reciprocal Virtue

Reciprocal Public Virtues

The Debasement Puzzle

The Path to Debasement

The Need for an Argumentative Culture

10 Repairing Argumentative Culture

Some Rudiments of Deductive Logic

The Turn to Informal Logic

Pathologizing the Opposition

Hearing the Other Side

11 Democracy at Dusk

Scaling Up the Problem

The Fallacy Fallacy

More on Fake News

Trolls, Sock-puppets, and Bots

The Owl in Full View

Index

POLITY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT

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Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

So this clearly isn’t a book about how to save democracy. What is it, instead? Well, it’s not a case against democracy, either. Just because democracy can’t be fixed, it doesn’t follow that we should do away with it. This is because doing away with democracy requires that we put something else in its place, something that there’s sufficient reason to think is superior to democracy. But this comparative work is fraught. Notice that the relevant comparison is not between real-world democracy and some idealized nondemocratic alternative. Instead, the relevant comparison is between democracy as it presently functions and some envisioned alternative as it would function were it instated. When the comparison is performed properly, democracy comes out on top. So this isn’t an anti-democracy book; we think there is no better political arrangement than democracy, even when it is functioning poorly.

.....

What we will be calling civility is a set of norms that enable citizens to manage their political disagreements, even in cases where the stakes are high. Civility in general is the disposition to regard fellow citizens as politically equal partners in collective government even when they hold political views that you regard as fundamentally mistaken, injudicious, and even reckless. However, civility is not capitulation. And it needn’t mean social etiquette, like conversation with soft tones and maintaining a veneer of niceness. Rather, civility as we understand it in this book is composed of the dispositions needed to disagree well even when disagreeing vehemently, to hear each other’s reasons, make the stakes clear, and look at the various positives and negatives in ways that get to the bottom of the matter. Civility is a commitment to norms of proper argument.

Now, if civility is a matter of good argument, then logic has a political edge. Our examples of arguments that live up to these norms and those that break them will be drawn from politics in the United States – we are writing about the democratic environment that we know best. But we think that the cases are generalizable. The terms and trends of logic and critical exchange show up in political debates well beyond America – “fake news” and “whataboutery” are now global terms. Our overall objective in these pages is to make a case for ways to repair our arguments piece by piece, and repair our culture of civil exchange in the process. Thus, this is not a recipe for fixing or saving democracy, but rather a method for managing the vices that democratic politics engenders. It is an outline of the work that democracy requires of us.

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