Aspen Ideas Festival: Can Americans come together by having better arguments?
Can Americans come together by having better arguments? That's the question posed by Eric Liu at this summer's Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado.
With so much vitriol in our political and civic life and culture, Liu says our scorched-earth methods of arguing are becoming the "new normal," and we need to argue a lot better.
Americans "are engaged in perpetual tugs of war ... not always right or wrong. The idea of the rugged individual and collective action, the idea of personal responsibility and collective responsibility, are both part of the American DNA ... and God help us if any of these achieve final victory."
He argues that we need more arguing, not less, and says "a rush to reconciliation and reunion is dangerous, and can be used to paper over deep, abiding differences in worldview, and also used to paper over deep, abiding injustices and inequities in civic life."
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"We have to remember," Liu said, "that the whole point of American civic life is to be engaged in argument."
"At the foundational level, America is this perpetual unresolvable fight among core principles: that we are always arguing in this country between liberty and equality."
Americans have "deep, abiding differences of philosophy, and our deep abiding fears are drivers of argument. Either we reckon with them, and we face them and we learn to have these arguments better, or we lapse more deeply into what Carl Bernstein has already begun to call the 'Cold Civil War.'"
Liu concludes that we need to figure out "what it means to build a more constructive culture of debate, conversation and argument."
Liu heads up the Aspen Institute's "Better Arguments Project." He moderated a discussion with the Aspen Ideas Festival audience members, and with Topeka Mayor Michelle De la Isla, Ramesh Ponnuru of the National Review, Stanford University political science professor Rob Reich and linguist Deborah Tannen, author of "You Just Don't Understand" and "The Argument Culture." It was held on June 25, 2018.
To listen to the discussion, click the audio player above.