Today we celebrate living in a country dedicated to the ideal of deep disagreements. We have other ideals: justice, equality, liberty, and dignity for all. But none of these values work in democratic practice without the underlying trust that we can disagree about their meaning and application.
Terms like freedom and liberty and democracy function as what Anthony Cohen calls "hurrah words." They win broad support (who'd boo "equality" or "human rights"?) provided we refrain from defining them too exactly. Definitions mean boundaries, limits, zones of appropriate application. My liberty goes as far as your nose, but no further. Equality applies to opportunity, not to outcome. Rights belong to citizens and corporations, not to all humans (and certainly not to animals).
Or maybe not. People disagree. No definition proves so correct or final that some new person, group, or situation can't challenge it. We replace our justices and elected officials. We pass and enforce new laws in new ways. We amend our Constitution--and thank goodness we do. Women can vote. Slavery gets outlawed. Same-sex couples can marry. Not everyone cheered (or cheers) such changes. Nor do such changes enjoy some magical immutability. Democracies get to change anything about themselves, notes Stanley Fish, free from any predetermined outcome. They can even vote themselves out of democracy. We could conceivably annul the Constitution and elect a tyrannical president-for-life, ceding forever the ability to define and redefine ourselves.
Thus we hold the reliability and the vulnerability of our constituent democratic concepts in uneasy balance. Our ideals frame our political worldview, but their practical application rides the choppy cross-currents of democratic consensus and challenge. That ride doesn't always feel pleasant, especially when you sense your rights, your equal standing, and your freedoms getting tossed about. No pleasure cruise, the ship we ride makes no guarantees of crew or passenger safety. People get washed overboard, carried away by riptides and dragged down by political undertow. Democratic disagreements matter.
No wonder that the back-and-forth creates some seasickness.
I think about this nausea in light of our current us-versus-them atmosphere of (affectively) polarized politics. I don't just disagree with the other side; I regard them as dangerous, bad-faith actors and existential threats. I detect such rancor mainly in the fantasies many on either side entertain about the world after their side's victory: a Thanos-type snap where the baddies turn to dust and blow away. They imagine an end to disagreement, a time without challenge to their definitions of freedom, equality, liberty, and the like. I have such fantasies myself from time to time, in moments of weakness.
Yet such fantasies run counter to the spirit of this country, which at its best invites constant challenge, opening its core values to possible revision. Perhaps patriotism requires us to imagine the better world we fight for as one that includes our opponents and their disagreements.
More tomorrow,
JF
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