are always at least one step behind the phenomenon to be explained. We call this The Owl of Minerva Problem. The mythological Owl of Minerva brings understanding, but it flies only at dusk, after the dust has settled. So our understanding of democratic argumentation applies only in retrospect, because once we make that understanding public, we change the practice of democratic argumentation.
To grasp this, think of all the ways that “tone policing” in the name of civility has become a way of attacking the other side for not adopting the correct tone. A norm is identified for democratic arguers to embrace in conducting their disputes, but then that very norm itself becomes a tool for expressing one’s contempt for the other side. We dismiss the other side’s views by impugning the ways in which they are expressed. Think of all the times that, in a heated exchange, the tone with which one side puts their point becomes the topic of discussion, a stand-in for their view. Now, we have two disagreements: what we’d originally disagreed about, and also how we’ve been managing that disagreement. Anyone who’s been to family therapy or taken part in team-building exercises can recognize that the tools of these ways of bringing us together can be turned into new and cruel weapons. In this way, the norm is turned against itself: the attempt to make explicit a way to get along becomes a tool for not getting along. This point generalizes: certain kinds of incivility are possible only once we’ve tried to model civility. That’s the Owl of Minerva Problem in a nutshell.
Hence a recurring theme of this book: civility produces its own discontent. Political argument, even when civil, has challenges that branch out to our larger culture and that loop back on themselves. Our attempts to conduct ourselves properly amidst political disagreement create the possibility for new modes of incivility, precisely by way of the norms they instantiate. Notice that this phenomenon is at work in the case of the very concept of civility. Here’s how. You have political views, and lots of other citizens in your city and country have political views as well. Many of them have political views that are inconsistent with your own. Moreover, many of those folks have views you think are not only wrong, but benighted or abhorrent, and in any case not worthy of serious consideration or respect. And they think the same of you and your views: they see you as adhering to political ideas that are ridiculous and ignorant. But here’s the deal with democracy: our commitment to collective self-government among political equals means that sometimes these other folks will get their way, and the government will shape policy in light of their views. And, although democracy permits you to enact your opposition to the prevailing policies in various ways, you still have to live with the fact that your side lost and the other side won. For the time being, and of course within the standard constitutional constraints, your political opponents get to decide how things will go. That’s simply how democracy works. Equal citizens have equal input into the decision-making process, and we all abide by the results of that process. After all, you expect your opponents to live with it when your views prevail, so you have to do the same. That’s largely what political equality is.
But in cases where the political stakes are high, many democratic citizens entertain the following background thought. Maybe there are views that are so wrong, so abhorrent and foolish, that holding them disqualifies a person for democratic citizenship. Surely there are views of this kind; they are views that are themselves inconsistent with democracy and its commitment to the political equality of all citizens. Managing citizens who adopt such views is a special problem for democratic theory that we cannot address in this book. The trouble is that factionalized and polarized citizens begin to regard any deviation from their own preferred political position as tantamount to adopting an intolerable view. Thus they come to see anyone who is not a fellow partisan as not only incapable of democratic citizenship, but a threat to democracy itself.
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.
2 Civility and Its Discontents
Democracy is hard to love. It’s noisy, contentious, frustrating, and inefficient. It involves meetings, caucuses, and committees. There’s a seemingly endless procession of polls, surveys, campaigns, and speeches. Sometimes democracy calls on us to canvass, demonstrate, and protest. More than this, democracy is also a suspicious moral proposal. It is the thesis that you may be required to live according to rules that you reject, simply because they are favored by others. Further, democracy is the claim that you may be rightfully forced to live according to rules that are supported only by others who are demonstrably ignorant, misinformed, deluded, corrupt, irrational, or worse. Democracy apportions equal political power to its citizens, regardless of their ability to wield it responsibly. Plato famously argued that as in any society there will be very few people who are wise, democracy is simply the rule of the foolish. What could be worse?
Nonetheless we tend to embrace democracy emphatically. But why? Consider Winston Churchill’s famous rationale: despite all of democracy’s flaws, every other form of government that has been tried is far worse. That rings true enough. But there’s less to this argument than meets the eye. We tend to see democracy as a supreme social good, rather than as merely the least bad in a collection of terrible alternatives. We are inclined to regard democracy as the best political system there could be. Thus we treat it as something to be cultivated, expanded, promoted, exported, and protected. Are these attitudes warranted? What’s so great about democracy?
Democracy as a Society of Equals
In order to address this question, we need to take a step back. Democracy is many things. It’s a form of constitutional republicanism in which all citizens are ruled not by government but by laws, a system of popular government, a procedure for collective decision, a method for electing public officials, a collection of fair processes by which conflicts among competing preferences are domesticated, a means for creating social stability, and so on. But underneath all these common ways of defining democracy rests its fundamental commitment to the moral ideal of collective self-government among political equals. This commitment to the political equality of citizens is what explains the familiar mechanisms of democratic government. Our elections, representative bodies, constitutions, and systems of law and rights are intended to preserve individual political equality in the midst of large-scale government. Absent the presumption of political equality, much of what goes on in a democracy would be difficult to explain. Why else would we bother with all of the institutional inefficiency, the collective irrationality, and the noise of democracy, but for the commitment to the idea that government must be of, for, and by the People, understood as political equals?
Even though democracy is hard to love, it is nonetheless beloved
