America Needs to Argue Better

I didn’t count how many times I used words like “partisanship” and “ideology” in my book about the destructive effects of partisanship and ideology, but I’m willing to take Dr. Ellmers’s word on it. We can leave to readers to determine whether I made inadequate use of a thesaurus.

Regarding his reframing of my thesis, however – a plot twist that he helpfully demarcates in his review with the antecedent clause, “In other words” – I do take issue, because what follows the clause isn’t my argument. In Dr. Ellmers’s words, what I have claimed is that “citizens can usually avoid hard choices between mutually incompatible alternatives, since virtually every political problem has a moderate solution.”