America Doesn’t Need to Argue Less, It Needs to Argue Better

This piece is in response to Glenn Ellmers' essay "Politics Should Be Contentious," part of a symposium on "I, Citizen: A Blueprint for Reclaiming American Self-Governance" 

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.”

In this telling, the American public wants French fries dipped in Nutella for supper, and it’s up to our political class to make us eat our vegetables. Or rather, the people want lukewarm porridge, but the “knotty issues” facing our republic, the “intransigent” political reality in which we find ourselves, reveal my “Goldilocks’ bowl of warm consensus” for the fairytale that it really is.

A more apt fairytale for our present conundrum might be Hansel and Gretel, because I fear the birds have eaten Dr. Ellmers’s breadcrumbs. I understand how he made his wrong turn: he saw data revealing the steadfast center-right ethos of average Americans, laid alongside a chronicle of efforts by America’s manipulative political class to engender polarization, and concluded that he was reading another of those mushy Middle Way books that sound like a refrain in “Kumbaya, My Lord.” The path seemed familiar, so he followed it.

There were clues that might have brought Dr. Ellmers back to the book’s actual thesis, but unfortunately, he concluded that they were simply contradictions in my argument. (“In one short section, Woodlief actually defends polarization;” “He depicts, by his own estimation, one-fifth to one-quarter of the American citizenry as, well, enemies.”)

I’ll briefly offer a more accurate summary of my book, which I hope can dispel Dr. Ellmers’ misconceptions, and about which I think he and I might even agree: the pursuits of our two major parties are shaped by their activists and donors, not the will of the American people. The chief cause of personal bankruptcy in America, for example, is healthcare expense, yet one party labors to federalize healthcare in a manner that will bankrupt all of us simultaneously rather than one at a time. The other party studiously ignores the predatory practices of Big Pharma and Big Hospital. Recognizing these facts does not lead one to conclude that the solutions are simple, or that we won’t have to argue about them. It simply means that the infrastructure accreted by Team Red and Team Blue is geared toward beating the other side, not serving America.

The solutions I offer are to inoculate ourselves against partisanship by reinvigorating community bonds, and from there to engage in state-based political action with the aim of forcing our bloated, inept, corrupt, and abusive federal bureaucracy back within its constitutional confines.

All this entails contention and argument. It requires that Americans become, to quote John Courtney Murray, once again “locked together in argument,” the necessary antecedent and outgrowth of local self-governance. This is why I wrote, in one of those seemingly contradictory passages that bewilders Dr. Ellmers, that America doesn’t need to disagree less, it needs to disagree better. In the original text I italicized that passage to make sure readers don’t miss it. Perhaps in the next edition I’ll underline it as well.

Tony Woodlief is Executive Vice President at State Policy Network, a nationwide community that cultivates and supports state-based organizations working on behalf of citizen freedom and self-determination.