Political Disagreement Quotes

Jasnah had once defined a fool as a person who ignored information because it disagreed with desired results.

In art, religion, and politics the respect must be mutual, no matter how violent the disagreement.

If you say you're a unifier, you expect and usually get applause. I'm a divider. Politics is division by definition, if there was no disagreement there would be no politics. The illusion of unity isn't worth having, and is anyways unattainable.

The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex. There are tyrants, not Muslims. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said that we should now define ourselves not only by what we are for but by what we are against. I would reverse that proposition, because in the present instance what we are against is a no brainer. Suicidist assassins ram wide-bodied aircraft into the World Trade Center and Pentagon and kill thousands of people: um, I'm against that. But what are we for? What will we risk our lives to defend? Can we unanimously concur that all the items in the preceding list -- yes, even the short skirts and the dancing -- are worth dying for? The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his world-view, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons. Not by making war but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them. How to defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized. Don't let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.

A lot of lip service gets paid to being honest, but no one really wants to hear it unless what's being said is the party line.

He was a consummate politician-- which is to say he was given to expedient speech and lacked even a vestigial spine.

As for the majority, it is not so much race as it is political affiliation that really divides it today. What was once an issue of physical difference is now one of intellectual difference. Men have yet to master disagreeing without flashing all their frustrations that come with it; the conservative will throw half-truths while the liberal will throw insults. Combine these and what do you get? A dishonest mockery of a country.

Politics is good; when it works properly, disagreements get solved without people beating each other up. But when a regime knows its days are numbered, there's always the chance it may use its position to change the rules and make the debate it is losing irrelevant.

We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.

The role of democracy is not to banish disagreement but rather to prevent political disagreements from devolving into armed conflict.

America truly is the best idea for a country that anyone has ever come up with so far. Not only because we value democracy and the rights of the individual, but because we are always our own most effective voice of descent....We must never mistake disagreement between Americans on political or moral issues to be an indication of their level of patriotism. If you don't like what I say or don't agree with where I stand on certain issues, then good. I'm glad we're in America, and don't have to oppress each other over it. We're not just a nation, we're not an ethnicity. We are a dream of justice that people have had for a thousand years.

Humans do not simply, innocently, and honestly disagree with each other about the good, the just, the right, the principles and applications of moral distinction and valuation, for they are already caught, like it or not, in a complex dynamic of each other’s desires, recognition, power, and comparisons which not only relativizes moral distinctions and valuations, but makes them a constant and dangerous source of discord.

Do Americans not hate each other enough to fantasize about killing one another, in cold blood, over political and cultural disagreements? It would be hard to argue they do not. How did Nixonland end? It has not ended yet.

We tend to forget that unity is, at best, morally neutral and often a source of irrationality and groupthink. Rampaging mobs are unified. The Mafia is unified. Marauding barbarians bent on rape and pillage are unified. Meanwhile, civilized people have disagreements, and small-d democrats have arguments. Classical liberalism is based on this fundamental insight, which is why fascism was always antiliberal. Liberalism rejected the idea that unity is more valuable than individuality. For fascists and other leftists, meaning and authenticity are found in collective enterprises—of class, nation, or race—and the state is there to enforce that meaning on everyone without the hindrance of debate.

Morality binds and blinds. This is not just something that happens to people on the other side. We all get sucked into tribal moral communities. We circle around sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong. We think the other side is blind to truth, reason, science, and common sense, but in fact everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects. If you want to understand another group, follow the sacredness. As a first step, think about the six moral foundations, and try to figure out which one or two are carrying the most weight in a particular controversy. And if you really want to open your mind, open your heart first. If you can have at least one friendly interaction with a member of the “other” group, you’ll find it far easier to listen to what they’re saying, and maybe even see a controversial issue in a new light. You may not agree, but you’ll probably shift from Manichaean disagreement to a more respectful and constructive yin-yang disagreement.

Cassandra Dahnke and Tomas Spath, write: Civility is claiming and caring for one’s identity, needs, and beliefs without degrading someone else’s in the process….[Civility] is about disagreeing without disrespect, seeking common ground as a starting point for dialogue about differences, listening past one’s preconceptions, and teaching others to do the same. Civility is the hard work of staying present even with those with whom we have deep-rooted and fierce disagreements. It is political in the sense that it is a necessary prerequisite for civic action. But it is political, too, in the sense that it is about negotiating interpersonal power such that everyone’s voice is heard, and nobody’s is ignored.

In America, disagreement with the policies of the government does not necessitate a lack of patriotism!

Transcending divisiveness is one of the dreams of centrists, as if disagreement were a bad habit rather than fundamental to politics.

though the technological challenges are unprecedented and the political disagreements intense, humankind can rise to the occasion if we keep our fears under control and be a bit more humble about our views.

This is how all social, ideological, or religious movements police their members-by making clear that agreement will be rewarded with greater social standing and support, and dis-agreement punished with ostracism.

How often, in everyday conversation, had I said things I didn’t mean or feel, just to be polite, to make things easier? How often had I said to Brandon what I thought I should say in order to maintain order, to repair a rift? We had never been good at disagreement. One of us always gave in when it got too uncomfortable. One of us would recognize that we were at a dead end, would begin to back out. We rarely paved a road through to the other side. We rarely stuck with it long enough to forge any kind of new, if painful, understanding.

Consensual' views of society represent society as if there are no major cultural or economic breaks, no major conflicts of interests between classes and groups. Whatever disagreements exist, it is said, there are legitimate and institutionalised means for expressing and reconciling them.

There will always be disagreements among mankind, as long as we have different religions, political parties, sports and time zones. That is the beauty of living.

This debate over Genesis revealed a major disagreement among second-century Christians, a disagreement whose outcome would shape church doctrine ever after.

God does not take sides in American politics, and in America disagreement with the policies of the government is not evidence of lack of patriotism.

Our ability to have a respectful disagreement with our opponents has been torn to shreds by market forces in a deliberate act of irresponsibility.

Totalitaria is any country in which political ideas degenerate into senseless formulations made only for propaganda purposes. It is any country in which a single group—left or right—acquires absolute power and becomes omniscient and omnipotent, any country in which disagreement and differences of opinion are crimes, in which utter conformity is the price of life.

I began to realize that maybe my opinions just didn’t fit in with the liberal status quo, which seems to mean that you must absolutely hate Trump, his supporters and everything they believe. If you dare not to protest or boycott Trump, you are a traitor. If you dare to question liberal stances or make an effort toward understanding why conservatives think the way they do, you are a traitor. It can seem like liberals are actually against free speech if it fails to conform with the way they think. And I don’t want to be a part of that club anymore.

When we encounter someone who holds a viewpoint we don’t agree with, we can begin to view their whole existence through the lens of our disagreement with them. Instead of getting to know them and engaging their ideas, we assume that we already know them because we know where they stand on a certain political or religious question. And the degree to which we disagree with them on this question becomes the degree to which we will disrespect and disregard their humanity. They become our cultural enemy with whom we can’t imagine having anything in common. We can’t imagine that they, like us, are people who love their families, walk their dogs, work hard at their jobs, enjoy a good book, and might just be working toward the common good (even if we disagree about what “good” looks like). By separating ourselves into categories of “us” and “them,” we can justify mocking them, misrepresenting their views, and (in extreme cases) condoning violence against them. But “when we engage in dehumanizing rhetoric or promote dehumanizing images,” writes sociologist Brené Brown, “we diminish our own humanity in the process.”6

It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and of the Communist movements in Europe after 1930 that they recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been "spoiled" by the party system. Therefore they did not need to refute opposing arguments and consistently preferred methods which ended in death rather than persuasion, which spelled terror rather than conviction. They presented disagreements as invariably originating in deep natural, social, or psychological sources beyond the control of the individual and therefore beyond the power of reason. This would have been a shortcoming only if they had sincerely entered into competition with other parties; it was not if they were sure of dealing with people who had reason to be equally hostile to all parties.

Democracy is about disagreement, uncertainty, complexity, and making mistakes. It's about having to listen to arguments you think are obviously completely wrong; it's about being angry with other people, and their being angry with you. It's about it all taking much longer to get something passed that you think reasonable, and about taking a long time resisting some policy you think is dipshit. Democracy is about having to listen, and compromise, and it's about being wrong (and admitting it). It's about guessing - because the world is complicated - the best course of action, and trying to look at things from various perspectives, and letting people with those various perspectives participate in the conversation. Democracy is hard; demagoguery is easy.

Two other issues are contributing to tension in Sino-American relations. China rejects the proposition that international order is fostered by the spread of liberal democracy and that the international community has an obligation to bring this about, and especially to achieve its perception of human rights by international action. The United States may be able to adjust the application of its views on human rights in relation to strategic priorities. But in light of its history and the convictions of its people, America can never abandon these principles altogether. On the Chinese side, the dominant elite view on this subject was expressed by Deng Xiaoping: Actually, national sovereignty is far more important than human rights, but the Group of Seven (or Eight) often infringe upon the sovereignty of poor, weak countries of the Third World. Their talk about human rights, freedom and democracy is designed only to safeguard the interests of the strong, rich countries, which take advantage of their strength to bully weak countries, and which pursue hegemony and practice power politics. No formal compromise is possible between these views; to keep the disagreement from spiraling into conflict is one of the principal obligations of the leaders of both sides.

Civility is claiming and caring for one’s identity, needs, and beliefs without degrading someone else’s in the process….[ Civility] is about disagreeing without disrespect, seeking common ground as a starting point for dialogue about differences, listening past one’s preconceptions, and teaching others to do the same. Civility is the hard work of staying present even with those with whom we have deep-rooted and fierce disagreements. It is political in the sense that it is a necessary prerequisite for civic action. But it is political, too, in the sense that it is about negotiating interpersonal power such that everyone’s voice is heard, and nobody’s is ignored.

What he had no disagreement about with either former president was that political parties were instruments of bad governance; they were manifestations of individual or group self-interest that would undermine republican government.

Some readers may have noticed an icy little missive from Noam Chomsky ["Letters," December 3], repudiating the very idea that he and I had disagreed on the "roots" of September 11. I rush to agree. Here is what he told his audience at MIT on October 11: I'll talk about the situation in Afghanistan.... Looks like what's happening is some sort of silent genocide.... It indicates that whatever, what will happen we don't know, but plans are being made and programs implemented on the assumption that they may lead to the death of several million people in the next—in the next couple of weeks.... very casually with no comment.... we are in the midst of apparently trying to murder three or four million people. Clever of him to have spotted that (his favorite put-down is the preface 'Turning to the facts...') and brave of him to have taken such a lonely position. As he rightly insists, our disagreements are not really political.

Not long ago, having expressed some disagreements in print with an old comrade of long standing, I was sent a response that he had published in an obscure newspaper. This riposte referred to my opinions as ‘racist.’ I would obviously scorn to deny such an allegation on my own behalf. I would, rather, prefer to repudiate it on behalf of my former friend. He had known me for many years and cooperated with me on numerous projects, and I am quite confident that he would never have as a collaborator anyone he suspected of racial prejudice. But it does remind me, and not for the first time, that quarrels on the left have a tendency to become miniature treason trials, replete with all kinds of denunciation. There's a general tendency—not by any means confined to radicals but in some way specially associated with them—to believe that once the lowest motive for a dissenting position has been found, it must in some way be the real one.

The first thing people usually do when they decide to reduce the outrage in their lives is stop talking about politics altogether - or at least stop arguing with people who disagree with them. This is exactly the wrong response. We are supposed to argue about politics; we're just supposed to figure out how to do it without shouting at the top of our lungs and calling each other stupid or evil. Democracy calls us to have uncomfortable conversations. It asks us to listen to each other even when we would rather be listening to ourselves - or to people enough like us that we might as well be listening to ourselves. It is easier and more comfortable for us to live in perpetual high dudgeon inside our echo chambers than it is to have a meaningful conversation with people who disagree with us. The entire outrage industry has been designed to keep us in our bubbles, never challenged by disagreement and never required to think that we might be wrong.

The measure of our political and cultural health cannot be whether we all agree on all things at all times. We don’t, and we won’t. Disagreement and debate—including ferocious disagreement and exhausting debate—are hallmarks of American politics.

Recourse to thick narrative detail reveals that the principal hurdle in the way of a united Pakistan was not disagreement on constitutional matters but the transfer of power from military to civilian hands. More concerned with perpetuating himself in office, Yahya Khan was strikingly nonchalant about the six points. He left that to the West Pakistani politicians, in particular Bhutto, who, contrary to the impression in some quarters, was more of a fall guy for the military junta than a partner in crime.

Small acts of persuasion matter, because there is much less distance between people's beliefs than we often suppose. We easily confuse the distance between people's political positions with the intensity of their convictions about them. It is entirely possible for people to become sharply divided, even hostile, , over relatively minor disagreements. Americans have fought epic political battles over things like baking wedding cakes and kneeling during the national anthem. And we once fought a shooting war over a whiskey tax of ten cents per gallon. The ferocity of these battles has nothing to do with the actual distance between different positions, which, when compared to the entire range of opinions possible in the world, is almost negligible. None of this means that we can persuade our opponents easily. Persuading people to change their minds is excruciatingly difficult. It doesn't always work, and it rarely works the way we think it will. But it does work, and the fact that it works makes it possible for us to have a democracy.

To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment—that mature style of viewing which is a prime acquisition of "the modern," and a prerequisite for dismantling traditional forms of party-based politics that offer real disagreement and debate. It assumes that everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world.

The [members of the German Social Democratic Party] remained in the same party, and lived in the same world, and this gave their disagreements a special complexion, because debates which are settled by compromises, and which lead to action, are more fruitful than dialogues of the deaf

The enemy is noise. By noise I mean not simply the noise of technology, the noise of money or advertising and promotion, the noise of the media, the noise of miseducation, but the terrible excitement and distraction generated by the crises of modern life. Mind, I don't say that philistinism is gone. It is not. It has found many disguises, some highly artistic and peculiarly insidious. But the noise of life is the great threat. Contributing to it are real and unreal issues, ideologies, rationalizations, errors, delusions, nonsituations that look real, nonquestions demanding consideration, opinions, analyses in the press, on the air, expertise, inside dope, factional disagreement, official rhetoric, information—in short, the sounds of the public sphere, the din of politics, the turbulence and agitation that set in about 1914 and have now reached an intolerable volume.

When politics was centrally about the size of government and how much to tax, the resulting disagreements were about the fundamentals of governing, which, frankly, most Americans care little about. How hot can disagreements get when the details are complicated and people have little motivation to learn them?

In contrast, Europe has never come remotely close to political unification: it was still splintered into 1,000 independent statelets in the 14th century, into 500 statelets in A.D. 1500, got down to a minimum of 25 states in the 1980s, and is now up again to nearly 40 at the moment that I write this sentence. Europe still has 45 languages, each with its own modified alphabet, and even greater cultural diversity. The disagreements that continue today to frustrate even modest attempts at European unification through the European Economic Community (EEC) are symptomatic of Europe’s ingrained commitment to disunity.

In politics, civility shows itself in respect for disagreement and in granting others the right to express it. Civility shows itself when we acknowledge the best in our political opponents' line of thinking and the best in our political opponents themselves. Civility is mercy and forgiveness. It is a form of public grace.

Proverbs tells us, “Pride only leads to arguments” (13:10 NCV). The proud are magnetically attracted to conflict. And when the proud get into a squabble, it can become epic, because the hardest thing in the world would be for them to apologize. That requires humility. Some words and phrases just won’t come out of the prideful mouth. “I was wrong. Please forgive me,” for example. It’s agonizing because it feels like defeat, and proud people are obsessive about being undefeated in arguments, class discussions, political conversations, and family disputes. And proud people love to make their point on the Internet. The few, the proud (unfortunately the proud are not few) will wait out the worst disagreements without apologizing. They can hold out for decades, kind of hoping it all blows over. “I was wrong” or “that was my fault” are out of the question. On the very, very rare occasion one of the proud apologizes, he’ll qualify it: “I’m sorry—but …” Qualified apologies never seem to work.

You, Gorgias, like myself, have had great experience of disputations, and you must have observed, I think, that they do not always terminate in mutual edification, or in the definition by either party of the subjects which they are discussing; but disagreements are apt to arise—somebody says that another has not spoken truly or clearly; and then they get into a passion and begin to quarrel, both parties conceiving that their opponents are arguing from personal feeling only and jealousy of themselves, not from any interest in the question at issue. And sometimes they will go on abusing one another until the company at last are quite vexed at themselves for ever listening to such fellows.

Certain emotional influences such as peer pressure or extreme fear can cause us to alter our worldviews and change what we accept as normal. That’s what the political technique of the Overton window is all about. Create a crisis and move the window of how much freedom people are willing to do without. That’s how governments, schools, and personal relationships become oppressive.

This is a profound enough point worth dwelling on for a moment. When a division exists inside a party, it gets addressed through suppression or compromise. Parties don’t want to fight among themselves. But when a division exists between the parties, it gets addressed through conflict. Without the restraint of party unity, political disagreements escalate. An example here is health care: Democrats and Republicans spend billions of dollars in election ads emphasizing their disagreements on health care, because the debate motivates their supporters and, they hope, turns the public against their opponents. The upside of this is that important issues get aired and sometimes even resolved. The downside is that the divisions around them become deeper and angrier.

Today both the Democratic and Republican parties support the expansive US Empire as well as the neoconservatives’ agitation for a perpetual Global War on Terror. The disagreement we hear between the two parties is only regarding management style and is designed to use political failures and unintended consequences to enhance the power and influence of one party relative to the other.

The military-industrial complex corporations never complain of higher prices for bombs, planes, drones, and missiles. They benefit when prices rise and when cost overruns are covered with more money from the US Treasury. Those who profit are the greatest champions of the military readiness and armed conflict. They are represented by lobbyists who greatly influence both political parties. Corporate war profits and high union wages bring about remarkable cooperation between the two parties despite the political rhetoric suggesting passionate disagreement. And these militaristic policies are defended with patriotic zeal, and in appeals regarding our moral obligation to take care of all the world’s needs and to meet our obligation to spread our “goodness” around the world.

Public debate is now undermoralized and overpoliticized. We have many shows where people argue about fiscal policy but not so many on how to find a vocation or how to measure the worth of your life. In fact, we now hash out our moral disagreement indirectly, under the pretense that we’re talking about politics, which is why arguments about things like tax policy come to resemble holy wars.

Activism has its own overcoming myth. You enter some activist space, Tumblr, a campus group, your neighborhood cultural center. You’re expected to make mistakes, but to eventually never mess up anyone’s pronoun, ever, to never accidentally use the wrong vocabulary, regardless of how educated you are, self-educated or formally. You’re expected to be on this linear progression of no longer making mistakes once you are politically conscious, radical, or involved enough. And if you do make a mistake (and things that are actually toxic or oppressive end up being conflated very easily with valid disagreements), it’s evidence there’s something deeply wrong with your character regardless of how you handle it, whether you try to be accountable, or whether you work to not repeat that harm again.

To put the matter bluntly, not everyone who cares about what we believe cares about our believing what the best reasons say we should believe. Not everyone who cares about what we believe cares about our cognitive health. Not all of those who care about what we believe care about how or why we believe. They just want us to believe the things that will make it most likely that we will act as they wish. They care about what we believe because they want to control us.

I’m not saying that they don’t have political and other challenges that lead to disagreements, including some brutal fights over what should be done, because they do (in private). What I am saying is that the Chinese have much longer-term and historically based perspectives and planning horizons, which they break down into shorter-term plans and ways of operating, and they have done an excellent job of achieving what they have set out to do by following this approach.

Above all, disagreement is needed to stimulate the imagination. One may not need imagination to find the one right solution to a problem. But then this is of value only in mathematics. In all matters of true uncertainty such as the executive deals with—whether his sphere be political, economic, social, or military—one needs creative solutions which create a new situation. And this means that one needs imagination—a new and different way of perceiving and understanding.

My disagreements with Joel come to a head when he tells me to establish PACs in other countries. Political action committees, of course, are an American invention that pull together donors to give money to political candidates. There are PACs for every possible cause: to elect more women to office and to elect candidates who are friendly to Realtors, or beer wholesalers, or teachers’ unions. Home Depot runs its own giant PAC, as does AT&T. “We were so late in establishing Facebook’s PAC in the US; I don’t want to make that mistake

Support on the home front for the soldier, regardless of ethical and political disagreements over the war itself. is essential. This is never easy in the emotionally polarized climate of a war. However, when facing individual soldiers, we must remember that all modern soldiers serve under constraint. The justice of overall war aims and of operational theories -- "strate-gic" bombing of civilians to weaken the industrial capacity to wage war is an example of such theory -- is not within the individual soldier's scope of moral choice, unless he or she is willing to face imprisonment or death by refusing to fight. I cannot hold soldiers to an ethical standard that requires martyrdom in order simply to be blameless. I am not arguing against the Nuremberg principles, which say that no person is absolved of responsibility for horrible acts by the fact that he or she was legally ordered to do them. I am speaking from the pain that I feel when I witness in our veterans the ruin of moral life by the overwhelming coercive social power of military institutions and of war itself.

To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment—that mature style of viewing which is a prime acquisition of "the modern," and a prerequisite for demanding traditional forms of party-based politics that offer real disagreement and debate. It assumes that everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world. But it is absurd to identify the world with those zones in the well-off countries where people have the dubious privilege of being spectators, or of declining to be spectators, of other people's pain, just as it is absurd to generalize about the ability to respond to the sufferings of others on the basis of the mind-set of those consumers of news who know nothing at first hand about war and massive injustice and terror. There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are far from inured to what they see on television. They do not have the luxury of patronizing reality.

The measure of our political and cultural health cannot be whether we all agree on all things at all times. We don’t, and we won’t. Disagreement and debate—including ferocious disagreement and exhausting debate—are hallmarks of American politics. As Jefferson noted, divisions of opinion have defined free societies since the days of Greece and Rome. The art of politics lies in the manufacturing of a workable consensus for a given time—not unanimity. This is an art, not a science. There is no algorithm that can tell a president or a people what to do. Like life, history is contingent and conditional.

Like George Washington, we are quick to dismiss politics. This is naïve. Conflict in politics is not only inevitable; it is axiomatically imperative. Politics is division. Political parties do not exist arbitrarily, but are a rational, practical response to dispute. As long as we keep our republic — and in fact even if we do not — people will form cliques in order to forward their agendas. The only way to remove the need for parties, and the disruption they cause, is to remove the capacity for disagreement completely. One cannot help but suspect that for some who claim to find antagonism so tiring, this is the latent desire.

Good disagreements are the bedrock of communities. Good disagreements happen when people with different kinds of expertise and points of view talk and listen to one another, and when we try, honestly and pragmatically, to determine the best course of action for our whole community. Our differences make our decisions stronger. Democracy presumes that we can behave as one community, caring together for our common life, and disagreeing productively and honestly with one another. Demagoguery rejects rejects that pragmatic acceptance and even valuing of disagreement in favor of a world of certainty, purity, and silencing of dissent.

There is disagreement amongst the Drafters. I have two ardent advocates: one is as tall as Augustus, but her hair flows down to her spine in three golden braids. And the second is broader, not very tall. He’s old. Can tell by the scars and wrinkles on his thick hands. Hands that bear the signet ring of an Olympic Knight. I know him immediately even without seeing his face. Lorn au Arcos. The Rage Knight, the third-greatest man on Mars, who chose to serve the Society by safeguarding the Society’s Compact, instead of reaching for crowns in politics. When he points to me, Fitchner grins. I am chosen tenth. Tenth out of one thousand.

We have long known that in closed societies, the the arrival of democracy, with its clashing voices and differing opinions, can be "complex and frightening," as [Karen] Stenner puts it, for people unaccustomed to public dissent. The noise of argument, the constant hum of disagreement--these can irritate people who prefer to live in a society tied together by a single narrative. The strong preference for unity, at least among a portion of the population, helps explain why numerous liberal or democratic revolutions, from 1789 onward, ended in dictatorships that enjoyed wide support. Isaiah Berlin once wrote of the human need to believe that "somewhere, in the past or in the future, in divine revelation or in the mind of an individual thinker, in the pronouncements of history or science... there is a final solution." Berlin observed that not all of the things that human beings think are good or desirable are compatible. Efficiency, liberty, justice, equality, the demands of the individual, and the demands of the group--all these things push us in different directions. And this, Berlin wrote, is unacceptable to many people: "to admit that the fulfilment of some of our ideals may in principle make the fulfilment of others impossible is to say that the notion of total human fulfilment is a formal contradiction, a metaphysical chimera." Nevertheless, unity is a chimera that some will always pursue.

The fate of the Union, the possibilities of democracy, and the future of slavery, then, were the stakes of a war that Abraham Lincoln chose to wage to total victory—or to defeat. A president who led a divided country in which an implacable minority gave no quarter in a clash over power, race, identity, money, and faith has much to teach us in a twenty-first-century moment of polarization, passionate disagreement, and differing understandings of reality. For while Lincoln cannot be wrenched from the context of his particular times, his story illuminates the ways and means of politics, the marshaling of power in a democracy, the durability of racism, and the capacity of conscience to help shape events.

We venerate centrists, moderates, independents. In a telling experiment, Samara Klara and Yanna Krupnikov cued subjects to think about political disagreements and then handed them photographs of strangers, some of whom were identified as independents and others of whom were said to be partisans. The independents were rated as more attractive, “even when, by objective standards, the partisans were actually more attractive.” In another test of the theory, Klar and Krupnikov found that Americans are nearly 60 percent more likely to call themselves “independents” when they’re told they need to make a good impression on a stranger. Being independent isn’t about whom you vote for. It’s about your personal brand. Our appreciation of independents reflects our denial of the substance of partisanship. We want to wish away the depths of our disagreements, and it is convenient to blame them instead on the maneuverings of misguided partisans. But partisans aren’t bad people perverting the political system through irrationality and self-interest. They’re normal people—you and me—reflecting the deep differences that define political systems the world over. And the more different the parties are, the more rational partisanship becomes. What has happened to American politics in recent decades is that the parties have become visibly, undeniably more different, and the country has rationally become more partisan in response.

Today we place lots of emphasis on increasing racial diversity in our churches. That’s a good thing. It’s needed. But there’s more to having a genuinely mosaic church than just racial and socioeconomic diversity. We also have to learn to work through the passionate and mutually exclusive opinions that we have in the realms of politics, theology, and ministry priorities. The world is watching to see if our modern-day Simon the Zealots and Matthew the tax collectors can learn to get along for the sake of the Lord Jesus. If not, we shouldn’t be surprised if it no longer listens to us. Jesus warned us that people would have a hard time believing that he was the Son of God and that we were his followers if we couldn’t get along. Whenever we fail to play nice in the sandbox, we give people on the outside good reason to write us off, shake their heads in disgust, and ask, “What kind of Father would have a family like that?”1 BEARING WITH ONE ANOTHER To create and maintain the kind of unity that exalts Jesus as Lord of all, we have to learn what it means to genuinely bear with one another. I fear that for lots of Christians today, bearing with one another is nothing more than a cliché, a verse to be memorized but not a command to obey.2 By definition, bearing with one another is an act of selfless obedience. It means dying to self and overlooking things I’d rather not overlook. It means working out real and deep differences and disagreements. It means offering to others the same grace, mercy, and patience when they are dead wrong as Jesus offers to me when I’m dead wrong. As I’ve said before, I’m not talking about overlooking heresy, embracing a different gospel, or ignoring high-handed sin. But I am talking about agreeing to disagree on matters of substance and things we feel passionate about. If we overlook only the little stuff, we aren’t bearing with one another. We’re just showing common courtesy.

It seems likely that, for such ideas to work, participants must accept that politics can no longer be guided by absolutes, rather in the manner that conflict resolution in the Empire was about workable compromises, not questions of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. Like current practice within the EU, the Empire relied on peer pressure, which was often more effective and less costly than coercion, and which functioned thanks to the broad acceptance of the wider framework and a common political culture. However, our review of the Empire has also revealed that these structures were far from perfect and could fail, even catastrophically. Success usually depended on compromise and fudge. Although outwardly stressing unity and harmony, the Empire in fact functioned by accepting disagreement and disgruntlement as permanent elements of its internal politics. Rather than providing a blueprint for today’s Europe, the history of the Empire suggests ways in which we might understand current problems more clearly.

Leftists shrieked like happy hamsters at a recent Canadian (of course) study linking “prejudice” and “right-wing” ideology to “lower cognitive ability.” They also squealed like shiny baby piglets at another recent study that purported to show that liberals and conservatives (whatever that means) have different brain structures. And though they claim to celebrate the rainbow of differences that Goddess has bequeathed us, somehow they find room in their wide-open minds to cheer for the day when we breed all of those differences into extinction. Neither will these diversicrats tolerate any true diversity of thought—they’re lurching toward Soviet-style political psychiatry by suggesting that ideological disagreement on racial matters is a mental disorder requiring medication. Sound paranoid? I’m sure they’re working on a pill for that, too. Sanity is in many ways a social construct, one that varies widely from society to society. In a pragmatic sense I’ll admit it’s crazy to go against the crowd, however abjectly deluded and brainwashed that crowd may be. If you don’t run with them, they’ll stomp right over you like wild buffalo. Despite the soul-blotting excesses of Soviet and Maoist totalitarianism, many neo-Marxists still appear to believe that the control freaks and power psychos are confined to the right.

In your journal, note which of the following statements describe one or both of your parents (Gibson 2015). My parent often overreacted to relatively minor things. My parent didn’t express much empathy or awareness of my feelings. When it came to deeper feelings and emotional closeness, my parent seemed uncomfortable and didn’t go there. My parent was often irritated by individual differences or different points of view. When I was growing up, my parent used me as a confidant but wasn’t a confidant for me. My parent often said and did things without thinking about people’s feelings. I didn’t get much attention or sympathy from my parent, except maybe when I was really sick. My parent was inconsistent—sometimes wise, sometimes unreasonable. Conversations mostly centered on my parent’s interests. If I became upset, my parent either said something superficial and unhelpful or got angry and sarcastic. Even polite disagreement could make my parent very defensive. It was deflating to tell my parent about my successes because it didn’t seem to matter. I frequently felt guilty for not doing enough or not caring enough for them. Facts and logic were no match for my parent’s opinions. My parent wasn’t self-reflective and rarely looked at their part in a problem. My parent tended to be a black-and-white thinker, unreceptive to new ideas.

We ought to recognize the darkness of the culture of death when it shows up in our own voices. I am startled when I hear those who claim the name of Christ, and who loudly profess to be pro-life, speaking of immigrants with disdain as “those people” who are “draining our health care and welfare resources.” Can we not see the same dehumanizing strategies at work in the abortion-rights activism that speaks of the “product of conception” and the angry nativism that calls the child of an immigrant mother an “anchor baby”? At root, this is a failure to see who we are. We are united to a Christ who was himself a sojourner, fleeing political oppression (Matt. 2:13–23), and our ancestors in Israel were themselves a migrant people (Exod. 1:1–14; 1 Chron. 16:19; Acts. 7:6). Moreover, our God sees the plight of the fatherless and the blood of the innocent, but he also tells us that because he loves the sojourner and cares for him so should we, “for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” (Deut. 10:18–19). We might disagree on the basis of prudence about what specific policies should be in place to balance border security with compassion for the immigrants among us, but a pro-life people have no option to respond with loathing or disgust at persons made in the image of God. We might or might not be natural-born Americans, but we are, all of us, immigrants to the kingdom of God (Eph. 2:12–14). Whatever our disagreements on immigration as policy, we must not disagree on whether immigrants are persons. No matter how important the United States of America is, there will come a day when the United States will no longer exist. But the sons and daughters of God will be revealed. Some of them are undocumented farm-workers and elementary-school janitors now. They will be kings and queens then. They are our brothers and sisters forever. We need to stand up against bigotry and harassment and exploitation, even when such could be politically profitable to those who stand with us on other issues. The image of God cannot be bartered away, at the abortion clinic counter or anywhere else.

There are so many things to be done, and progressive minds are overflowing with ideas and proposals. As we consider real-world actions, though, there's one thing worth remembering above all: the future can't be planned by a group of socialist intellectuals designing bullet-pointed lists of what's best for the rest of humanity. Democracy means that people make choices themselves, and good ideas emerge from healthy, collective deliberation... Personally, I'ld like to see a thriving culture of political discussions, where the cafes are full of people passionately hashing out their disagreements about What Must Be Done. Not everyone has to participate in political life, but everyone should at least feel like someone would listen to them if they came up with a solution to a problem.

Our nation is built from the ground up to handle political disagreement. It is not built to endure mass-scale dishonesty and vindictiveness.

But of all the ways in which people can find meaning in their lives, politics – let alone politics on such a scale – is one of the unhappiest. Politics may be an important aspect of our lives, but as a source of personal meaning it is disastrous. Not just because the ambitions it strives after nearly always go unachieved, but because finding purpose in politics laces politics with a passion – including a rage – that perverts the whole enterprise. If two people are in disagreement about something important, they may disagree as amicably as they like if it is just a matter of getting to the truth or the most amenable option. But if one party finds their whole purpose in life to reside in some aspect of that disagreement, then the chances of amicability fade fast and the likelihood of reaching any truth recedes.

When some of the post-Soviet societies developed in unexpected ways, language impaired our ability to understand the process. We talked about whether they had a free press, for example, or free and fair elections. But noting that they did not, as Magyar has said, is akin to saying that the elephant cannot swim or fly: it doesn’t tell us much about what the elephant is. Now the same thing was happening in the United States; we were using the language of political disagreement, judicial procedure, or partisan discussion to describe something that was crushing the system that such terminology was invented to describe. Magyar spent about a decade devising a new model, and a new language, to describe what was happening in his country. He coined the term “mafia state,” and described it as a specific, clan-like system in which one man distributes money and power to all other members. He then developed the concept of autocratic transformation, which proceeds in three stages: autocratic attempt, autocratic breakthrough, and autocratic consolidation. It occurred to me that these were words that American culture could now borrow, in an appropriate symbolic reversal of 1989: these terms appear to describe our reality better than any words in the standard American political lexicon. Magyar had analyzed the signs and circumstances of this process in post-Communist countries and proposed a detailed taxonomy. But how it might happen in the United States was uncharted territory.

When something in society goes so wrong, that something is often a product of one very large agreement instead of the various small disagreements that consume the political sphere. Looming over the fights about which administration is to blame for housing becoming so unstable and what percentage increase this or that program is entitled to sits the inconsistency of America spending about $70 billion a year subsidizing homeownership through tax breaks like deferred taxes on capital gains and the mortgage interest deduction (MID), which allows homeowners to deduct the interest on their home loan from their federal income taxes. Together these tax breaks amount to a vast upper-middle-class welfare program that encourages people to buy bigger and more expensive houses, but because their biggest beneficiaries are residents of high-cost cities in deep blue redoubts like New York and California, even otherwise liberal politicians fight any attempt to reduce them. These programs are also entitlements that live on budgetary autopilot, meaning people get the tax breaks no matter how much they cost the government. Contrast that with programs like Section 8 rental vouchers, which cost about $20 billion a year, have been shown to be highly effective at reducing homelessness, and cost far less than the morally repugnant alternative of letting people live in tents and rot on sidewalks, consuming police resources and using the emergency room as a public hospital. That program has to be continually re-upped by Congress, and unlike middle-class homeowner programs, when the money runs out, it’s gone. This is why many big cities either have decades-long lines for rental vouchers or have closed those lines indefinitely on account of excess demand. The message of this dichotomy, which has persisted for decades regardless of which party is in charge and despite the mountains of evidence showing just how well these vouchers work, is that America is willing to subsidize as much debt as homeowners can gorge themselves on but that poor renters, the majority of whom live in market-rate apartments, are a penny-ante side issue unworthy of being prioritized.

All revolutions have liberté, egalité, fraternité, and other noble slogans inscribed on their banners. All revolutionaries are enthusiasts, zealots; all are utopians, with dreams of creating a new world in which the injustice, corruption, and apathy of the old world are banished forever. They are intolerant of disagreement; incapable of compromise, mesmerized by big, distant goals; violent, suspicious, and destructive. Revolutionaries are unrealistic and inexperienced in government; their institutions and procedures are extemporized

The sharp segmentation of the electorate goes much deeper than just policy disagreements. Americans of different political hues have started to positively hate each other. In 1960, roughly 5 percent of Republicans and Democrats reported they would “[feel] ‘displeased’ if their son or daughter married outside their political party.” By 2010, nearly 50 percent of Republicans and over 30 percent of Democrats “felt somewhat or very unhappy at the prospect of inter-party marriage.” In 1960, 33 percent of Democrats and Republicans thought an average member from their own party was intelligent, compared to 27 percent who had the same view about someone from the other side. In 2008, those numbers were 62 percent and 14 percent!64

some textual ethics studies approach their critique of texts with an a priori assumption that the agency of sufferers is what shapes and influences audience responses. Between the disagreements whether it is the presence or the absence of agency that prompts ‘political action’ on the part of the audience (Orgad 2008, 21), what is set aside are factors beyond agency that may turn out to be more significant in shaping audience response.

Our views on politics aren’t firm; they are solely based on circumstance. In the midst of death, the patient no longer cares about their disagreement with the doctor.

An enlightened public and a strong, independent Press must maintain strict impartiality in judging a major policy crisis arising out of a disagreement between the professional and political heads of the Armed Forces. The intrusion of fallacious concepts of Civil Supremacy will only stifle argument and still the professional voice till the time comes for rude awakening – as in 1962. In a serious divergence of opinion, which forces a Chief to submit his resignation, both the Service Chief and the politician must get a fair hearing at the bar of public opinion and during Parliamentary scrutiny. The high standards of the Western armies is largely due to this healthy and time-honoured custom. Any attempt to brow-beat a Service Chief or to pick one who is likely to conform is a self-defeating arrangement. The elimination of outspoken generals is unfair both to the Army as well as the Nation.

In the weeks and months following the 9/11 attacks, I was proud to lead an amazing, resilient, united people. When it comes to the unity of America, those days seem distant from our own. A malign force seems at work in our common life that turns every disagreement into an argument, and every argument into a clash of cultures. So much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear, and resentment. That leaves us worried about our nation and our future together. I come without explanations or solutions. I can only tell you what I have seen. On America's day of trial and grief, I saw millions of people instinctively grab for a neighbor's hand and rally to the cause of one another. That is the America I know. At a time when religious bigotry might have flowed freely, I saw Americans reject prejudice and embrace people of Muslim faith. That is the nation I know. At a time when nativism could have stirred hatred and violence against people perceived as outsiders, I saw Americans reaffirm their welcome to immigrants and refugees. That is the nation I know. At a time when some viewed the rising generation as individualistic and decadent, I saw young people embrace an ethic of service and rise to selfless action. That is the nation I know. This is not mere nostalgia; it is the truest version of ourselves. It is what we have been -- and what we can be again.

Christian nationalism gives people a religious justification for their hate... This actually means if Christian nationalism is your thing you were never a Christian in the first place. ie When you're a person who hates, who lives in a society that does not accept that hate you carry that hate like a burden. So naturally when somebody comes along and gives you a religious justification for your hate...that's a very powerful thing that will take over the core principles of their lives because they want that justification they want that burden to go away...So that they have a raised sense of superiority over the Society in which they live that doesn't agree with their hateful bigotry and homophobic views. "Mores are the customs, norms, and behaviors that are acceptable to a society or social group. If your personal morals are in disagreement with local mores, you should be prepared to be annoyed every time you go buy beer.

Although disagreements between wives and husbands may have been less common, or perhaps only less well documented, Jane and William were far from being the only married couple for whom the Revolution created political divisions that were seemingly irreconcilable.

There is no “good life for man” (in general)—or if there is we know nothing of it, or not enough. Even those persuaded that they do, on the contrary, know what such a life should be, promote its universality only at the expense of being denied the opportunity to pursue it. If we need to agree on the broad contours of such a model for human existence, then reaching agreement will precede it—and “reaching agreement” is politics. Some much wider world acquires a veto over the way of life you select, or accept, or inherit (the details need not detain us). We have seen how that works. Global communism is the inevitable destination. The alternative to agreement is schism. Secession, geopolitical disintegration, fragmentation, splitting—disagreement escapes dialectics and separates in space.

Self-interest can't be taken out of politics. Nor is there such a thing as an understandable 'will of the people'. While we may share common goals, we often differ substantially on how to get there or the exact shape of the end point. These types of disagreements can't be wished away and they're not simply the product of the malign influence of special interests. They're fundamental to collective life.

I am not a predictor It's not been long since I told some people, "I see no difference in value between any of the world's richest people and a poor child with a round-the-clock danger." Their disagreement / objection were all lying on wealth, advocates, friends, political influence, authorities, what they eat, and the place they settle, and all such worldly desires. But the testimony to my belief is three simple things: same oxygen, same sky, and same ignorance about planet's tomorrow's morning, which are our commonalities. Come on ... this is so raw, poetic, and spiritual view which works only for a literature / art book, not reality, they said. After several months of exposing to covid 19 and its unprecedented death tool everywhere beyond all the human being's differences, they got back to me with somehow regretfully letters saying " I would stand on your side, you're a predictor ". Here is the case: Our differences are embedded in a far much bigger circle, which is our commonalities. Our differences may be easy to be seen but what govern them are our similarities. Simply speaking, the first key helps you walk is not the skill how to walk, nor even how strong your feet are, but having a surface as earth underneath your feet. I am not a predictor then, only familiar with the forecast report of look.

I had a polite disagreement with Chief Inspector Grabby Hands.” Chief Inspector Barrett. “It was him or me, and he had rank. Do you need me to draw you a diagram?” “No, that won’t be necessary.” Gibson nodded to himself, as if confirming a suspicion. He seemed indecently satisfied, but she was damned if she could see why.

the technical ignorance of elected politicians who are hardly credible in providing oversight or contemplating regulation; profound disagreements about what we value and how trade-offs should be made, whether in regard to data privacy, free speech, and content moderation or automation and the future of work; the slow, painstaking consideration of legislation that seems to generate competing bills—so that everyone has his or her name on one—without generating significant progress, especially in a highly polarized political environment; and the strong status quo bias of democratic institutions, which means that policy change is slow and sticky, making it difficult for regulators to respond flexibly and adaptably to new developments in technology.

[Political reaslism] "does not mean that we throw our political convictions away: we have no reason to end up with none, or with someone else’s. Nor does it mean that we stare at our convictions with ironical amazement, as Rorty suggests. But we do treat them as political convictions which determine political positions, which means, for one thing, that we acknowledge that they have obscure causes and effects. It also means that we take certain kinds of view of our allies and opponents. Even if we were utopian monarchs, we would have to take into account others’ disagreement as a mere fact. As democrats, we have to do more than that. But remembering the points about the historical conditions, we should not think that what we have to do is simply to argue with those who disagree: treating them as opponents can, oddly enough, show more respect for them as political actors than treating them simply as arguers – whether as arguers who are simply mistaken, or as fellow seekers after truth. A very important reason for thinking in terms of the political is that a political decision – the conclusion of a political deliberation which brings all sorts of considerations, considerations of principle along with others, to one focus of decision – is that such a decision does not in itself announce that the other party was morally wrong or, indeed, wrong at all. What it immediately announces is that they have lost.

[Political realism] "does not mean that we throw our political convictions away: we have no reason to end up with none, or with someone else’s. Nor does it mean that we stare at our convictions with ironical amazement, as Rorty suggests. But we do treat them as political convictions which determine political positions, which means, for one thing, that we acknowledge that they have obscure causes and effects. It also means that we take certain kinds of view of our allies and opponents. Even if we were utopian monarchs, we would have to take into account others’ disagreement as a mere fact. As democrats, we have to do more than that. But remembering the points about the historical conditions, we should not think that what we have to do is simply to argue with those who disagree: treating them as opponents can, oddly enough, show more respect for them as political actors than treating them simply as arguers – whether as arguers who are simply mistaken, or as fellow seekers after truth. A very important reason for thinking in terms of the political is that a political decision – the conclusion of a political deliberation which brings all sorts of considerations, considerations of principle along with others, to one focus of decision – is that such a decision does not in itself announce that the other party was morally wrong or, indeed, wrong at all. What it immediately announces is that they have lost.

[Hamas's] idea of democracy seems to include free elections which will express the people’s will, but not necessarily political pluralism and conflict. The "will of the people" seems to be understood as a monolithic bloc which might not be in agreement with the rulers. The conflict is perceived between the people and the ruler, and conflicts within this "will of the people" are rarely mentioned. The conviction that their understanding of Islam is the only possible one makes Ḥamās believe that there cannot be any disagreement among true believers.

A related idea is simply to spend some time over coffee or a meal with someone you know who holds very different political positions. The goal is not to persuade them to come over to yours but to come away with a better appreciation of one another’s views and to build a foundation of respect and trust that allows both of you to spend time with one another despite your disagreements.

When disagreement turns to enmity, the result is almost always moral blindness on all sides. History is distorted, collectivities are demeaned, theological reasoning ignored, and political conspiracies peddled.

People like bipartisanship not because they like the substance of what bipartisanship produces, but because it reduces the cognitive stress that partisan disagreement creates. If two sides are bitterly arguing over some major piece of public policy, this forces us to choose sides, and for those with weak mastery of the issue or tenuous connections to a specific worldview, it is easy to be stalked by the worry that you’re choosing the wrong side: After all, there are a ton of people screaming in righteous indignation that the side you’re on is about to destroy the country.

It is. It’s a psychological phenomenon common in governments, business organizations, and political parties; a culture of conformity that discourages independent thinking and disagreement. Anyone who challenges the consensus of the greater body, regardless of how valid that challenge might be, is considered disloyal. This produces deviant outcomes. People thinking they are always right, everyone else is wrong, and their logic is unassailable, no matter how divorced from reality it might be.

Theories of agonism emphasize the affective aspects of political relations and accept that disagreement and confrontation are forever ongoing. For political theorist Chantal Mouffe, this is a consequence of what she calls the “paradox of democracy”: we strive for a pluralism that we know can never be achieved. As she states (Mouffe 2000b, 15–16), What is specific and valuable about modern liberal democracy is that, when properly understood, it creates a space in which this confrontation is kept open, power relations are always being put into question and no victory can be final. However,

It was apparent to Raesinia that she had walked into the middle of an argument, though one that might not have been obvious to anyone who hadn’t spent their lives at Ohnlei. It was the kind of roundabout, exquisitely polite disagreement carried on by men who are aware that their opponent could, technically, have them executed.

But which one is right? The real gods? The truth?' I asked. Balthazar smiled gently, as if speaking to a very slow child. 'That is not for us to judge. Each of us believes what seems true enough to him, and allows others the same luxury. Who can know what happened in the dim dawn of the world? We can barely decide what to have for breakfast without a theological debate - the Nurian law is polite disagreement. We do our best with how the world appears to our own eyes.