Go Ahead. Have An Argument. It’s Who We Are.
Americans are divided, but not in the way most people imagine. When we say we are divided, we often mean that we disagree too much and have too little in common. Well, for what it’s worth, I think Americans don’t disagree nearly enough. Even most politically engaged people don’t actually spend much time in active disagreement with people who have different views. We spend most of our time cocooned away with people we agree with, talking about those terribly bad people on the other side, but rarely actually talking to those people. It is one of the main reasons I love writing these mini-essays. I love the back and forth when I write about a serious topic. Anyway… This feeds the common misimpression that disagreement is a mark of civic failure, and that the very existence of people who don’t share our goals and priorities is a problem to be solved. The distinctly twenty-first-century institutions of our civic life—not only social media, but the...