First, I owe you a definition, then an explanation. You will see the word “argument” throughout this book. By “argument” I mean something besides shouting or name calling, though both often are part of the transaction. I mean a clash between at least two people (or regions, political parties, candidates, or economic interests) over facts and ideas in the search for answers—in this case, answers to questions about the future and fate of America. The gist (the “argument,” if you will) of this book is: We are the Arguing Country, born in, and born to, debate. The habit of doing so—the urgent, almost neurotic need to do so—makes us unique and gives us our freedom, creativity, and strength. By my count, there are thirteen foundational arguments that comprise our public life—hence the title of this book. Rather than argue too much, which is the conventional wisdom’s critique, we in fact do not argue enough, about the fundamentals. If we fail to draw strength from our argumentative nature, we risk losing what made us great and gives us hope. Our disputes are not a burden, but a blessing.
Who am I to make such sweeping declarations? After all, I am neither a scholar nor a historian. I am a reporter, however, and I have been around—literally and figuratively. Long ago, a favorite professor of mine at Columbia reduced his journalistic advice to two words: “Go there.” I have tried, reporting in and about forty-nine of the fifty states (I’m saving what I expect to be the best, North Dakota, for last). I have covered every presidential campaign and major candidate since 1983. I have covered leaders and stories in other fields as well, from business and entertainment to the environment and communications. Inside the Beltway, I have come to know all quadrants, from the White House to Congress to K Street to the think tanks to the hallways of the federal bureaucracy. I also have learned about America by leaving it, traveling in more than forty countries in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. I have woven my own reporting from the campaign trail and from Washington into the history I have picked up along the way and discovered as I worked on this book. I came to see a pattern.
Generalizations are imperfect, admittedly, but they can be useful in sorting out the tribes and nations of the planet. The United States stands out in sharp relief for one reason.
Even as we arrived we were asking ourselves: What was the destiny of this place? Was this to be a Christian New Jerusalem, a Dutch speculation, or an English shire? Was everyone welcome, and welcome to be free, or were merely the Old World chosen? Were there to be borders, or none, central authority, or none, a continental nation, or none, a currency and market to call our own—or none? Was the virgin earth a hedged-in garden to be tended in perpetuity, or a limitless, disposable commodity? Was this place a coastal outpost of a global elsewhere, or a new type of nation, its self-sufficient identity waiting to be forged in the woods above the fall line?
We forget—or fail to realize—how unlike most of the world we are in this essential characteristic. In China, when Mao died, there was no debate over his legacy; schoolchildren were commanded to put their heads down on their desks and cry. In the name of jihad, the Al Qaeda training manual dismisses all “Socratic debates, Platonic ideals, and Aristotelian diplomacy.” In America, by contrast, we have been debating our very identity from the first days of our existence.
The Thirteen American Arguments bitterly divide us, but they also define, inspire, and ultimately unite us by bestowing legitimacy on hardfought deals. They are the force that makes us whole and who we are. They produced a civil war, the still-smoldering embers of racial tribalism and pitiless economic competition; but they also produced the freest of societies, an ongoing (if imperfect) accommodation between capital and community, and a Constitution that stands as a beacon to the world even if we sometimes honor it in the breach. Arguing keeps us moving fitfully forward—toward being worthy of the gifts God gave us.
I began my education in the American character—in Arguing America—as a cub reporter for The Courier-Journal in Louisville. I was eager for any assignment that would send me out into Kentucky. I believed then, and still do, that the “real” country was “out there” somewhere, which is how I came to cover the Mountain Laurel Festival in
eastern Kentucky. Every Memorial Day weekend, the town of Cumberland, far up in the mountains, staged a parade and beauty pageant to welcome the spring and its flowers. The governor would fly down to preside. As the Commonwealth’s only statewide paper, one with a deep commitment to Appalachia, The Courier-Journal felt obliged to publish its own (not from a wire service) picture and story. Only one problem: No one on the city or state desk wanted to waste his precious holiday on what seemed a merely ceremonial assignment. I did, of course, if for no other reason than that I would get to fly to Cumberland in the paper’s own twin-engine airplane, piloted by the legendary Billy Davis Jr. For decades, Billy had been documenting the region from the air. Flying low, he would throw open the window on the pilot-side door, bank to the left by steering with a special set of foot pedals, and aim his huge Graflex camera at whatever story was down below. In the late 1960s, that story was strip-mining, and the ravages of what was then a fastgrowing—and largely uncontrolled—part of the coal industry. No one had ever photographed the devastation so dramatically: the scarred hillsides, the rubble in the creeks, the vegetation shriveled by acid drainage. Billy documented it all, which was one reason why the paper had won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the issue.
Looking back, I regard Billy as a journalistic role model. He took pride in a landscape he viewed as his own, if for no other reason than that he had seen it all. On the way back, he added another leg to the itinerary. “Howard,” he said with a flourish. “Let’s go see the Cumberland Gap!” Even a rookie from Pittsburgh by way of New York understood the significance of that declaration. I was about to see, from a unique vantage point, one of the most historic features of the American landscape, the dip in the Appalachians through which Daniel Boone led his band in 1775. We flew southeast across an undulating carpet of green, the folds of mountains highlighted by shadows in the low-angled late-afternoon sun.
Soon enough, our destination loomed ahead: a long, hammock-shaped dip in the line of hills. The Gap looked like the place God had put His boot on a fence and told His flock to cross. I could see why Boone and his Transylvania Company had come this way. It was the only way they could come—through the Khyber Pass of a New West.
I assumed we would get a look from well above the Gap, but Billy had a different flight plan in mind. “Hang on!” he cried as he nudged the controls forward. Down we went, to just above the treetops. “Now this is the Cumberland Gap!” he said as we roared through. There was no time for a picture and no need.
Boone had been heading to a place of new beginnings, one that was simultaneously connected to, and cut off from, the established towns of the coast. The Gap was a signal geological feature of what became (and remains) an age-old, bitter tug-of-war, between the Old Ways of the oceanfacing, Europe-oriented East and the New Ways of a frontier in which all the reference points were purely, inwardly American. The land Boone settled became a fertile ground for agitation, change, controversy, and war. The sons of the pioneers who settled Kentucky and Tennessee drew from their frontier experience radical new ideas of national destiny and popular participation: Henry Clay’s “national system” of federal public works, which challenged the role of the then-dominant states; Andrew Jackson’s new “populist” theory of direct democracy, including the chrysalis of modern campaign politics.
I got a sense of the ardor of that “frontier” politics later, when I covered the coal industry in the same mountains over which Billy Davis had flown me. When the United Mine Workers of America went on strike, the rank and file in eastern Kentucky were among the most reluctant to make a deal. In a nasal twang, they sang the folk song “Which Side Are You On, Boys?” The title expressed their combative worldview. They were suspicious of the “coal operators,” of course, but more so of the distant companies Up East that owned the mineral rights and traded the stock that controlled the mines.
The East-West (or local versus national) divide symbolized by the Cumberland Gap is only one of the many fault lines that run through our public life and history. In the early days of the twenty-first century, the newest Cumberland Gap was not geological but digital—yet another virgin territory fertile with freedom and ferment, this one called the Internet. Conflict is built into the very landscape of our country, and into the character of the people who inhabit it.
So what are the Thirteen American Arguments? Drop a pebble into a pond (Walden Pond would be an appropriate one) and the perpetual disputes radiate out in concentric waves. At their core, they were set in motion by a Declaration of “self-evident truth” that every person is entitled to freedom and respect. Our first Argument, therefore, always is: Who is a “person”? Next we want to know who can become an American person. Then we argue about what Americans can be told to believe as a matter of faith rather than reason; what they can know and say; and what responsibilities they have to each other in terms of behavior, material wealth, and social welfare. Moving outward, ring by ring, the next set of arguments is about the shape and rules of government: how we choose the priests of our secular faith, the law; how we define money and manage debt; the conflicts between regions and between local and national power (such as the frontiers of Kentucky and Tennessee versus the powers Back East); and the relative strength of the president in a federal scheme dedicated to finding the midpoint between monarch and mob. In the next circles, we argue about our relationship to the world: the role of trade, war and diplomacy, and the environment. The last and perhaps most vehement argument is over the distance we still must travel to reach the “more perfect union” the Founders claimed to have established. Lincoln called us the “last best hope of earth.” Have we redeemed that promise? If arguing is our saving grace, everyone must feel they have a voice and a chance to be heard. Do they?
How were we born and bred to argue? To understand our nature—and to sustain it—we need to appreciate the lucky mix of accident and intention that made us who we are. Here, in sum, is how it happened:
As we were rising in the New World, unquestioned authority—the kind you risk your life to oppose—was dying in the Old. In England in the early seventeenth century, King James I decreed that he ruled by divine right. The fact that he felt it necessary to commit this idea to writing was proof enough that the concept was crumbling beneath his throne. As in politics, so in religion. In the late sixteenth century, Martin Luther had loosed a war of theology, ideas, and blood in defiance of the Catholic Church. For more than a millennium, Rome had held sway in Christendom, but the Reformation had eroded its authority by the time the first settlers left Europe for our shores. In one way or another, to one degree or another, most of our first founders were dissenters: initially, Protestants dissenting from the Vatican, then from the successor orthodoxies of a nominally Protestant official church. Robert Browne, an early dissenter, wrote that the church should be guided not by bishops but by “the voice of the whole people.” Our forefathers, by and large, had the habit of and even a theological need for disputation.
No Gold
Even if royal (and ecclesiastical) authority had remained supreme, it would have been hard to feel the weight of their command if you were an average person in early America. For most of our first 180 years, the powers that be in London (or, for a brief time, Amsterdam) paid relatively little attention to what was going on in their rather obscure and distant American colonies. We were afterthoughts, essentially commercial franchises, a way to show the flag without draining the treasury. Inattention amounted to freedom to argue with (local) authority. And there was no glittering treasure to draw royal attention. The Founders would later remark that it was our good political fortune to have been bereft of gold, the ravenous mining of which had led the Spanish to exert a much tougher and more dictatorial reign over their New World possessions. (We can be thankful that the California Gold Rush didn’t begin until the United States was sixty years old.) Americans got used to a light administrative hand, which led to revolution and war when the grip tightened in the late eighteenth century.
THE BIRTH OF FREE INQUIRY
If neither the pope nor the king had the power to explain the world and to rule it, who did? America’s founding coincided with the dawn of an age in which leading men first began to suggest a shattering new answer to that question: the free mind and soul of Man. With a printed Bible in one hand (written, for the first time, in his local, native language) and a telescope or microscope in the other (through which he could observe real-world phenomena with his own eyes), Man could understand the world, and forge his own destiny rather than merely accept it. Now, understanding would require argument in the scientific sense. Ironically, but appropriately, the dawn of this new era effectively was in 1620, the year the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock and Sir Francis
Bacon first propounded the theory of the scientific method, which required close observation and open-minded experiment. Soon after, John Milton proposed a new method of inquiry into questions about God and Man—in free speech. The unencumbered play of argument was the point of his Aeropagitica, published in 1644 and read with great interest in America. “And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth,” he famously wrote, “so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open endeavor.” The Augustan cadences echoed across the Atlantic, and still do. The Founding Fathers knew the passage by heart. Key word: “grapple.”
THE FREE FLOW OF INFORMATION
From the beginning, America was made for that Miltonian contest. We are the first nation—arguably the only nation—in which top-down control of the flow of ideas and information never was seriously attempted. The British weren’t eager to import printing presses to the colonies, understanding the risk of doing so, but by the early eighteenth century a robust, coffeehouse-and-pamphlet culture was thriving in cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. If there was “grappling” to be done, these were the places.
Attempts to dam the flow of information were proximate causes of our national existence. The Stamp Act Congress, which convened in New York in October 1765, is generally considered the first official act of what ultimately became the United States, and its Declaration of Grievances our first collective political utterance. What followed was perhaps the most intense period of public debate in our history, as we argued about how to establish a government. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published in 1776, sold an astonishing 600,000 copies in a country of 3 million.
ISAAC NEWTON’S CONSTITUTION
What Bacon had begun, Sir Isaac Newton brought to fruition, and the Founding Fathers who drafted the Constitution were steeped in respect for his successful experiments. Our Founders inherited a belief in scientific method, and several of them—Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, even George Washington—were men of science, a gentleman’s credential in the America of the late eighteenth century. Newton’s discoveries in physics were echoed in public life in a search for laws of mass and motion in human affairs.
The Constitution they drafted was Newtonian clockwork, a wheelwithin-wheel of countervailing gravitational forces. Those wheels—we call them “checks and balances”—were designed to encourage the release of energy while at the same time preventing political passion from tearing us apart. Historian Michael Kammen calls it “A Machine That Would Go of Itself.” We are still going.
In the most famous of all of the Federalist Papers, No. 10, the intellectual architect of the Constitution, James Madison, proposed that the multiplicity of “faction” was essential to a just and equitable society. The more factions, the more disputes—and the less chance for tyrannical rule, either from moblike majorities or power-mad politicians.
LAWYERS AND LEGAL ARGUMENTS
Lawyers launched a “nation of laws” in the language of legal procedure. The Declaration of Independence was written in the prescribed form of ancient common-law pleading known in Blackstone’s Commentaries as “The Argument”—that is, the motion in court that states the plaintiff ’s civil claim. The Declaration is a list of grievances against King George: our causes of action for the case we were about to argue. And the Declaration launches itself in the form of a court-rendered judgment in a case: “We hold these truths to be self-evident. . . .” In other words, in the court of human morality, we handed down an a priori judgment that we would cite in our new case.
The Constitution is not in pleading form, but it was fashioned in a legal environment of fifty-five men gathered behind closed doors in Philadelphia in 1787. Of that group, thirty-three—a working majority—were lawyers. How could we be anything other than the Arguing Country? And the result of their deliberations was not a Code in the Roman (or later, Napoleonic) sense. It was, in classic common-law fashion, the shortest distance between two points, dealing only and precisely with the problem at hand: how to assemble in the most efficient and durable way one country from thirteen fractious colonies. The “brevity and precision” of the document, wrote Lord James Bryce, emphasizes its “definiteness of principle,” which in turn leads to endless arguments over its application—which is the whole point. And the more arguers the better.
HOW TO MAKE A NEW EDEN?
Wherever we have come from, whatever we have come for, most of us view America as a clean slate of fresh possibilities. We tend to regard ours as the first and only perfectible nation. Our ancestors, burdened as they were by a prehistory of tribal warfare, beset by the need for mere survival and territorial coherence, rarely dared to pursue—and could not conceive of—the idea of societal perfection. We did, and do. The idea burned bright on the Mayflower. “They were not ordinary pilgrims,” wrote historian Paul Johnson, a Brit with a keen eye for his cousin country. “They were, rather, pilgrims, setting up a new, sanctified country which was to be a permanent pilgrimage, traveling ceaselessly toward a millenarian goal.”
THE BLACK EXPERIENCE
We aim high, which makes our failures dramatic—which spurs arguments about them. No one can see the contrast or feel the pain of it more sharply than African Americans, who, as slaves, literally built the Capitol in which laws were enacted to keep them in chains. But it was also in that very building where other, later laws were enacted to bring them to full personhood. Cornel West, the Princeton professor, captured the duality that fosters argument, and change. “To accept your country without betraying it,” he wrote, “you must love it for that which shows what it might become. America—this monument to the genius of ordinary man and women, this place where hope becomes capacity, this long, halting turn of the ‘no’ into the ‘yes’—needs citizens who love it enough to re-imagine and remake it.” So we try, fitfully, and argue about how to remove the burden that history gave to us all.
COMPETING COLONIAL MODELS
When we remember the Founders, we tend to think of the Pilgrims: the grim theocrats of Plymouth and Boston, censorious Puritans who gave us our communitarian idealism and our bristling impatience with those who do not share our ideals. But as historians have unpacked and repacked the past, they have come to see a more varied landscape and a greater variety of social frameworks that jostled each other up and down the Atlantic Coast. These existed, and thrived, for up to 180 years before the convention in Philadelphia. (And that’s not counting Spanish explorers, who crisscrossed the continent and established a smattering of settlements in the sixteenth century.) Each of these colonial frames—in New England, Virginia, and the Middle Colonies—began with its own blend of attitudes toward the fundamental forces in human affairs. Boston was communitarian and theocratic, Virginia a reconstituted English countryside. In Philadelphia and New York, the market ruled. Each of these three colonial models was utopian in its own way, but each envisioned a different kind of Elysium. They clashed from the start, and still do.
UTOPIAS IN A LIMITLESS ELSEWHERE
When our country was confined largely to its east-of-the-Appalachians configuration—a period that lasted roughly from 1609 to 1784—the West gave unimaginable room in which to imagine more new beginnings. We could get away from each other; each succeeding group of Israelites could build its own version of a Promised Land. The paradoxical result was more friction, and more numerous arguments, as the proponents of each fresh utopia worked themselves into a lather of unquestioned righteousness in the wilderness. Since they never had to look at the world through someone else’s eyes, they were all the more uncompromising about their own.
Roger Williams fled Boston to establish his own ideas in Rhode Island. His flight path was replicated endlessly in a big continent that was, for the most part, undefended. The Scots, venturing west over and through the Alleghenies, established a live-free-or-die society that only President George Washington himself could tame. Mormons, beset in the East, and facing cruelty and bloodshed as they trekked through Missouri and Illinois, finally found their utopia near the Great Salt Lake. The newest West for freedom-seeking utopians doesn’t exist on the land; it is not beyond the Alleghenies, or in the vastness of the Far West. It’s a truly limitless place: cyberspace, where gunslinging bloggers vie for attention with the hucksters from Back East. “It’s wild and wide-open,” said Arianna Huffington, a Los Angeles activist and writer who used that latitude to turn her eponymous website from a start-up to a must-read.
IMMIGRANTS’ EYES
Immigrants revere America with a fervor few natives can match, yet no one can see the contrast between American ideals and street-level reality more quickly or vividly. (Huffington, for example, a native of Greece, exhibits both qualities.) That shock can strike a spark of recognition and anger, and a consequent urge to demand change. Immigrants, or more usually their children, generate waves of idealism and indignation that fuel the never-ending debate over the distance between the “more perfect union” and its sometimes grim shortcomings. From early in the nineteenth century on, the Irish faced discrimination and scorn, but they eventually fought back by creating the big-city political machine that brought with it the Catholic social-welfare ideals of Europe. Coming to America with their own hopes for American society, the Jews of New York argued for a place at the table—and for social justice—in a movement that helped consummate Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. Now Latinos, Asian Americans, and Muslim Americans are stepping into the arena. What will they say? We need to hear it, and we will. Whatever it is, they will join in and help sustain the Thirteen American Arguments that have—and still can—define and inspire us. What do I hope to achieve by writing this book? Here is my to-do list:
SEEING PATTERNS
American democracy is not tidy, but it is understandable—and certainly worth trying to understand. My first goal is to cut through the noise of the day and try to show you a comprehensible and nonpartisan overview of our public life and how it works. The earthquakes and lava eruptions we see and hear every day, whether at Daily Kos or the Drudge Report, whether on O’Reilly or NPR, are merely the visible expressions of deeper forces. If you have a map of the tectonic plates and know the terrain, as Billy Davis Jr. did, you know where you are, you know where the next story is coming from, and you can separate what is useful from what is mere bombast and entertainment. I call that map The Thirteen American Arguments. You can see evidence of them every day on the home page of your favorite news website (or if you insist, on the front page of your local newspaper).
In his The Cycles of American History, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. summarizes America as an ebb and flow in attitude toward the role of government “as the best way of meeting our troubles.” He’s right, but only partially. The arguments are more numerous and, in some cases, more fundamental.
To understand them, what matters is not the name of the package, but its contents. The labels change, but the issues—the arguments—remain constant. In the past century, for example, the Republican Party has been the party of high trade barriers and low; the tribune of emancipation for African Americans and a barrier to civil rights and affirmative action; the bastion of the industrial North and of the rural South. The Democrats have been the party of Bible-toting teetotalers, and the libertines of New York and San Francisco; the “peace” party opposed to the use of military force in foreign affairs and the “hawk” party agitating for wars; the supporters of “states’ rights” and the champion of expanded federal power. The labels don’t matter, the Arguments do. You won’t see me using the words “conservative” and “liberal,” or “left” and “right” very much. They are functionally meaningless, especially in America. We are not a country of rigid ideologies, but of real, permanent conflicts.
THE RISKS OF FAILING TO ARGUE
My second goal is to remind us that arguing is good—in fact, indispensable. The process can seem so nasty, petty, and personal. But the harshness literally comes with the territory. Here is the paradox in Arguing America: The process that makes us so fragile also makes us durable. The machinery of our life is complex, deliberately so, and always in danger of corrosion and collapse from lack of maintenance. We need education if we are to argue; but we need emotion if we are to want to. I hold no brief for the haranguers of radio or flamers of the Web, but when they mention facts (which they sometimes do) or argue from the heart (which they often do), they are essential. Our constant challenge is to harness the often passionate energy of our arguments to the useful deals that can result, without tearing ourselves apart. The word “but,” I realized long ago, is the most important one in any speech, and in public life it is the moment an argument begins.
We are the sum of the resulting achievements and accommodations. We make progress that way. The “mixed” American economy is the legacy of the never-ending negotiation among the fundamental forces of the Market and the State. For all of its shortcomings, it has been, so far, the largest generator of wealth in the world and the most productive economy in history. It took a depression to weave a “social safety net.” Though frayed, it achieved its primary goal—the amelioration, through Social Security and Medicare, of dire poverty and untended disease among the elderly. It took a civil war to free the slaves, and another century to ensure their civil rights, but no country has emerged more genuinely committed to the ideal of individual freedom for all—in part because we had to shed so much blood for that prize. The never-ending argument over our relationship to the rest of the planet—do we want to merely survive in it or change it?—led us to achieve both in World War II, the “good war” if there ever was one.
Silence is a greater risk than tumult. Many would regard the all-toosmooth road to war in Iraq as a grim example of that risk. Congress did not do its part in arguing over our course; neither did the press, the author of this book included. The president was free to propound, with little debate, a new doctrine of preemptive war—a radical change to our theory of the use of military power and foreign involvement. Pro-life activists from a generation ago regarded the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision on abortion the same way, as a radical change in policy made without the grand public debate it deserved. Argument requires voices. Progress requires that they be heard, even if they are not obeyed.
The absence of vehemence is one risk; the failure to recognize the validity of vehemence is another. The multifaceted debate over the question of who controls the genetic destiny of mankind—God, or society and science—is a vivid example. Those who worry about the morality of embryonic stem-cell research are not necessarily ignorant; those who put their fierce faith in the life-saving possibilities of such research are not godless heathens. Each side needs to accept the other’s humanity, and understandable emotional intensity, so the debate can really begin. For argument is inert without a measure of goodwill. Our Declaration of Independence, after all, was written in the name of “a decent respect for the opinion of mankind.”
IMPEDIMENTS TO ARGUMENT
Next, I want to sound an alarm. Like a reciprocating engine or a human heart, our country can produce energy only if the valves flow freely. In the early twenty-first century, the obstacles have thickened. We have clotted
the arteries of the American body politic.
One impediment often is the presidential selection process, which the political parties have turned over to primary voters. The objective was a noble one: to foster democratic participation. But often the result is the opposite, exaggerating the clout of small groups of single-issue activists and rapacious consultants at the expense of the larger electorate. Rather than addressing each other, the candidates (even in the general election) tend to stand back-to-back, gesticulating in the direction of their own “base.” It’s “why Americans hate politics,” as author E. J. Dionne once put it. Rather than lubricating the engine of argument, the media—old and
even new—often jams the gears. The Internet exponentially has expanded venues for free expression, but at the same time encourages likeminded people to cling together, talking to each other rather than engaging the world outside of their digital enclave. As the University of Pennsylvania’s Kathleen Hall Jamieson has shown, TV ads often obscure more than they reveal. In the “free” media, the hunger for ratings reduces the ratio of real argument to mere rant. We are left to operate in a miasma of what comedian Stephen Colbert calls “truthiness.”
In the post-9/11 world, war has further clogged the arteries of argument. In the name of security, officials withhold information. It often is difficult, if not impossible, to debate the actions of government if we have no idea what government really is doing. In his first six years as president, George W. Bush was free to maneuver without strict oversight from a largely compliant, Republican-led Congress. Yet even the fitfully aggressive Democrats, who took charge in 2007, have been largely unable to closely inspect, let alone redirect, Bush’s national-security policies. A generation ago, as the Cold War began, a venerable Republican senator declared that, at such times, political debates should stop “at the water’s edge.” What Senator Arthur Vandenberg meant was that we should vigorously debate our course here at home, then present a united front to the world. But his dictum has been turned inside out in the post-9/11 era. If there is no “water’s edge” at all, there is no safe place for free debate.
GET INTO AN ARGUMENT
The impediments to argument are daunting, but not insuperable. All it takes—but what it requires—is involvement. My fourth aim is to encourage voters to commit the most American of acts: to take part in the arguing. The era of proxy participation in public life is over; a new era of direct action has begun.
It is no accident that, as the Web rises, the traditional political parties decline. As the 2008 presidential election approached, there were as many voters registered as “independents” or “unaffiliated” as Democrats or Republicans. Voters have become wary of one-size-fits-all, prix fixe party agendas. Americans pick and choose. I have tried to lay out the menu of arguments as they exist in nature, if you will, independent of the parties that, over the years, have taken (all) sides in them. The political parties have shriveled as conduits for “collective expression,” a phrase that has a deservedly musty, twentieth-century feel to it. In the new millennium, voters are taking it upon themselves—and must take it upon themselves—to make their own case. Think of this as a briefing book for a nation of citizen-candidates. The Internet is their campaign trail, YouTube their advertising campaign.
Involvement is also an antidote to media “truthiness.” As Jamieson of Penn points out, the Internet is allowing a speedier response to false claims in TV ads and false reports on the news. In this new era, everybody is her own fact-checker.
WE’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE
My fifth goal is to offer a sense of perspective in the midst of what, to many, seems like a gloomy period in our national life. The lesson of looking at the Thirteen Arguments and their history is sobering, to be sure: They have a sense of inescapability that can be unnerving, like a political version of Bill Murray’s living nightmare in Groundhog Day. Immigration is perhaps the most vivid these days, but all of the arguments are alive on the front page. It will always be that way.
On the other hand, it is comforting and inspiring to know, in essence, that We Have Been Here Before—that we have been in similar predicaments and not only survived, but triumphed, working out ways to preserve freedom and yet inch ever closer to the ideals of justice. We have felt overwhelmed by immigrants before, and survived. We have felt threatened by overbearing, secretive presidents in wartime, and survived. We have erupted in bellicosity toward the world, and survived. We have laid waste to our environment, and it has survived. The economy and the dollar have been devastated before, and they have survived. What is required to move forward is something more than luck. What is required is that we dig deep down into our history to find the countervailing insights and rediscover the enduring ideas that can set us right. It’s all in our DNA—the double helix of our contentious and complex history. “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America,” Bill Clinton said in his first inaugural address—and he was right.
BE THANKFUL
Last, we need to appreciate our uniqueness, and strive to be worthy of it. We have been blessed with history’s best chance to live in the space created by equipoise among the brute forces that forever vie for dominion over mankind in society. In shorthand, they are the State, the Church, the Market, the Tribe, and the Academy (Science). Balance among them produced the golden ages in the history of mankind. But let any of these five forces achieve untrammeled control, and slavery is the inevitable result. So far, we have avoided the fate of Stalin’s Soviet Union, the Taliban’s Afghanistan, Dickens’s London, the Mob’s Sicily, or Huxley’s Brave New World. Our best hope lies in keeping each of the basic forces forever in countervailing conflict with one another. Let them make accommodation; never let them collude. Freedom exists in the space created by equipoise among them.
There is no such equipoise on most of the planet. From the great cities of China to the mountain caves of Afghanistan, there is no faith in the idea of argument. Most of humanity pays allegiance to only One Eternal Answer, whether it is a sacred text or a “revolutionary” party. I first saw that dangerous allegiance as a student on a visit to the old Soviet Union in 1970. On my first night in Kiev I checked into a hotel. The spartan room had a desk with a lamp and a modern-looking radio. As I examined the radio more closely I noticed something odd—and chilling. It had no dial,only an “on/volume” switch. I was in a country with only one voice—the government’s.
In the never-ending aftermath of Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack, we face constant reminders of the hatred and ferment that face us. Yet in spite of the bloodshed—indeed, because of it—we have to remain willing to argue in good faith among ourselves. We have to prove (again) that argument is strength, not weakness, and that freedom and security can live together. How do we do so? By making sure that people know they have a chance to be heard. The American way breeds unsettling conflict, but argument is what leads to consent, and consent is what leads to legitimacy. People accept outcomes that they deplore, because they think the process gives their point of view a chance.
As long as we argue, there is hope, and as long as there is hope, we will argue. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville saw genius in this. “To take a hand in the regulation of society,” he said, was our “biggest concern and, so to speak, the only pleasure an American knows.” This “ceaseless agitation,” he wrote, creates an “all-pervading and restless activity, a superabundant force, and an energy which is inseparable from it and which may, however unfavorable circumstances may be, produce wonders. These,” he concluded, “are the true advantage of democracy.” The “ceaseless agitation” is what this book is about. It’s the story of the Thirteen American Arguments.
Copyright © 2008 by Howard Fineman. All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
You can buy Howard Fineman's book, The Thirteen American Arguments, here.
