Yuval Levin: Have an Argument

This article is part of a Free Press series on “Repairing America After the Murder of Charlie Kirk.” Read the other entries, including from Abigail Shrier, Coleman Hughes, Sam Harris and others, here.

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. In reality, 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 terrible people on the other side, but rarely actually talk to those people.

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 21st-century institutions of our civic life—not only social media but the polarized political press, the one-party university, the one-party church, and an increasingly performative political culture—are all grounded in that misimpression. They are built to let us avoid exposure to conflicting views. People we disagree with are the subjects of our lives as citizens, not the content of them.

The Assassination of Charlie Kirk

Je Suis Charlie

The Editors

Charlie Kirk’s Murder and the Rise of Political Violence

Bari Weiss

The Students Celebrating Charlie Kirk’s Murder

Maya Sulkin, Sean Fischer

Spencer Cox and Bernie Sanders Rise to the Moment

Peter Savodnik

This is a perverse distortion of the American political tradition. Our Constitution is premised on the assumption that our neighbors aren’t always going to share our views, and that dealing with each other through those differences is what politics is for.

“As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed,” as James Madison bluntly put it. To eliminate disagreement from a free society you’d have to eliminate the air we breathe, and that would obviously be a cure much worse than the disease. The purpose of politics is not to solve the fact that people who disagree with us exist, but to solve shared, concrete public problems in light of that fact.