United We Argue
Ask ten Americans what it means to be American and you'll get eleven opinions, most of them shouted.
We like to picture our founding as a moment of unity. A room full of powdered wigs, nodding in solemn agreement.
It wasn't. It was a room full of men who despised each other's positions and stayed in the room anyway.
That, right there, is the oldest American tradition. Older than baseball. Older than apple pie. Older than complaining about the weather.
We were arguing before we were a "we."
Take Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, running for a Senate seat in 1858. Seven debates, three hours apiece, nothing but a wooden platform and Illinois weather. No microphones. No moderators. No mercy.
Twelve thousand showed up at Ottawa, twenty thousand at Galesburg, farmers riding the rails in from three states just to watch two men argue about slavery all afternoon. Lincoln lost the race. Published the transcripts anyway, and two years later he was President. Losing the argument, it turns out, beat not having one.
And we have not always argued well, or rightly. This is an imperfect nation built by imperfect people, and the ledger shows it: slavery defended by men who called themselves Christians, land taken from people who were here first, half the population told to sit quietly while the other half decided its fate.
Look back with today's eyes and the verdict is plain. But climb into the shoes of the people living it ... I mean really climb in, not just glance down at them ... and you find the debates were not lopsided.
Both sides, much like today, believed themselves virtuous. Both sides had preachers, pamphlets, and conviction. That's the uncomfortable truth about moral progress: it rarely arrives by unanimous vote. It arrives after a fight.
And the fight continues.
Healthcare. Immigration. Guns. Speech. The right to protest. What America owes the world, and what the world owes America.
Trade one century's debates for another and the shouting sounds about the same.
Good.
This is what we were built for. Wanting an America where nobody disagrees is like wanting an ocean with no waves ... Easy to picture, impossible to have, and about as much fun as watching paint dry on a fence nobody asked you to paint.
What's changed isn't the arguing, it's the audience.
For most of our history, disagreement happened across a fence, a dinner table, a barstool — someplace you couldn't leave without at least nodding at the fellow you disagreed with.
If you're old enough, you remember that world plainly.
If you're young, you've likely never set foot in it. Your disagreements happen across a feed, one you can curate, mute, and block until it tells you only what you already believe.
I'm caught in between: young enough to have mostly grown up inside the feed, old enough to have caught the tail end of the fence and the dinner table. I live in a bubble of my own construction, and it's a comfortable one ... right up until it collides with someone else's. And when two bubbles collide, they don't debate. They pop, loudly, and everybody standing nearby gets wet.
We didn't used to confuse volume for virtue, or a tantrum for a principle. Stamping your feet because the vote didn't go your way used to be something you grew out of around age six, right about the same time you stopped biting people at birthday parties. Now grown adults do it on cable news, on both sides of the aisle, and call it "standing firm."
I'd like to believe we'll grow out of it again. That we'll figure out this new technology the way we eventually figured out fire, cars, and the group chat, and get back to the older, more tried-and-true trick: disagreeing with our whole chest and still shaking hands after.
A nation built on argument doesn't survive by ending arguments or muting disagreements.
It survives the way a marriage survives. By not agreeing on everything, but by learning, again and again, how to fight about the dishes and still make breakfast the next morning.
Land of the free, home of the argument. Pass the potatoes.