Agree to disagree? I don’t agree to that!

Like a lot of 90’s kids, I have quotes from the Simpsons come spontaneously to mind just about all the time. The other day a moment came to mind where Ned Flanders (with whom I deeply identify) is chairing a meeting of the Springfield Parent-Teacher Association where he is trying to mediate a strike between the School administration (represented by Principal Skinner) and the teachers (represented by Edna Krabapple). After some unproductive back and forth between the contending parties, Flanders chuckles as he says “well I guess this is a case where we’ll have to agree to disagree.” Skinner responds: “I don’t agree to that” and Krabapple adds “Neither do I!”

I was put in mind of this when I watched footage from a town hall meeting held by Republican Congressman Bryan Steil of Wisconsin. His constituents were angrily grilling him about the ICE raids and the lack of due process or humane treatment of undocumented immigrants, as well as other issues of (to my mind) flagrant and illegal abuse of power by the Trump administration that Steil continues to support. To attempt to diffuse the situation Steil tried to frame the confrontation as an honest disagreement: “We’ll probably agree to disagree on some of my answer here . . .” and – when the audience booed its response – he said, “It’s completely fine that we disagree; there’s nothing wrong with disagreeing on the topic.”

Disagreement mirage

Now, I’m on the record (including in the pages of CC in 2019) expressing opinions that basically accord with what Rep. Steil said here: robust disagreement is a sign of health in a democracy. But I’m going to pull a Principal Skinner in this instance: I don’t agree that we can agree to disagree in this case. That’s because I don’t think that the divisions underlying the Trump administration’s actions and the angry responses of the audience at the town hall are good-faith differences of opinion. The fractures in American (and, I fear, increasingly in Canadian, especially Albertan) political life are not rightly characterized in terms of two (or more) parties, both oriented toward the common good, simply disagreeing about how to get there or even about what the common good looks like. Disagreement implies some shared terms of reference: an “information ecosystem” where we can go to adjudicate disputes because we have some sense of what reliable sources of knowledge are, a shared legal and moral framework for how we make decisions in spite of our disagreements, and a shared resolve to keep disagreeing, compromising, deciding and re-visiting decisions.

All of these shared terms of reference are almost gone in the U.S., largely because one party has decided to view its opponents as enemies to be destroyed and humiliated and to view constitutional rules and norms as hammers to be used to that end or ignored if they don’t help to defeat their enemies. Congressional Democrats keep trying to play the game of compromise and bipartisanship, but the Republicans have long since stopped playing. As someone who actively aids and abets that, Rep. Steil doesn’t get to appeal to civility and agreeable disagreement.

Disagreement would be a real achievement in this world, one that I fear is a long way off.