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In a democracy, controversy is healthy.1 Complex issues as far-ranging as immigration, health care, military interventions, taxation, and education seldom lend themselves to simple, consensual solutions. The public interest is well served by robust public argument. But when disagreements are so driven and distorted by extremist rhetoric that citizens and public officials fail to engage with one another reasonably or respectfully on substantive issues of public importance, the debate degenerates, blocking constructive compromises that would benefit all sides more than the status quo would. Like many scholars, American citizens today discern a link between the impoverished, divisive discourse that pollutes our politics and culture, and the diminished capacity of America’s political system to address intelligently, let alone solve, our most challenging problems–from health care to global warming, from public education to Social Security, from terrorism to this country’s eroding competitive advantage in the global economy.

To help us understand the nature of this link between extremist rhetoric and political paralysis, let us begin with an example of extremist rhetoric in entertainment, where it is even more common and far less controversial than in politics. Many Americans over the age of forty may remember the weekly “Point/Counterpoint” segment from 60 Minutes, which pitted the liberal Shana Alexander against the conservative James J. Kilpatrick. Even more will recall the spoof of “Point/Counterpoint” from Saturday Night Live, where Dan Ackroyd resorted to a show of verbal pyrotechnics as he drove a single point to the ground, while effacing Jane Curtin as an “ignorant slut.”

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Endnotes

• 1This essay is adapted from lectures delivered at the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, Brown University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. I thank those audiences along with Sigal Ben-Porath, Sam Freeman, Jim Gardner, Rob Reich, Steve Steinberg, and Dennis Thompson for their excellent advice.