Civil Discourse Is Not Surrender, and Lincoln and Scalia Prove It

Manners are for losers, says a theory floating around parts of the right: the other side plays rough, so the only sensible response is to play rougher. The man who says "with respect" has already lost, and the man who says "you idiot" is the only one who means it.

I'd like to put that theory on trial, and I would like to call two very unlikely witnesses. One is a lanky Illinois lawyer in a stovepipe hat who lost an election and then won the country. The other is a Supreme Court justice famous for dissents so sharp that law students quote them for fun. Neither one was soft. Neither one was rude. And both of them did more for the conservative cause, and for the cause of plain old good argument, than all the people who confuse volume with courage.

My claim is simple: civility is not surrender. It is a discipline for people who want to win arguments rather than just feel good about having them. Let me lay it out in order, take the best objection head-on, and then tell you what I think it means for you.

The case in five numbered points

1. Civility is a method, not a position. It says how you argue, not what you argue. A man can hold the hardest, most unyielding view in the country and state it without contempt.
2. Contempt shrinks your audience. When you sneer at the other side, you please the people who already agree with you and you lose the people who don't. Persuasion is arithmetic. Every movement that wins elections needs more votes than it started with.
3. You cannot refute what you cannot state. The only way to beat an argument is to understand it well enough to describe it in terms its owner would accept. Mockery lets you skip that step, and skipping that step is how you lose to an opponent who did not skip it.
4. The best arguers in our history did it this way. The two cases below make the point.
5. Contempt is a bad habit with a bad end. Violence is never a legitimate tool of politics, and nobody on the right should shrug at anyone on either side who flirts with it. But the road there often starts with the habit of treating opponents as something other than fellow citizens. A person you have talked yourself into despising is a person you will eventually stop listening to.

Now the witnesses.

Witness one: Lincoln and Douglas, 1858

The year was 1858, and two men wanted the same United States Senate seat from Illinois. One was the incumbent, Stephen A. Douglas, a national figure called the "Little Giant," a Democrat who had pushed the Kansas-Nebraska Act through Congress in 1854. The other was Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, a former one-term congressman, and a lawyer well known in Illinois and little known elsewhere. On June 16, 1858, Lincoln accepted the Republican nomination in Springfield with the famous "House Divided" speech, saying that a house divided against itself cannot stand and that the country could not endure permanently half slave and half free.

The two men then met in seven joint debates, one in each of seven Illinois towns between August 21 and October 15: Ottawa, Freeport, Jonesboro, Charleston, Galesburg, Quincy and Alton. There were no microphones and no cameras. The format was long by any modern standard: one candidate would speak for an hour, the other would respond for an hour and a half, and the first would close with a half hour. Thousands came to listen. Newspapers printed the speeches. People who could not attend read them over breakfast.

Here is what I want you to notice. The debates were about the most explosive issue in American life, which was whether slavery would be allowed to spread into the territories. Lincoln did not soften his position. He argued that slavery was a moral wrong and that Congress could and should keep it from spreading. Douglas argued that the people of each territory should decide, a doctrine he called popular sovereignty. They disagreed on a question that would soon tear the country apart.

And they argued about it with arguments. At Freeport on August 27, Lincoln asked Douglas a pointed question: could the people of a territory, in any lawful way, exclude slavery before it became a state? Douglas's answer, which became known as the Freeport Doctrine, is remembered to this day because it forced him to say something that cost him support among Southern Democrats. A good question is a weapon. Lincoln used it without a single insult.

Was he gentle? No. Lincoln could be devastating. He used humor, logic and the record of Douglas's own statements. But he treated his opponent as a man whose reasoning had to be answered. The goal was to be heard by the voters in the middle.

Lincoln lost. In those days the state legislature chose the Senator, and the legislature sent Douglas back. Lincoln's own loss turned out to be the best advertisement he ever bought. The debates were published as a book, and two years later he was elected President. After the war began, in his Second Inaugural Address in March 1865, he spoke of "malice toward none" and "charity for all." And in his First Inaugural in 1861, as the Union was coming apart, he ended by saying "we are not enemies, but friends." The man who said that was about to lead the country through the bloodiest war it ever fought. He did not think civility meant giving up. He thought it meant staying human while you fought for what was right.

Witness two: Scalia and Ginsburg

Now jump forward more than a century. Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg could not have been more different in their reading of the Constitution. Scalia was the leading champion of originalism: the Constitution means what it meant when it was adopted. Ginsburg came from a different tradition, in which the courts have a larger role in applying constitutional principles to changed circumstances. They served together on the Supreme Court from 1993, when Ginsburg joined, until Scalia's death in February 2016. They disagreed in case after case.

Scalia did not hold back in his opinions. When the Court held in United States v. Virginia (1996) that the Virginia Military Institute could not exclude women, Ginsburg wrote the opinion for the Court and Scalia wrote a lone dissent that ran the length of a short essay. He called it as he saw it, and he did not blur it. Ginsburg answered in kind in her own writing. They fought on paper at full strength.

And yet they were close friends. They shared a love of opera. They and their spouses spent New Year's Eve together for years. The friendship was so well known that a comic opera inspired by their disagreements, Scalia/Ginsburg, was staged in 2015. Neither one thought that agreeing to be warm to each other cost them a vote.

What the two of them showed is that there are two different levels. On the level of ideas, the argument can be as fierce as you like. On the level of people, you can keep the relationship. And here's the thing for conservatives to notice: Scalia's reputation as the best writer and the sharpest intellect on the right owes a great deal to the fact that even those who disagreed with him had to take him seriously. People who dislike your conclusions will still read your opinions if you treat them as adults. For more on how he applied his principles even when the results annoyed conservatives, see Antonin Scalia Sided With Flag Burners and Defendants, and That Is the Point.

Witness three: John Stuart Mill

If you want the intellectual case for all of this, the best one is nearly two centuries old. In On Liberty (1859), the English philosopher John Stuart Mill argued, in the chapter on freedom of thought and discussion, that we should never silence an opinion, for four reasons. The opinion we suppress may be true. It may contain part of the truth. Even if it is entirely wrong, a view that is never challenged will be held, in his phrase, "as a dead dogma, not a living truth." And the meaning of the doctrine itself can be lost if no one is ever made to defend it.

Mill also wrote, in the same chapter, that "he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that." Think about what that means for the person who only reads people he agrees with. He cannot know his own case well. He has never had to defend it against its best objections, so he cannot tell which of his arguments are strong and which are decoration.

I find this the most practical point in the whole tradition. If you want to be a better conservative, read the best argument against your position. Read it as though your side's reputation depended on getting it right. Then either change your mind, which is honorable, or come back with a better case, which is how movements get stronger. Mill, who was no conservative, handed us the best training manual for conservatives ever written.

The strongest objection

Now the other side, stated fairly. The objection goes like this:

"All very nice, but it is fantasy. The other side doesn't play by these rules. They call us names, they mock our faith, they treat every conservative as a bigot. If we're polite while they brawl, we hand them the field. Civility is how the establishment tells the right to sit down and lose gracefully. We've been 'civil' for decades and look where it got us."

That is a serious complaint. It comes from a real frustration, and I won't pretend it is baseless. People on the right have been condescended to, and the condescension is real. Here is my answer, in three parts.

First, civility is not silence. Lincoln said that slavery was wrong, that it must not spread, and that the Union must be preserved. Scalia wrote dissents that cut. Being civil in manner has nothing to do with being timid in substance. If someone tells you to be civil in order to get you to stop arguing, they are not asking for civility. They are asking for your silence, and you can decline that request politely.

Second, look at who wins elections. The coalition that brought Ronald Reagan to the presidency was built by persuasion, including persuading Democrats and independents. The 1981 tax-cut law passed through a House of Representatives that was controlled by the Democratic Party. That doesn't happen to a movement that has contempt for the voters it needs. For the full story, see reagan's 1981 tax cut and the quiet end of bracket creep. A party that is satisfied to be a loud minority can have as many insults as it wants. A party that wants to govern needs the person in the middle to think, "These folks at least listened to me."

Third, the other side's bad behavior is not a license for yours. If a man throws mud at you and you throw mud back, the crowd sees two men covered in mud. If he throws mud and you answer with a fact, a fair summary of his view and a joke at his idea's expense, the crowd sees a difference. That difference is the whole game. As to the claim that being civil has gotten us nowhere: the problem was never civility. The problem was a failure to argue the case clearly, and a habit of retreating when the argument got tough. Civility and a spine are compatible. You need both.

I'd add a fourth point, for honesty's sake. There is a kind of "civility" that is fake: a pose of politeness that exists to protect the powerful from criticism. I am not defending that. I am defending the real kind, which is the willingness to hear a person out, state his argument fairly and answer it with evidence. Wit, ridicule of ideas and sharp criticism of public officials for their public acts all fit inside it. What does not fit is contempt for the person.

What this looks like in practice

You do not have to turn into a diplomat. Practically, civil argument means a handful of habits:

1. State their view before you answer it. Say it in words they would accept.
2. Argue with the best version, not the worst. Don't pick the dumbest tweet from the other side and pretend it speaks for a hundred million people.
3. Aim at ideas and public acts. Ridicule a bad policy as hard as you like. Leave families, faith and private lives alone.
4. Concede what is true. If the other side is right about a point, say so. It makes the rest of your case more believable.
5. Keep the door open. The person who disagrees with you today may be the voter you need next November, or the neighbor you need next winter.

Those habits are laid out for the dinner table in How to Argue Politics at the Holiday Table and Still Be Invited Back, and the broader map of what the arguments are really about is in The Culture War as Five Big Arguments, With Each Side at Its Best. If you want the founding-era proof that political talk has always been rough, and that the republic survived it, see The Founders' Partisan Press Was Far Nastier Than Anything on Your Feed.

The verdict

Civility is not surrender. It is what winners do when they intend to keep winning. Lincoln lost a Senate race and won the argument of the century by making the better case in front of an audience he respected. Scalia and Ginsburg fought their hardest battles on paper and still spent their evenings together at the opera. Mill told us that a view that is never challenged goes stale, and that the person who knows only his own side knows little of it.

So the next time someone tells you that only the loud win, ask him to name a lasting political victory that was built on contempt. Then ask him to name one built on persuasion. The second list is longer, and it includes most of what conservatives are proudest of.

The bottom line

• Civility is a method, not a surrender. You can hold the hardest view in the country and state it without contempt.
• Lincoln lost the 1858 Senate race and won the argument. The seven debates, from August 21 to October 15, are still the model of a serious disagreement carried on in public.
• Scalia and Ginsburg fought on paper and stayed friends. Their dissents were sharp. Their friendship was real. Both facts can be true.
• Mill's test is the conservative's test. If you only know your own side, you know little of that. Read the best case against your view.
• Aim your sharpest words at ideas. Ridicule bad policy all day. Never treat a fellow citizen as something less, and never excuse violence from any side.