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How can people with different worldviews overcome their political disagreements to make collective decisions. Immigration, capital punishment, abortion, gun control, foreign policy-- these are just some of the many issues that divide us. Each of us has a unique worldview, our own understanding of justice, rights, and the consequences of political actions. So how can we possibly make shared decisions that affect us all? To address this question Michael Hutchins uses modern bargaining theory, in conjunction with analysis of important political controversies to provide new insights into how broadly liberal people--those who are not inclined to enforce their own views through violence--can govern themselves despite fundamental disagreements. Irreconcilable Politics examines the ways in which we disagree and explores the very meaning of freedom and democracy.
How can people with different worldviews overcome their disagreements to make collective decisions?
Acrimony and hyperpartisanship have seeped into every part of the political process. Congress is deadlocked and its approval ratings are at record lows. America's two main political parties have given up their traditions of compromise, endangering our very system of constitutional democracy. And one of these parties has taken on the role of insurgent outlier; the Republicans have become ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, and ardently opposed to the established social and economic policy regime.In It's Even Worse Than It Looks, congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein identify two overriding problems that have led Congress -- and the United States -- to the brink of institutional collapse. The first is the serious mismatch between our political parties, which have become as vehemently adversarial as parliamentary parties, and a governing system that, unlike a parliamentary democracy, makes it extremely difficult for majorities to act. Second, while both parties participate in tribal warfare, both sides are not equally culpable. The political system faces what the authors call &"asymmetric polarization," with the Republican Party implacably refusing to allow anything that might help the Democrats politically, no matter the cost.With dysfunction rooted in long-term political trends, a coarsened political culture and a new partisan media, the authors conclude that there is no &"silver bullet"; reform that can solve everything. But they offer a panoply of useful ideas and reforms, endorsing some solutions, like greater public participation and institutional restructuring of the House and Senate, while debunking others, like independent or third-party candidates. Above all, they call on the media as well as the public at large to focus on the true causes of dysfunction rather than just throwing the bums out every election cycle. Until voters learn to act strategically to reward problem solving and punish obstruction, American democracy will remain in serious danger.
American politics seems like a war between irreconcilable forces and so we may suspect that political life as such is war. This book confronts these suspicions by arguing that liberal political institutions have the unique capacity to sustain social trust in diverse, open societies, undermining aggressive political partisanship.
In recent year, pro-gay and anti-gay rights activists have engaged in a struggle to sway public opinion in their favor through the use of ideologically charged rhetoric in an effort to win support from an undecided public. The author contends, however, that the debate is stalemated precisely because each side stereotypes and pathologizes the other's perspective, thereby becoming perfect enemies divided on every issue and with such intensity that consensus seems nearly impossible. Providing a panoramic view of both perspectives, this unique book traces the contested issues to fundamental conceptual differences within the field of religious, scientific, and political studies. Caramagno carefully examines the centuries of thought behind the questions involved and encourages readers to consider the arguments in order to draw their own conclusions. This book is not about the wrongs or rights of the gay-rights debate. Nor is it a condemnation of the sides involved in the debate. Instead, it shows how the two sides have engaged in the battle and how they have marshaled evidence from a variety of sources (often the same ones) to muster public support but without addressing the conceptual changes needed to conduct a more profitable dialog. Treating both sides of the debate respectfully and objectively, Irreconcilable Differences? opens the discussion up so that all ideas and arguments can be understood as having something valuable to bring to the table. In this way, readers are challenged to consider the ways arguments are formed, how culture disseminates ideas, and how a debate can be shaped so that consensus-building is a real, not an imagined, outcome.
This unique volume brings together a multi-disciplinary group of scholars as well as Czech and Slovak decisionmakers who were personally involved in the events leading up to the separation of Czechoslovakia. Asking whether the dissolution was inevitable, the contributors bring a range of different approaches and perspectives to bear on the twin problems of democratic transitions in multinational societies and ethnic separatism and its origins. The blend of analysis and insider experiences will make this book invaluable for all concerned with nationalism and ethnicity, democratization, and transitions in Eastern Europe.
Since the end of the Cold War, the concept of reconciliation has emerged as a central term of political discourse within societies divided by a history of political violence. Reconciliation has been promoted as a way of reckoning with the legacy of past wrongs while opening the way for community in the future. This book examines the issues of transitional justice in the context of contemporary debates in political theory concerning the nature of 'the political'. Bringing together research on transitional justice and political theory, the author argues that if we are to talk of reconciliation in politics we need to think about it in a fundamentally different way than is commonly presupposed; as agonistic rather than restorative.
Irreconcilable Differences is an attempt to peer into the future in the light of recent and ongoing events. Author David Cole proposes that Americans may be living through the beginning of the devolution of the United States of America – a development that may unfold after our lifetimes, although it could happen sooner. Cole surveys examples of devolutionary political developments around the world in recent decades. He offers a running commentary on recent polemics, as commentators in the press consider the evidence of American political decline and decay. He speculates as to exactly what form a devolved United States might take. The conjecture is that a point could be reached at which Americans conclude that an amicable breakup is to be preferred on the whole to an attempt to continue to live under the same tent. Is contemporary America an example of the Aristotelian phenomenon of “coming into being and passing away”?
First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Although politics at the elite level has been polarized for some time, a scholarly controversy has raged over whether ordinary Americans are polarized. This book argues that they are and that the reason is growing polarization of worldviews - what guides people's view of right and wrong and good and evil. These differences in worldview are rooted in what Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler describe as authoritarianism. They show that differences of opinion concerning the most provocative issues on the contemporary issue agenda - about race, gay marriage, illegal immigration, and the use of force to resolve security problems - reflect differences in individuals' levels of authoritarianism. Events and strategic political decisions have conspired to make all these considerations more salient. The authors demonstrate that the left and the right have coalesced around these opposing worldviews, which has provided politics with more incandescent hues than before.