Political disagreement is human, and so is authoritarianism
By now, anyone paying even modest attention to politics should see that many or most political disagreements cannot be conclusively settled by evidence or logic alone. Abortion is understood by some as a wrongful killing, while supporters disagree. Such conflicts are intensified by ordinary human limitations. We are often inconsistent, self-interested, tribal, and capable of hypocrisy. In politics simple answers rarely deliver uncontested truth or moral certainty. Politics is a struggle over (1) power and contested concepts, e.g., freedom, equality, justice, rights, security, order, morality, and the public interest, and (2) who gets to define them in law or state power. The rational objective here is not to abolish disagreement. That is impossible. Instead, to stay away from tyranny and corruption political systems need to contain disagreement in institutions that allow people to remain political equals while continuing to disagree.
What is eroding civil American political life is not just disagreement. The weakening of the norms and institutions that make disagreement governable are failing. What is needed is things like (1) good faith commitment to facts and robust truths, (2) acceptance of electoral loss, (3) reasonable constitutional restraints, (4) defense of civil liberties, equal citizenship, independent courts, peaceful political competition, and (5) willingness to compromise without surrendering basic rights any more than necessary. Our democracy is failing on multiple fronts, e.g., congressional gridlock, expanded executive power, overt partisan threats and reprisals linked to nonviolent speech, and greatly weakened anticorruption safeguards.
Contemporary conditions offer no basis for complacency. Expert analyses find global freedom declines for the last two decades. In a 2025 assessment, 54 countries deteriorated in political rights and civil liberties, while only 35 improved. Its assessment found that only 21 percent of the world’s population lived in countries rated “Free.”
The implication is that a pluralistic democratic society needs a durable system for legitimate disagreement. That means we need democratic elections and representation, secular, publicly defensible laws, defenses of civil liberties equal legal and political standing, independent non-partisan courts, functioning, accountable institutions, and compromise on revisable policy. We need to oppose compromises that unduly sacrifice basic rights or permit either state tyranny or private domination.
Meta-ideology: Moving past liberalism and conservatism
Politics is saturated with contested concepts, including freedom, equality, justice, democracy, rights, public interest, order, security, and decency. Reasonable people disagree deeply and often irreconcilably over what those terms mean and require in law or practice. A society that one group calls orderly and morally decent may appear to another as oppressive, exclusionary, economically dominating, or tyrannical. The danger begins when (1) a political faction treats its own contested conception of virtue, tradition, religion, national identity, or public order as self-evidently authoritative, and (2) uses the state and major private players to impose it on dissenters. Liberal theories of public justification address this by holding that coercive laws need reasons citizens can evaluate and have reasons to endorse.
Liberalism has the stronger inherent claim to personal freedom because it begins with the equal moral standing of persons and places the burden of justification on those who would coerce them. Conservatism can protect real and important liberties, but it also gives weight to inherited institutions, authority, social stability, property, religion, family norms, and cultural continuity. Those values can support human flourishing, but they can also become grounds for subordinating people whose identities, beliefs, relationships, or economic interests depart from dominant norms. The central liberal question is not whether tradition or order has value, but whether preserving either justifies restricting the equal freedom and civic standing of people who do not share the prevailing ideal.
Freedom, however, cannot be reduced to freedom from government action. In a capitalist society, people may be free from government, but dependent on employers, landlords, insurers, creditors, monopolies, or owners of wealth. Taxation, public services, labor law, antitrust, consumer protections, civil-rights law, and environmental regulation can restrict particular private powers while enlarging individual freedom, security, and independence. The crucial question is therefore not simply whether a policy involves government intervention, but whose power it limits, whose choices it expands, whether it prevents public or private domination, and whether it is necessary, proportionate, accountable, and consistent with basic civil liberties. Analyses of capitalism and economic democracy specifically identify the danger that concentrated wealth and corporate authority are sometimes sources of domination by converting economic inequality into unequal political power and influence.
Because no final agreement about the good life or public interest is possible, the best practical alternative is a system for legitimate disagreement. In the US, that means free and fair democratic elections, reasonable compromise, secular and publicly justifiable law, rule-bound institutions, equal citizenship, civil liberties, due process, independent courts, and protections against both state tyranny and concentrated private wealth and power. Such a system will be slow, imperfect, and contentious. Its virtue is not that it resolves disagreement. Its virtues is that it permits citizens with profoundly different convictions to live as equals, contest power peacefully, revise policy, and prevent any temporary majority, wealthy minority, religious orthodoxy, or authoritarian leader from turning a disputed moral vision into permanent rule. Democratic legitimacy is strengthened when most citizens see laws as publicly justified rather than the commands of a winning faction. The rule of law constrains this kind of arbitrary exercise of official power.
Q1: Do we need (1) a robust, rule of law-constrained democratic system for legitimate disagreement to play out, or (2) since democracy is a failed system of governance, the winning side should take no prisoners and not worry about democracy, civil liberties or the rule of law?
Q2: Should the authoritarianism of Trump and MAGA elites, limit disagreement and just rule as they want because they are in power, or should there still be reasonable compromise?
Some info sources:
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Liberalism”
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Conservatism”
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