An American Inheritance

Honoring those we disagree with

In our online information ecosystem, it may be difficult to disentangle debate and contrarian deliberation from disinformation and efforts to sow discord. Democracy is messy, yet so is evolution, and both are among the most powerful forces shaping the world as we see it.

The long history of fiery disagreements in the American democratic experiment have forged my own social inheritance. Some of my ancestors disagreed so strongly with the Church of England they felt compelled to sail here on the Mayflower. My great-great-great-great grandfather, Benjamin Brown, retained his forebears’ disagreement with the British and fought beside his brothers in the Battle of Bunker Hill during the Revolutionary War. My great-great grandmother Brown settled the Midwest, disagreed so radically with slavery they volunteered the family home in the Underground Railroad as relatives fought their cousins in the Civil War. On another branch of ancestors, my great-grandmother Concha was an indigenous orphan in Mexico, a legacy of another deeply rooted set of disagreements in American soils (I’m not trying to be Elizabeth Warren here - I have no tribal affiliation but I do honor my ancestors). Concha, her husband, and her kids disagreed with Pancho Villa so they immigrated to the United States during the Mexican Revolution with only the clothes on their backs, saying famously “Thank God for Nothing” as poverty helped them see more clearly what really matters in their new American lives. My great uncle William disagreed with Nazi Germany so he flew planes and, sadly, died in World War II.

My grandmother worked to educate prisoners for all her life, believing in an early form of rehabilitative justice prior to the modern movement to reform our incarceration system. She was in a coma on her deathbed, my aunt sitting beside her, when suddenly she bolted upright, looked at Aunt Maria, and said,

”Americans are SO stupid!”

and then she died. Whenever my family tells that story, we all laugh. We know that my grandmother believed in America more than anyone else, and yet her last words hilariously captured the timeless feeling of democratic participation, of political disagreement. Her story is a piece of the mosaic in my American cultural inheritance.

The most beautiful part of this complex American inheritance stretching back through all the wars and conflicts is, ironically, an unyielding love and tolerance of the American experiment, a timeless sense from oral and written histories that it’s felt messy for all of my ancestors, yet we’ve won many battles and improved the world, and we’ve always honored those who debated, deliberated, or died for causes before us. The same way, we honor those who are debating, deliberating, and fighting for causes with us today.

I realize that many who lack this particular cultural inheritance from generations boiled in the American melting pot may see debate and conflict as a weakness, and so I wanted to share a little bit of this personal cultural perspective to underscore my core optimism for the free world. I’ve participated in American democracy myself. Even recently, I’ve written a bit on major disagreements of my own, from my discontent with the slogan “Follow The Science” to my distaste for credentialism and disciplinary territoriality. In all these cases, these writings come from the heart, they are a sincere effort to make the world a better place with my fellow Americans, to convince them with a heartfelt argument and not impose anything against their will. Arguments and rhetoric may seem radical from some angles, but from angles tangent to the arc of the speaker’s history one may see a profound love. Grandmother Brown and her family were radical for letting runaway slaves use their homes, yet it was their love of human dignity that compelled them to act. Old Benjamin Brown was a radical for choosing to fight the British (after all, many Americans disagreed with the pretense of the revolutionary war), he and his brothers were batshit crazy to fight in the Battle of Bunker Hill, yet it was a love of this new country that made fighting the Redcoats worth the heroic risk. If my ancestors have taught me anything, it’s that sometimes radical democratic deliberations that seem messy today often have a radical love at their core, and they may be the necessary deliberations that we’ll one day realize helped us make a better world.

That doesn’t justify every curt statement or tactless point, and we should always endeavor to be more graceful wherever it’s possible. We must honor those we disagree with, because their disagreements come from a similar position of having lived entire lives, inherited entire lineages of ancestors and their lessons, and they are passionately making their own case that they sincerely believe is right, often with their own radical love that exists but we just can’t see easily from our perspective. As someone from Democratic parents, I honor Republicans and continually seek to better understand the love in the hearts of the GOP. Heck, don’t tell my parents, but William F Buckley Jr was my favorite mainstream editorialist since elementary school, and today Ross Douthat may take the cake, because both make cases that should help most liberals see that conservatives are good people, too. As someone who believes SARS-CoV-2 most likely came from a lab, I nonetheless continue to listen to and read the papers by people who believe SARS-CoV-2 is most likely zoonotic. As someone who believed a lighter touch & focused protection would improve outcomes in COVID public health policy, I continued to listen to people who were passionately making the case for stronger interventions. It’s easy to dislike people with whom we disagree, but it’s far more powerful to learn to love them because when we love the people we disagree with, we become united in debate, intertwined in history like two paradigmatic vines creeping to the canopy with each others’ help.

Even today, while everyone is dissuaded by a rising partisanship and what feels like irreparable division, some of it no doubt sowed by hostile foreign powers like Putin’s Russia, I still see the United States as rather united because our unity is, and always has been, characterized not by agreement but by productive disagreement. Benjamin Brown’s disagreements with the British were part of a movement that made America possible. With time, we came to love the British and even fought beside them in two World Wars. Grandmother Brown’s disagreements with her cousins in the South were far more intense than those we face today, and, while it was ugly and I hope it never happens again, their disagreement over slavery was necessary to make America a more perfect union. Immigrants like my grandmother came to love the US and their unique perspectives have planted seeds to improve our justice system and more. My dad did not like the Vietnam War, but he accepted the draft and joined the army with a peace sign on his dog tag, and then devoted the remainder of his career to helping veterans at the VA hospital, passing on his compassion for veterans to his sons. Our disagreements may be fierce, and many of us believe our own beliefs quite strongly, yet my entire ancestry that I know about reveals how those disagreements are precisely what make us stronger, give us purpose, and make the world better.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been historic. We have disagreed fiercely over the science of the pandemic, the public health policy, the origins of the virus, and more. All the while we’ve moshed in the rhetorical mosh pits of social media, no doubt with Russian trolls pushing some of us into each-other and perhaps throwing sucker-punches that increase the temperature, we have nonetheless seen the peaceful transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden (not without an historic hiccup on January 6th, but we survived & I believe we’ll be stronger because of it). The United States and our international allies have supported & continue to support Ukraine’s heroic stand against Putin’s territorial aggression, we’ve shot Chinese surveillance balloons out of the sky, and we’ve invested in infrastructure around the world to prop up nations not with the mercantilist ambitions of authoritarians in China but with the noble ambitions of supporting democracy, free markets, and global trade to make the world a better place. Even during the pandemic, while we disagree on the necessity of vaccines, their efficacy at reducing transmission, and the risks of adverse events, our free markets nonetheless responded to an urgent pandemic by generating and mass-producing new vaccines in record time, we unleashed novel therapeutics, rapid testing, telehealth, remote work, and more. When I look at what’s come from this pandemic, what we’ve done is nothing short of incredible. The greatest generation rose to the challenge of WWII, and I believe in many ways we rose to the challenge of COVID in ways that reflect positively on our generation not because we agreed, but because we passionately debated. There were failures, yes, but there were also heroic successes. Let’s not forget our shared victories.

So, today I wanted to take a break from arguing and share how unbelievably proud I am of our free world and its free markets. My own arguments, radical as they may feel sometimes, aim to strengthen our society, and I believe the same holds for people with whom I disagree. I wanted to take today to honor everyone I’ve disagreed with. What would our free world be without our disagreements? Would we really be united if we all thought the same thing? If we went back in time at any point in history and made every American (or citizen in another free country) believe the same thing on a contentious issue of the day, I’m convinced that would make us worse off today. Our diversity is our greatest strength, provided we protect our core freedoms and maintain our ability to disagree. We can do that by bowing to our opponents, honoring them and appreciating that the goal of our rhetorical sparring is something larger than our own victory.

There are some parallels between the course of democratic history and the course of evolutionary history of living things. Evolutionary theory has turned self-replicating chemicals into a world bustling with multicellular organisms, plants photosynthesizing to make oxygen, herbivores eating plants, predators eating herbivores, and every single organism so beautifully adapted to its environment. Evolution, like democracy, is driven by diversity, by a sometimes fierce competition between living things. I don’t mean that just to be poetic. Mathematically, Fisher’s Fundamental Theorem illustrates that the rate of evolution is proportional to the variance in fitness, and, where fitness is due to heritable traits, it’s the variance in our heritable traits that determines the rate of evolution. Our diversity determines how fast we can change and adapt to new circumstances, especially if we safeguard fair competition in our marketplace of ideas, especially if we give those different from us room to grow & shoot their shot. In our democracy, I inherit the braided history from my lineage of ancestors and I’m forged by my own unique upbringing, giving me a particular set of beliefs and authentic rhetorical flair. The other 340 million Americans bring their own traits to the table, and chances are the good ideas, the fit cultural traits that become adopted and benefit our society, will come from them, not me. So, I love them, and I listen. Our beliefs vary, and for any given issue there is a variance in the “fitness” or viability of our beliefs - that variance, which manifests in disagreement, is our greatest strength insofar as we tolerate everyone speaking their minds, sharing their authentic truth, and listen to their ideas.

We’re not united in our beliefs, and that’s okay. We’re united in our commitment to & participation in this incredible democratic experiment, the evolutionary coliseum of political change. From the stories I’ve inherited, being united in this system has never felt like the engine is aligned with your unique view, like everything is going according to plan - you might wake up on your deathbed after decades of democratic melee and say “Americans are SO stupid!” and then croak - but there are ways to laugh and love this remarkable mess that reliably makes us stronger. There are 340 million reasons to trust the system and lovingly participate.

If I were president, I would make a holiday to honor those we disagree with. On the holiday, I would encourage everyone to call up or write someone with whom they disagree, tell them something you love about them, and laugh. Put the videos on YouTube to show our descendants just how diverse America really is, and what it really feels like to be part of our grand experiment. It would be a beautiful piece of cultural inheritance we can give to our grandkids.