Effective Civil Discourse

Too many people believe that civil discourse is synonymous with polite conversation, and they immediately rule it out because there is nothing polite about our current disagreements.  They are right about polite talk not resolving divisive political issues, but they are wrong about civil discourse being merely polite talk.  Those of us who believe that civil discourse is key to making democracy work must make the case that it is much more than merely polite talk.

The building blocks of civil discourse are constructive dialogue and meaningful consensus-building.  These building blocks target very different goals.  Dialogue seeks greater understanding while consensus-building promotes compromise and concessions.  Neither dialogue nor consensus-building can perform its essential role if this distinction is lost. 

Dialogue is an exploration of disagreement.  It is emphatically not a debate.  In dialogue, we want to understand how our disagreements are rooted in our different experiences.  The goal is not to convince those with different views that our views are correct and theirs are wrong.  Instead, we want to understand why they hold the beliefs they do.  The goal of dialogue isn’t to create agreement, which is the goal of consensus-building.  Its goal is greater understanding.  For dialogue to be authentic, it must face the possibility that greater understanding might lead to deeper disagreement. 

Like civil discourse, consensus-building also involves two terms people often use interchangeably but are quite different: compromise and concessions.  Compromise denotes a shift from an adversarial to a cooperative mindset.  This mindset has two important attributes.  First, it recognizes the viewpoint and concerns of an adversary as legitimate.   Secondly, it is open to getting less than what was hoped for, and this entails making concessions.  Concessions are how disagreement is managed.