Unsplash / Beth Macdonald
CV NEWS FEED // President Donald Trump’s return to the White House could mean the return of an open society where debate is accepted, political analyst Martin Gurri wrote in a New York Post op-ed.
Gurri wrote that an open society exists when “perspectives on reality confront one another in forceful competition.” Being able to engage in debate with fellow citizens is important for intellectual growth and the political health of the country, he added.
“A vast diversity of perspectives should be promoted within an open society. It’s the intellectual equivalent of hybrid vigor. If we all think alike, a single fatal error, being shared by all, could destroy the world,” Gurri wrote. “These precepts are not original. They have long been part of the American DNA. The default, for us, has always been debate.”
Gurri added that the Biden administration suppressed debate and open society, choosing instead to promote itself as “the single source of truth and light.” The term “disinformation” also became widely popular, he noted, as the public chose to flag ideas they disagreed with as something that “must be removed from the information sphere.”
“But imagine if we heard something like this: ‘What you just said is in error, and here is the evidence for my point of view,’” Gurri wrote. “The conversation at that point would resume — once started, it will roll on indefinitely, back and forth, trial and error, into the future.”
Gurri expressed his hope that the Trump administration will take steps to restore debate and free speech without government censorship.
“Whether Trump’s policies turn out to be right or wrong evidently matters,” he wrote. “But the resumption of the great American debate, of speech that is unencumbered and unafraid … matters much more, since it will enable progress.
“Let there be furious disputes among political allies, Republicans arguing with Republicans, Democrats with Democrats, inside the right and the left as well as against each other. And let outsiders, popular or unpopular, orthodox and heterodox, join in.”
