Robust democracy, civil conversations

 In Democracy class this week we're picking up Robert Talisse's Overdoing Democracy. Next week he'll be joining us on zoom, so we're working on some questions. Some of mine, so far:

• Do you habitually socialize with anyone whose politics you do not know? Have you ever? (If No and Yes, what changed?)
• Professor Talisse, as I've mentioned, is not a sports fan. But don't spectator sports come as close as anything in our culture to bridging political divisions and bringing people together for occasions in which politics is simply irrelevant? (Well, now that we no longer have a POTUS tweeting about Colin Kaepernick etc.)
• Are you conscious of any specific consumer "brand" preferences you hold simply because they conform to your sense of political identity (Starbucks or Dunkin, Target or Wal-mart, etc.)?
• Are there any non-democratic political systems that avoid division, polarization, etc., at a cost worth the exchange? 
• Are you persuaded that John Dewey and Jane Addams were wrong to say that “the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy"? *
• Is it possible to both (1) agree with Talisse that our democracy would benefit from less polarization and more recognition of social contexts in which politics is irrelevant, and (2) think such a benefit negligible in light of the influence of "dark money," misinformation, and general dishonesty--the sorts of things documented by Nancy MacLean and Kurt Andersen--in our politics?
• This may be impertinent but I can't resist: Has "robust" been overused in public discourse (not to mention OD) lately?

Looking forward to a robust vigorous, muscular, spirited, zestful, enlivening, instructive, constructive, amicable, civically-friendly and conventionally-friendly exchange with our author. Hope he doesn't throw a thesaurus at me, next time we meet in real space.

* What Dewey actually did say, in The Public and Its Problems (1927)... 

The old saying that the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy is not apt if it means that the evils may be remedied by introducing more machinery of the same kind as that which already exists, or by refining and perfecting that machinery. But the phrase may also indicate the need of returning to the idea itself, of clarifying and deepening our apprehension of it, and of employing our sense of its meaning to criticize and remake its political manifestations. 119

And, 

We have every reason to think that whatever changes may take place in existing democratic machinery, they will be of a sort to...enable the public to form and manifest its purposes still more authoritatively. In this sense the cure for the ailments of democracy is more democracy. The prime difficulty, as we have seen, is that of discovering the means by which a scattered, mobile and manifold public may so recognize itself as to define and express its interests. This discovery is necessarily precedent to any fundamental change in the machinery... 121

And, a propos civil converations and the ailments of democracy... 

"Be this guy." No thanks

Also, Tom Ashbrook, I miss you on "On Point." American democracy needs voices like yours more now than ever.