If, like me, you are prone to having political conversations, sometimes against your will,

you'll be familiar with this feeling. You're trying to make your points, however imperfectly,

but you feel like you're going round and round in circles. You're carefully thought through positions,

the beliefs which seem so obvious to you that they're on a par with water is wet,

or those injustices which seem so inarguable and so urgent to address.

None of these seem to make any difference at all to your pig-headed, deluded, obstinate, or witless interlocutor

who refuses to acknowledge that I am, or you are, entirely right. If you have a little more self-awareness,

you might pause and wonder, wait, I'm not sure I've actually been listening to anything they've

been saying either. And that's just an instance of a wider and more diffuse sense, I think,

that something has gone wrong in the way that we talk about

politics. It's not just that we disagree in frustrating and heated ways, although that's true,

but perhaps we don't even share the same world as the people that we disagree with, and that we

just endlessly talk past each other, or perhaps even that good arguments or cogent

claims, these unanswerable cases just get absolutely nowhere because something is broken

in the way that we think politics is supposed to work.

All of this seems particularly acute to us because politics, democratic politics in particular,

since the Athenian polis onwards,

is all about argument. It's all about words and reason and above all debate.

It's the very stuff of politics itself. And if it's not, what's the point?

You're listening to On Politics on the LRB podcast.

I am, as always, James Butler.

And joining me here in the studio is Sarah Stein Lubrano,

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