Contempt Is the Real Threat
Disagreement built the republic. Contempt is what could unbuild it — and it is available in equal measure to every side.
By Common Ground editorial team · · 4 min read
Illustration: Two jagged lines converging toward a single calm line
Anger is not the problem
Americans have always been angry at one another. The debates over the Constitution's ratification were vicious. The election of 1800 featured accusations that would be unprintable in a family newspaper today. Anger is not new, and anger is not, in itself, a threat to self-government. An angry citizen is still engaged. An angry citizen still thinks the other side is worth arguing with.
Contempt is different. Contempt does not say "you are wrong." It says "you are beneath argument." Where anger seeks to persuade or defeat, contempt seeks only to dismiss. Researchers who study which marriages end have long reported that contempt — the eye roll, the sneer, the certainty that one's partner is not merely mistaken but defective — is among the strongest predictors of collapse. A republic is not a marriage, but it is a relationship among people who cannot leave one another, and the same poison works on it.
What contempt does to the machinery
Consider what self-government actually requires. It requires that a losing side accept a result, which means believing the winning side had a legitimate right to win. It requires that legislators compromise, which means believing the other side's constituents have interests worth accommodating. It requires that jurors deliberate with strangers, that neighbors serve on boards together, that a police officer and a protester both believe the other is a citizen.
Contempt severs every one of those. If the other side is not merely wrong but contemptible, then their electoral win is not a loss to be accepted but an outrage to be reversed. Compromise with them is not statesmanship but collaboration. Their voters do not have interests; they have pathologies. Once that frame takes hold, every institution designed to manage disagreement — the election, the legislature, the court — is reinterpreted as a battlefield on which no rule is binding when the enemy is this bad.
This is not a partisan diagnosis. A student group shouting down a conservative speaker so that no one can hear him, and a crowd shouting down a progressive school board member so that no one can hear her, are doing the same thing for the same reason: they have decided the other person is not worth listening to. A commentator on the left who dismisses a court ruling as the work of illegitimate partisans, and a commentator on the right who dismisses a different ruling in the same words, are making the same move. Contempt does not have a home team.
The seduction
Why is contempt so attractive? Because it is pleasant. Anger is exhausting; contempt is restful. Contempt lets us stop doing the hard work of understanding why someone would believe something we find repellent. It resolves the discomfort of disagreement not by resolving the disagreement but by declaring the other person unworthy of it.
It is also profitable. The economics of attention reward whatever holds the eye longest, and nothing holds the eye like a vivid demonstration that the other side is monstrous. Whole industries — on cable, online, in the fundraising letters of both parties — are built on delivering a daily supply of the other side's worst moments, stripped of context and presented as typical. A steady diet of this does not make people angry. It makes them contemptuous, and contempt keeps them coming back.
The cure is not niceness
The answer to contempt is not to pretend disagreements are small, or to insist that everyone means well, or to substitute a wellness vocabulary for political argument. That is its own form of dismissal — it treats fellow citizens as fragile rather than as formidable. The founders did not want Americans to be mild. They wanted them to be free, and free people argue hard.
The answer is to argue hard with people rather than at them. To assume that the person across the table has reasons, and to ask what they are. To notice when a source is feeding you the other side's worst example and to ask whether it is representative. To distinguish, ruthlessly, between the argument you find wrong and the person you find contemptible, and to refuse the second even while pressing the first.
You may find an argument wrong. You may not find a fellow citizen worthless. Keeping those two apart is most of the work.
What it looks like in practice
It looks like a county commissioner who votes against her colleague's proposal and then drives him home when his truck breaks down. It looks like a pastor and an organizer who disagree about nearly everything and jointly run a food bank. It looks like a comment thread where someone writes "I think you're wrong, and here's why" instead of "typical."
It also looks like a discipline that must be relearned constantly, because the pull toward contempt never goes away. Every news cycle offers a fresh reason to conclude that this time the other side really has gone too far. Sometimes they have. The question is whether we respond by arguing, voting, organizing, and litigating — the tools of a republic — or by deciding that the people who disagree with us are no longer our fellow citizens.
That decision is the one that matters. Everything else follows from it.
Common Ground editorial team — Written and edited by Common Ground staff and volunteers.
Sources
- 1.Washington's Farewell Address (1796) (opens in a new tab) — The Avalon Project, Yale Law School
- 2.Pew Research Center (opens in a new tab) — Pew Research Center
- 3.What is Contempt? One of the Gottman Four Horsemen (opens in a new tab) — The Gottman Institute
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