Debate Must Be Closed Before It Can Be Opened

Debate Must Be Closed Before It Can Be Opened

“No sooner do you set foot on American soil,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “than you are stunned by a kind of tumult.” To be an American is to engage in political debate, constantly and obsessively. “An American cannot converse, but he can discuss,” he wrote. They don’t make small talk, but go straight into a political diatribe, the substance of which seemed to make up the entertainment of daily life in a young nation. Ranting about the governme…