11 Comments

Thank-you as always Lee for digging deeper and clearly highlighting opposing points-of-views (OPoVs) and the challenges that specific OPoV pose to achieving win-win democracy. Governments can use coercion (a powerful tool) in their value propositions (e.g., pay taxes or be fined or go to jail, and in some cases death penalty) to shape interactions and outcomes. Achieving win-win over different times scales, I suspect there are "play books" for individuals, elected officials, and various types of organizations. It might be interesting to examine such playbooks, for the purpose of evaluating both the ethical foundation of specific tools and approaches as well as their effectiveness in specific historical cases. If you see any books that delve into that, please let me/us (your readers know).

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Minor editorial: in the first sentence of the third paragraph in the Abortion Access section "Medicare" should be "Medicaid".

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Some writers use the word "faith" where "religion" might otherwise be used, and I think that is instructive. Faith basically means believing in something despite any "evidence" to the contrary ... and that is the problem (or at least one problem) with trying to find "win-win" solutions in this area. People believe different (conflicting) things based on "faith", so no amount of "evidence" will convince them to accept other views. Even if (as is usually the case) their beliefs in fact do not comport with many of the teaching of their "religion"/"faith", because their beliefs are (in their mind) "faith based" they are essentially impervious to persuasion.

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Lee, thanks for the excellent (as usual) article. However, in this case and in the preceding articles, I am very skeptical about the idea of finding a Win-Win Solution. As I see it, such a solution is not possible in a setting like the one we have today, where there are two contending viewpoints that have too little in common to enable a solution acceptable to both (see https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/republicans-launch-house-investigations-into-fbi-china-under-new-majority for an exception). As such, I'd like to focus on legislative approaches to defend "our" viewpoint such as term limits for SCOTUS and strengthened libel and fraud laws.

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