By Dylan Marando

Crooners, turkey, another pair of new slippers, and a lot of tinsel. These have come to define my winter holiday. Year-end rituals that are near the laws of physics and which provide a unique blend of excitement, comfort, nostalgia, and hope.

Yet, for my family (and I suspect a few others), the sequence of holiday traditions isn’t truly complete without a donnybrook at dinner; namely, a political one. Big ideas, rhetorical summersaults, wild speculation, and a few facts whirl across the table, befitting the snowy season. We agree, then disagree, then reverse viewpoints, disagree again, and take a break for apple pie. Like the other markers of the holidays, this experience can be eclectically Dickensian— combining confusion and frustration with learning and growth. At worst, I clarify my thinking and sharpen my oration. At best, I change my mind and get to live a moment in someone else’s galoshes. My family’s festive politicking has become a most wonderful time of the year.

However, as I muddle through this winter and let my mind wander to scenes of holidays future, I’m wondering how long this tradition will last— around my dinner table or others. While having contrary views on everything from gas prices to trade policy might have once been the default setting in many social environs, there’s reason to believe that our enthusiasm for civil disagreement is chilling. Whether it’s the emergence of empathy fatigue or low levels of interpersonal trust, it feels like the mood of the moment strains our tolerance for those who are different, those who want to try on new ideas, or those who are willing to stumble on their words as they build-up their better angels. It seems we may be losing our license to flip-flop, outgrow old modes, or agree with a small slice of an otherwise disagreeable group.

Even worse, each of us may be falling into the trap of talking only about things we agree on or congregating only with folks we agree with. As far as kitchen table conversation goes, it’s hard to imagine anything more boring. And with respect to democratic institutions, it’s hard to imagine anything more corrosive.

If, as the Bismarck types would have us believe, politics is the art of compromise, then perhaps the animating force of politics (and not just holiday meals) is some enduring level of discord. To do politics in the fulsome way we all deserve, maybe we need an iron stomach for disagreement and a capacity to unpack ideological and policy misalignments in the messy and imperfect style typical of democracies. Maybe we need to capture a bit of the spirit of holidays past by reminding ourselves of the many ways in which our country has expertly lived with dissonance, including as recently as the referendums of 1980 and 1995, the adoption of the Charter in the intervening period, and the subsequent Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords.

After all, how does one do any version of democratic politics absent a relentless competition of ideas? How does one do democratic politics absent free expression of those ideas? And how do we fuel all the supplements to democratic politics— journalism, academic debate, free assembly, etc.— without the right to be wrong? If we’re not doing politics with a belief that better is always possible— and, by extension, an assumption that each of us is at least somewhat wrong at any given time— what kind of politics are we doing?

Politics, of the democratic variety, demands dissent on all sides. It demands growth on all sides. It demands the kind of civility and compassion that can come naturally at a holiday meal, but that is equally important in deliberative mechanisms of societal import. And, by the way, if your impulse right now is to assert that the ‘other side’ needs to grow more, or dissent less, or be more civil, question that— as fervently as you question those you don’t align with.

To be clear, I’m not thinking about a particular side when offering this plea to disagree. As far as I can tell, a tendency to suppress dissent can emerge in various parts of the political spectrum, across geographies, and across generations. And to be doubly clear, I’m also not calling for the proliferation of misinformation or the allowance of hate speech. But I am suggesting that neither of those things can be substantially and sustainably defeated by muting voices. Rather, we need to do the hard, long, thankless work of showing up, listening, and transforming attitudes and actions, including our own (sometimes). We need genuine, open-minded engagement. To just walk away from the table is tantamount to enabling whatever toxicity we claim to oppose.

As readers of this forum understand well, the policy challenges of today and tomorrow are too big and too complicated for simplistic answers and narrow policy coalitions. Climate change, cost-of-living pressures, and economic security require massive multi-faceted initiatives which are likely to be full of similar, supplemental, divergent, and seemingly contradictory features. To do the work, we need to get accustomed to intellectual heterogeneity.

Moreover, readers of this forum likely also appreciate that policy leaders have a special obligation to stay at the table. Your obligation is to cultivate and contribute to spaces where diverse debate can thrive. Your obligation is to square the circle and wring water from a stone. While that might seem an unfair or unsatisfying task, it is the business we’ve chosen. 

So let’s find inspiration for this endless journey of constructive conflict from experiences at dinner tables. Let’s remember those encounters, whether with family or friends, when a bond moved from strong to illusory to unbreakable in an instant. These are moments where someone in our life took the risk of bringing down their guard and saying what they were feeling; moments when someone hoped that the people around them cared enough to understand and maybe co-create. When that moment works, when no one is convinced but everyone is better equipped from the exchange, that awesome Dickensian sense visits us again.

At least for this holiday season, choose to disagree with compassion and with an intention to later apply a scaled version of that spirit to our great societal challenges. Let us use this holiday season to strengthen our discursive muscles, to make the political personal and the personal political.

Dylan Marando, PhD, is a Munk MPP graduate (2011). He has served as a Deputy Director of Policy to a Prime Minister of Canada, as well as a Senior Advisor, Policy to a Premier of Ontario.