Naomi Klein Pushes Us to Dream Big to Get Beyond Trump’s Shock Politics The activist’s new book challenges the pessimism that sets in when we think radical change is politically impossible. But it misses something big. by Robert Jensen

“Klein, one of the most prominent and insightful leftist writers in North America for two decades, analyzes how Trump’s ‘genius’ for branding, magnified by his reality TV success, carried him to the White House.” Naomi Klein understands that President Donald J. Trump is a problem, but he is not the problem.

Klein’s book does not stop with an analysis of the crises.

In her new book, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need, Klein reminds us to pay attention not only to the style in which Trump governs (a multi-ring circus so routinely corrupt and corrosive that anti-democratic practices seem normal), but in whose interests he governs (the wealthy, those he believes to be the rightful winners in the capitalist cage match), while recognizing the historical forces that make his administration possible (decades of market-fundamentalist/neoliberal rejection of the idea of a collective good).

Klein, one of the most prominent and insightful leftist writers in North America for two decades, analyzes how Trump’s “genius” for branding, magnified by his reality TV success, carried him to the White House. But while we may have been shocked by the election of Trump—not just another celebrity, but the ultimate “hollow brand” that adds no tangible value to society—she argues that we should not have been surprised.

Trump is not a rupture at all, but rather the culmination—the logical endpoint—of a great many dangerous stories our culture has been telling for a very long time. That greed is good. That the market rules. That money is what matters in life. That white men are better than the rest. That the natural world is there for us to pillage. That the vulnerable deserve their fate and the 1 percent deserve their golden towers. That anything public or commonly held is sinister and not worth protecting. That we are surrounded by danger and should only look after our own. That there is no alternative to any of this.

Underneath all these pathologies, Klein explains, is “a dominance-based logic that treats so many people, and the earth itself, as disposable,” which gives rise to “a system based on limitless taking and extracting, on maximum grabbing” that “treats people and the earth either like resources to be mined to their limits or as garbage to be disposed of far out of sight, whether deep in the ocean or deep in a prison cell.”

In addition to the “no” to the existing order, there must be a “yes” to other values.

Klein’s book does not stop with an analysis of the crises. She outlines a resistance politics that not only rejects this domination/subordination dynamic, but proceeds “with care and consent, rather than extractively and through force.” In addition to the “no” to the existing order, there must be a “yes” to other values, which she illustrates with the story behind the 2015 Leap Manifesto (“A Call for a Canada Based on Caring for the Earth and One Another”) that she helped draft.

Klein believes the expansive possibilities of those many yeses are visible in Bernie Sanders’ campaign and others like it around the world.

Near the end of the book she lists ideas already on the table: “free college tuition, double the minimum wage, 100 percent renewable energy as quickly as technology allows, demilitarize the police, prisons are no place for young people, refugees are welcome here, war makes us less safe.” She goes on to identify more ambitious programs and policies: “Reparations for slavery and colonialism? A Marshall Plan to fight violence against women? Prison abolition? Democratic worker co-ops as the centerpiece of a green jobs program? An abandonment of ‘growth’ as a measure of progress? Why not?”

Klein is not naïve about what it will take to achieve these goals but stresses the possibilities: “there is reason to believe that many of the relationships being built in these early days [of the Trump administration] will be strong enough to counter the fear that inevitably sets in during a state of emergency.” The 2008 financial crisis created opportunities for more radical change.

Recognizing that the 2008 financial crisis created opportunities for more radical change that were lost not only because of the Obama administration’s cautious, centrist approach but because of progressive movements’ timidity, she reminds us that the most important changes in the past (expansions of justice and freedom post-Civil War, during the New Deal, and in the 1960s and ’70s) “were responses to crises that unfolded in times when people dared to dream big, out loud, in public—explosions of utopian imagination.”

Klein is right to challenge the pessimism that so easily sets in when we capitulate to the idea that radical change is politically impossible because of the success of decades of right-wing propaganda and organizing in the United States. Politics is a human enterprise, and therefore humans can change it. Utopian thinking in these realms is to be encouraged, as movements build the capacity to move us toward those goals.

My only critique of Klein’s book—and it is not a minor point—is that while reminding us not to accept artificial, self-imposed limits on social/economic/political fronts, it glosses over the much different reality of the biophysical limits we must work within. Klein’s 2014 book on climate change demonstrated how thoroughly she understands what my late friend Jim Koplin called the “multiple, cascading ecological crises” of our time.

But what are the implications of facing those crises?

Go back to Klein’s list of programs, which includes “100 percent renewable energy as quickly as technology allows,” alongside such goals as free tuition and a doubled minimum wage. These are very different kinds of projects that shouldn’t be conflated. By building a stronger left/progressive movement, greater equity in higher education and fairer wages could be won. But much more difficult challenges are hidden in “100 percent renewable energy.”

No combination of renewable resources is going to power the world in which we now live.

First, and most painful, is the recognition that no combination of renewable resources is going to power the world in which we now live—7.4 billion people, many living at some level of developed world affluence. That doesn’t just mean the end of luxury lifestyles of the rich and famous, nor just the end of middle-class amenities such as routine air conditioning, cheap jet air travel, and fresh fruits and vegetables from the other side of the world. We are going to have to face giving up what we have come to believe we “need” to survive, what Wallace Stegner once termed “things that once possessed could not be done without.” If you have trouble imagining an example, look around at the people poking at their “smart” phones or walk into a grocery store and survey the endless aisles of food kept “cheap” by fossil fuel inputs.

If we give up techno-utopian dreams of endless clean energy forever, we face a harsh question: How many people can the Earth support in a sustainable fashion, living at what level of consumption?

There is no magic algorithm to answer that question. Everyone’s response will be a mix of evidence, hunches, and theology (defined not as claims about God but ideas about what it means to be human, to live a good life). I’m not confident that I have an inside track on this, but I’m fairly sure that the answer is a lot fewer people than there are now, living at much lower levels of consumption.

There are biophysical limits that we can’t wish away because they are inconvenient, and they limit our social/political/economic options. Those realities include not only global warming, but also an array of phenomena, all interconnected: accelerating extinction of species and reduction of biodiversity; overexploitation of resources (through logging, hunting, fishing) and agricultural activities (farming, livestock, timber plantations, aquaculture), including the crucial problem of soil erosion; increase in sea levels threatening coastal areas; acidification of the ocean; and amplified, less predictable threats from wildfires, floods, droughts, and heat waves.

We are no longer talking about localized environmental degradation but global tipping points we may have already reached and some planetary boundaries that have been breached. The news is bad, getting worse, and getting worse faster than most scientists had predicted.

We have to think about what kind of human presence ecosystems can sustain.

The goal of traditional left politics—sometimes explicitly, often implicitly—has been to bring more people into the affluence of the developed world, with the contemporary green version imagining this will happen magically through solar panels and wind turbines for all. Honest ecological evaluations indicate that in addition to the core left/progressive goal of equity within the human family, we have to think about what kind of human presence ecosystems can sustain.

A simple example, but one that is rarely discussed: A national health insurance program that equalizes access to treatment is needed, but what level of high-tech medicine will we be able to provide in a lower-energy world? That question requires a deeper conversation that we have not yet had about what defines a good life and what kinds of life-extending treatment now seen as routine in the developed world will not be feasible in the future. Instead of rationing health care by wealth, a decent society should make these difficult decisions collectively, and this kind of ethical rationing will require blunt, honest conversations about limits.

Here’s another example: Increasing the amount of organic food grown on farms using few or no petrochemical inputs is needed, but that style of agriculture will require many to return to a countryside that has been depopulated by industrial agriculture and consumer culture. If we are to increase what Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry call “the eyes-to-acres ratio”—more farmers available to do the work necessary to take better care of the land—how will we collectively make the decisions needed in moving people from cosmopolitan cities, which young people tend to find attractive, to rural communities that may seem less exciting to many?

The best we can say about the fate of the human species is “maybe.”

My point is not that I have answers but that we have yet to explore these questions in any meaningful depth, and the ecosphere is going to force them on us whether or not we are ready. If we leave such questions to be answered by the mainstream culture—within the existing distributions of wealth and power, based on that logic of domination/subordination—the outcomes will be unjust and inhumane. We need to continue left/progressive organizing in response to contemporary injustices, not only for the short-term progress that can be made to strengthen communities and protect vulnerable people, but also to build networks and capacities to face what’s coming.

To ignore the ecological realities that make these questions relevant is not hope, but folly; not to incorporate biophysical limits into our organizing is to guarantee failure. Until we can acknowledge the inevitability of this kind of transition—which will be unlike anything we’ve faced in human history—we cannot plan for it. And we cannot acknowledge that it’s coming without a shared commitment not only to hope, but grief. What lies ahead—coming in a time frame no one can predict, but coming—will be an unprecedented challenge for humans, and we are not ready.

Saying no to the pathological domination/subordination dynamic at the heart of the dominant culture is the starting point. Then we say yes to the capacity for caring collaboration that we yearn for. But we also must accept that the systems of the larger living world—the physics and chemistry of the ecosphere—set the boundaries within which we say no and yes.

No one can predict when or how this will play out, but at this moment in history, the best we can say about the fate of the human species is “maybe.”

We must dare to dream big, and we must face our nightmares.

We have a chance for some kind of decent human future, if we can face the challenges honestly: How do we hold on to the best of our human nature (that striving for connection) in the face of existing systems that glorify the worst (individual greed and human cruelty)? All that we dream is not possible, but something better than what we have created certainly is within our reach. We should stop fussing about hope, which seduces too many to turn away from difficult realities. Let’s embrace the joy that always exists in the possible, and also embrace the grief in what is not.

We must dare to dream big, and we must face our nightmares.

As I tell my students over and over, reasonable people with shared values can disagree, and friends and allies often disagree with my assessment of the ecological crises. So, let’s start with points of agreement: We must say no not only to Trump and the reactionary politics of the Republican Party, but no to the tepid liberal/centrist politics of the Democratic Party. And we must push the platform of the social democratic campaigns of folks like Sanders toward deeper critiques of capitalism, developed world imperialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.

But all of that work will be undermined if we cannot recognize that remaking the world based on principles of care is limited by the biophysical realities on the planet, an ecosphere we have desecrated for so long that some options once available to us are gone, desecration that cannot magically be fixed by a technological fundamentalism that only compounds problems with false promises of salvation through gadgets.

No is not enough. But yes is not enough, either. Our fate lies in the joy and grief of maybe.

This article was written for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas and practical actions. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. He is the author of Arguing for Our Lives: A User’s Guide to Constructive Dialogue (City Lights, 2013); All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, (Soft Skull Press, 2009); Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity; The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege; Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity; and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang). Jensen is also co-producer of the documentary film “Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing” (Media Education Foundation, 2009), which chronicles the life and philosophy of the longtime radical activist. An extended interview Jensen conducted with Osheroff is available here.

He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online here. Return to   Top Directory      Main Directory File


The Argument Culture                   Deborah Tannen           Jan 2008
            Subtitle:  Moving from Debate to Dialogue

C1  Fighting for Our Lives   Why do we see (almost) every disagreement or difference of opinion as an argument, a war between two (and only two) competing sides?  Is everything a war - on drugs, on cancer, the battle of the sexes, etc.?  Why can't we discuss the issue from multiple backgrounds and feeling, gain from the exchange, and come to a conclusion that most of us can accept as better than the current?

The author's interest in this topic began with the publication of her book, You Just Don't Understand, a book about communication between women and men.  While most of her reviews and interviews were balanced and fair some were laced with controversy, there were a number that focused primarily on controversy and attacks.  When she asked one reviewer who had attacked her for a statement who had misrepresented a point she had made, the answer was, "It's an argument!"  The reviewer felt that she would get more readers if she made it out to be an argument, a controversy.  She makes the point that sometimes violent argument and conflict is necessary - but most often such tactics just make for ill feelings and reduce the possibility of a friendly solution.

Interesting experimental result, Paul Ekman set up an experiment where people talked about various topics, some of these were true statements, some were not. This was tried first on the general public and then when the results showed that most people were very poor at picking out liars, he tried it on professionals who are trained and whose jobs require them to determine who is a liar and who is not.  With the exception of one group, members of the U. S. Secret Service, other groups scored no better than chance.  These included judges, lawyers, police, psychotherapist and employees of the CIA, FBI, and ATF.  

Are there really two sides to every issue?  Some issues are just plain facts, giving credence to the other side is listening to the murderers, rapists, con-men etc.  The press is often viewed as one of the main problems, they are but often they are the ones called on to report what has happened so they are exposed all of the time.  This is not to say that many aren't serious offenders but they are sometimes pushed into it.  

We need to end the automatic assumption of a "battle" between one side and another, sometimes there truly is, but sometimes there is (or should be) an honest discussion of the issue without rancor.

C2  Both Sides Come Out Fighting: The Argument Culture and the Press  Many examples of "war" terminology in the newspaper, television, and magazine cultures.  Why do many reporters and editors think that to be interesting an item must include controversy.  Often the press only covers the small part of a talk or discussion that involves controversy.  Recent explicit example, in the recent (to me) South Carolina Democratic debate, Clinton, Obama, and Edwards talked for over an hour but the television reported only the 5 or 10 minuted part where Clinton and Obama had a protracted argument-debate.  The rest of the debate was ignored.

Another point is that often guests are invited only because they can be counted on to make a good "show" but really don't have anything to add to the conversation other than shouting.  Sometimes where there is only one side, for example the Holocaust, the press feels that it has to invent another side to be complete and "fair".  The First Amendment says that the government shall not suppress speech, anybody can say what they want, it does not require the press to report or disseminate outrageous views.  Another technique that the press often falls for is that if often allows groups to invent a controversy and then demands that they be heard to "debate the issue."  This is very common in the "debate" over global warming.  The oil and coal companies virtually invented the scientific opposition to global warming but the press never called them on it because they were "fairly covering both sides."

The rule for sports announcers, "It's not how you play the game but whether you win or lose."

C3  From Lapdog to Attack Dog: The Aggression Culture and the Press  Joke about Clinton during his first term as President:  "The president went on a fishing trip with members of the press corps.  After their boat left shore, the president realized he had left his tackle on the dock, so he stepped off the boat, walked to shore, picked up his tackle, and walked back over the surface of the water.  The next day's headline read, 'CLINTON CAN'T SWIM'."

During the Kennedy administration the press generally listened to the president and reported his statements as facts - sort of like a lapdog.  When Watergate hit, many of todays reporters were in college and are now modeling themselves on Woodward and Bernstein, they all want to bring down a president - or other elected official.  They are acting more like Attack Dogs.  When the press only wants to cover scandals they are ignoring their responsibility to cover the real news of governing which is often not all that exciting.  

When the press attacks people with whom they disagree that is one thing, but when they attack everyone in power just to cause attention to be focused on themselves or their employer that is quite a different thing.  She uses a term, complementary schismogenesis, which could be defined as a mutually aggravating spiral.  The press is angry at the president for not being instantly available and using them and the president (and staff) gets angry at the press for picking on every small failing and reporting it in disgusting detail.  Another problem is that speechwriters know that speeches are reported in sound bites, so they try to construct speeches that can easily be reported as sound bites.  This means that complex issues tend not to get put into speeches because they are harder to phrase into sound bites.

The press thrives on controversy.  When a politician tries to moderate the discussion, to come to a compromise, many in the press attempt to generate combative sound bites so that a controversy which sells more papers can be generated.  Many stories of public officials who quit rather than face the hostility of the press.  This causes the very real problem of good people not wanting to take high office because of the unrelenting pressure they are under.  Problems with the press and media attacking people,  one study reported that many of the same terms used by Nazi's to refer to Jews were used by right-wing talk show hosts.

Is journalists obsession with negative news serving them?  There is evidence to suggest that many of the problems with newspapers loosing readers and TV loosing viewers is related to people getting disgusted with press negativity.  She raises the question, is a dog that is busy attacking really doing that good of a job of watching?  We certainly don't want the press to be lapdogs, and we really don't want insensitive attack dogs, but we do need good watchdogs.  Most of the public wants the press to be aggressive, but not to display misplaced aggression.  Too many in the press are taking the easy way out and criticizing personal characteristics of politicians and not enough time is spent on researching stories that do reflect serious wrongdoing.  

C4  "A Plague on Both Your Houses!": Opposition in Our Political Lives  In 1996 something unexpected happened, 14 US Senators decided not to seek reelection.  This is the most ever, almost three times the normal.  In a collection of essays by 13 of them a common theme running through them was a "lament the increasing level of vituperation and partisanship."  These relentless attacks on our legislators and the president are interfering with their work in governing our country.  

Another example is the definition of the term compromise.  One is negative as in a compromised immune system - the other is come to an agreement.  Too much use of the negative is used.  Another problem is the whole primary process.  We force our candidates to declare very early and then we force them to fight it out within each party.  By the time the candidates are nominated they are beaten down and "dirty" tactics seem normal.  Many more examples of harmful tactics.

C5  "Litigation Is War"  Our legal system isn't about truth, it's about winning.  It operates by putting two sides against each other and letting them fight it out in public.  In other legal systems, French and German for example, fact gathering is controlled by the judge, not the attorneys.  Our system pushes lawyers to overstate their claims.  The English distinguish between barristers, who are trial lawyers, and solicitors, who do all the other tasks.  When we combine the two tasks lawyers tend to confuse the roles and treat every problem as a fight.

When she was writing a book on working environments she also did some consulting for them.  Generally when she talked directly to the company leaders themselves, she and they could come to an agreement, sometimes she was asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement but it all worked out.  When company lawyers took over the negotiations, the prices went up, as she was forced to hire a lawyer and several times an agreement could not be agreed to at all.  The lawyers stopped anything from happening.  

She describes several court cases, a rape case and a Holocaust case, where lawyers attempted to deny justice.  A lengthy discussion of some of the problems involved in taking a case before a court.  Lawyers are reporting rising levels of stress related to their jobs.

C6  Boys Will Be Boys:  Gender and Opposition  Three cautions:  1) None of what is said is an accusation, it is simply an exploration of the differences between man and women and the purposes fighting and aggression serves for boys and men. 2) Patterns are not norms, there are wide ranges of variability within both men and women. 3) Male-female polarity, while real are both ends of a continuum.  They overlap and both sexes show aspects of the "other".  However the words are used differently for men and women.  "Aggressive" has different connotations when applied to a man or a woman.  (In all cases, "men and women" includes "boys and girls")

Small children tend to group themselves into same sex play groups.  Girls tend to sit and talk a lot, boys tend to run and roughhouse and play with pretend or play weapons.  Girls think boys play to rough, boys think that girls are boring.  Girls disputes tend to be verbal, boys disputes tend to be physical.  Often when boys try to involve girls in their play the girls object that the boys are bullies.  Neither group understands the others play desires and thinks that the other is being mean.  Again, girls are more commonly verbal and boys are most commonly physical.  

Adolescent boys are seldom violently physical but some mock punching is common.  Playful insults (mock verbal attacks) are common.  Adolescent girls quite often misinterpret this and take them for real fights.  They will also share mild insults, but much more carefully.  She implies that young womens insults and arguments are more related to their culture than young mens are.

Men find friendship in shared experience, women find friendship in shared intimacy.  In all cultures men tend to exhibit more aggression than women.  Men very commonly use ritual opposition whereas if women use it at all it is very mild.  However if the problem is real, for example the safety of a child, women can be very aggressive, they just don't get pleasure out of fighting for its own sake.  
The difference between computer games for boys vs. computer games for girls.  The very act of speaking in public is seen as a masculine act.  It was only in the last several hundred years that women were allowed to have any public life at all.  Women were only allowed to read the Bible in private or to their children.  Girls even now tend to hide their conflicts whereas boys make it a performance.  Aggressive behavior tends to negotiate status.  Some observations suggest that men loose some of their overt aggression around the age of 35.

C7  What Other Ways Are There?: Listing to Other Cultures  A woman who grew up in New York moved to the Netherlands - she was seen as too confrontational - in Israel she was seen as to wishy-washy.  People from Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, Armenia, Africa, South America, and others enjoy bantering opposition.  Those from India and Sri Lanka are confrontational,  in Bali definitely not.  Many stories of encounters between people of different cultures.  All cultures have signals when a discussion - argument is getting out of control but outsiders, and even insiders when the culture is changing, often fail to recognize these stopping points.  

Some cultures, she uses the Japanese as an example do not divide the world up into rigid categories.  For example they are very happy with being both Buddhist and Shinto while at the same time a western religion such as Catholicism.  The Ying - Yang dualism of China where each contains within itself a small part of the other and the acceptance if not the reverence for the berdach or both sexed individuals in the Zuni and Navaho groups.  Japan has a long history of acceptance for losers, they loose some, but not all, definitely not "Winner take All".  Should disputes be settled between the two people involved or should their friends take an active part?  This problem and its many variants is address in many different manners.  

Ritual fighting:  She describes cockfighting on Bali and sheep rustling in Crete.  These have both been banned by the government but they still persist because they are part of a male ritual and play an important part of keeping their society together.  She describes in detail the "Hold Me Coat!" ritual among the men in Irish villages.  Two men would begin arguing and when it had escalated to a critical point they would call out "Hold Me Coat!" and start taking their coat off.  Then their friends would trap their arms behind them.  They would scream something like, "Let me go, I'm going to kill him!'  Then their mothers or other female relative would come up and tell them that they were needed at home so stop this fighting.  Each would then complain that the other was lucky that his mother had come and of course he could not refuse her.  Then both they and the rest of the town would discuss the big fight for days, enjoying every minute of it.  Unfortunately this ritual broke down and actual fighting occurred when they move to big cities to work and had no support group.

Ritual Strikes:  She describes ritual labor disputes in Japan where workers and management yell at each other while the negotiating group is busy settling the issue in private and relative harmony.  I was involved in such a strike at the Bunker Hill mine and mill in Kellogg, Idaho in 1973.  It was just exactly as she explains

Ritual Killing of the King:  Examples from Africa.  In one case men gather around their leader, heap scorn on him, threaten him, and then everything goes back to normal.  In the other case after the leader is selected the men attack him, he is symbolically struck on the head, falls down dead, given a funeral, and is reborn with his new status.  He is then treated to a ritual display of support.  We just haven't learned to not guarantee our losers a part of the action and then to stop "killing" our leaders.

C8  Fast Forward: Technologically Enhanced Aggression  Email can pull people together but it can also generate flame wars.  Each new technological change has the capability of doing the same thing.  Face to face communication involves numerous little cues to the other person about how the message is being received.  One way communications (email, memo's, letters, phone messages) do not have this capability and problems are likely to occur.  

Throughout WW II and in most wars before that most of the men on the battlefield did not actually fire their weapons at the enemy.  In Vietnam this change dramatically.  The military used operant conditioning to desensitize American soldiers to the normal resistance to killing another person.  This boosted the rate up to 90 - 95%.  This is the same sort of "training" many children receive when playing video games.  Police departments use this same sort of training.  She compares this to the enhanced hostility of journalists.  

A comparison of email lists between man and women.  Here again men were more aggressive and women were more sensitive about publishing attack comments. 

C9  The Roots of Debate in Education and the Hope of Dialogue  Comments on the culture of education.  Chinese, based on observation and experience and marked by harmony.  Western, most goes back to Plato and Aristotle.  Logic is the only trustworthy source for human judgment, emotions just get in the way.  Early Christian Monks became the method of passing down information.  Many had been soldiers and saw themselves as God's warriors.  When they taught they used a military frame of reference.  In the Middle Ages, young man (never women) were raised in a very combative environment, when in the town they acted like marauding soldiers.  This high degree of competitiveness is still a large part of our culture in education.  

She discusses how the male / female aggression difference effects classroom response.  An academic quote, "If you can't find something bad to say, don't say anything."  "One reason the argument culture is so widespread is that arguing is so easy to do."  In a study of mental retardation, some residents who had severe language language and comprehensions were able to take part in verbal disputes, because arguments have a predictable structure.  They were much less able to participate in other verbal activities.  

Peter Elbow calls this "the doubting game",  educators are trained to look for what is wrong, the press tries to find an inconsistency in an office holder, lawyers look for problems in testimony.  "It is an attorney's job to discredit opposing witnesses, but is it a scholar's job to approach colleagues like an opposing attorney?"  Elbow recommends that you read a body of work as though you believe it and then go back and evaluate it.  Don't stop doubting, but stop doubting exclusively.  The original Socratic method was designed to jar others out of their habitual mode of thought.  By always attacking we just force someone to justify their statements.  If they "loose" the argument they often attribute their loss to poor performance or unfair tactics.  

Is forcing dichotomies on everything the best way?  Is debate the best way to achieve the truth.  Mary Bateson. an anthropologist, makes a point on asking her students to compare three cultures, not two.  If students compare two the are inclined to polarize them, if they compare three they are more likely to think about the cultures on their own terms.  We should talk about "all sides" of an issue instead of "both sides".  The Diane Rehm Show on  NPR often will have three guests instead of two so when one makes an outrageous statement the two can gang up on the statement instead of getting into a two person argument.  

In his The New Golden Rule, Amitai Etzioni proposed these rules:

• Don't demonize those with whom you disagree.
• Don't affront their deepest moral commitments.
• Talk less of rights, which are nonnegotiable, and more of needs, wants, and interests.
• Leave some issues out.
• Engage in a dialogue of convictions: Don't be so reasonable and conciliatory that you lose touch with a core of belief you feel passionately about.