Understanding Every Principle | #5: Debate with Facts and Dignity
How We Argue Matters as Much as What We Argue About
This is the fifth article in a nine-part series examining the governing principles of the Centercratic Party and the conditions that make American self-government possible. Each article is part of Foundations, the Centercratic Party’s publication. The previous articles examined Principles 1 through 4: Safeguard Our Democratic System, Limit Terms for Accountability, Protect Election Integrity, and One Law for All. Today, we move from structural guardrails to the question of how we talk to each other.
Principle 5: Conduct fact-based debates with respect. Acknowledge disagreements. Prohibit personal attacks and bad-faith tactics.1
On April 7, 2026, Justice Sonia Sotomayor stood at a lectern at the University of Kansas School of Law and criticized a colleague’s opinion in an immigration case. That is normal. Supreme Court justices disagree with each other in writing all the time, and those disagreements are part of how the law develops. What was not normal was what she said next. Referring to Justice Brett Kavanaugh without naming him, she remarked that his opinion reflected the perspective of someone whose parents were professionals, suggesting he could not truly understand people who earn by the hour. Eight days later, she issued a rare public statement. “I made remarks that were inappropriate,” she wrote. “I regret my hurtful comments. I have apologized to my colleague.”2 The incident would not have made national news if it were unusual. It made national news because it was recognizable. Even at the Supreme Court, the line between disagreeing with an idea and attacking the person who holds it has become harder to hold.
Why This Principle Comes Fifth
This is the fifth article in a nine-part series examining the Centercratic Party’s governing principles. Principle 5 states: conduct fact-based debates with respect, acknowledge disagreements, and prohibit personal attacks and bad-faith tactics.1 It is the first of two principles in the Collaborative Governance cluster, which addresses not what government does but how it deliberates. After four principles about structure, this one is about behavior. The four Democratic Guardrails protect the system from being broken by force. This principle protects the system from being broken by words and the habits of mind that produce them.
Self-governing people cannot decide anything together if they cannot argue productively. The pillar framework that grounds this series identifies two pillars that Principle 5 directly serves: Pillar 6, a vibrant civil society with independent information, and Pillar 8, a civic culture of tolerance and compromise.3 Robert Putnam’s research on civic life in America documented what happens when those conditions erode: citizens disengage, trust collapses, and the networks of association that allow people to solve problems together dissolve. Levitsky and Ziblatt identified the erosion of what they called “mutual toleration” as one of the two primary mechanisms of democratic decay. When political opponents stop treating each other as legitimate rivals with different views and start treating each other as existential enemies to be destroyed, the democratic norm of peaceful competition gives way to something much less stable.3 The Sotomayor moment was a small but vivid example of a very large pattern.
The Numbers Behind the Feeling
Americans are not imagining that political discourse has gotten worse. The data confirms it.
A Pew Research study found that 84 percent of American adults say political debate has become less respectful over the last several years. Only 4 percent say it has become more respectful. And 78 percent say political debate has become less fact-based, while just 5 percent say it has become more fact-based. These findings held across every political and demographic group the researchers measured.4
Trust in the information Americans receive has fallen in parallel. A Gallup poll released in October 2025 found that only 28 percent of Americans now express a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in newspapers, television, and radio to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. That is down from 31 percent the year before and 40 percent five years ago. Among Republicans, trust in media has been below 20 percent since 2015. Among Democrats, once the most media-trusting group, trust has fallen to just 51 percent. Among independents, it remains well below 50 percent.5
Separate Pew research found that overall trust in information from national news organizations fell 11 percentage points between March and October 2025 alone, dropping to 56 percent. Local news fared better at 70 percent, but that too had declined sharply from 82 percent in 2016.6
The physical consequences of the rhetoric are not abstract. The U.S. Capitol Police investigated 14,938 threatening statements, behaviors, and communications directed at members of Congress and their families in 2025. That is a 58 percent jump from 9,474 cases in 2024, itself a record. It is the third consecutive year of increases, and the Capitol Police stated plainly that “reducing violent political rhetoric is one of the most effective methods to lower the number of threats nationwide.”7 Conservative activist Charlie Kirk was killed while speaking at a college campus in September 2025. Former Minnesota state House Speaker Melissa Hortman was killed alongside her husband in a politically motivated attack that same summer. The Democratic Party platform analysis published by The Center Voter found that hostile references to Republicans in Democratic platforms quintupled between 1976 and 2024, cooperative language declined by more than half, and opposition-focused content rose from 15 percent to 40 percent of total platform content.8 The Republican Party’s rhetorical trajectory has been equally well documented.
Both parties have been complicit in this deterioration. The pattern did not begin with any single figure or any single election cycle. It accelerated with social media, with the donor economics that reward ideological purity over problem-solving, and with a media landscape in which outrage reliably generates more engagement than accuracy.9 Pointing to one party as the cause is itself a bad-faith argument. The problem belongs to the whole system.
What Independent Voters Are Telling Us
The 45 percent of Americans who identify as political independents have a specific relationship with this principle. They are not simply frustrated by rudeness in the abstract. They are describing a system that has made it impossible to learn what is true.10
The Claremont McKenna College Civility Survey, conducted in spring 2025 with 3,000 adults, found that 53 percent of Americans describe society as uncivil, compared to just 26 percent who say it feels civil. Half of Americans believe civility has declined in just the past 12 months. More striking still: 57 percent of respondents said they had held back honest opinions in the past year to avoid conflict, and 35 percent said they do not feel safe sharing their honest opinions on social media. A third of Americans encounter incivility online or in person on a weekly or daily basis.11 When respondents were asked what drives the decline, they identified digital aggression through social media at 28 percent and political polarization at 21 percent.11
Independent voters responded to all of this by disengaging from the partisan debate, not because they have no opinions, but because the format of the debate has been designed to generate heat rather than light. Forty-seven percent of independents describe themselves as moderates. They favor different parties on different issues. They are, by every measure, the voters who are most open to persuasion by facts and most likely to be driven away by personal attacks. They are precisely the voters that fact-based, dignity-preserving debate is supposed to reach. And they are precisely the voters the current style of political combat has most thoroughly alienated.10
The Centercratic Position
The Centercratic Party’s fifth principle states its requirements plainly: conduct fact-based debates, treat opponents with respect, acknowledge genuine disagreements rather than pretending they do not exist, and prohibit personal attacks and bad-faith tactics.1 Each of those four requirements has practical meaning.
Fact-based debate means that claims made in political argument must be traceable to evidence that can be examined and challenged. It does not mean that facts are never in dispute or that every question has a clear answer. It means that when facts are uncertain, that uncertainty is acknowledged rather than weaponized. A politician who cites studies that support their position and ignores studies that complicate it is not conducting a fact-based debate. A politician who fabricates or misrepresents data to win an argument has crossed from debate into manipulation.
Respectful debate means engaging with the best version of an opponent’s argument rather than the worst. It means disagreeing with the idea rather than attacking the person. Justice Sotomayor understood this when she apologized. The disagreement with Kavanaugh’s legal reasoning was legitimate. The suggestion that his upbringing disqualified him from understanding working people was a personal attack, not a legal argument, and she said so herself.2
Acknowledging genuine disagreements is, paradoxically, one of the most important and least practiced civic skills in current American politics. Many of the hardest policy questions involve real trade-offs where reasonable people disagree. Immigration policy involves genuine tensions between border security and humanitarian obligation. Fiscal policy involves genuine tensions between debt reduction and the cost of cutting services people depend on. Pretending those tensions do not exist, or that anyone who takes the other side is acting in bad faith, does not resolve the disagreement. It makes the disagreement impossible to resolve.
Prohibiting bad-faith tactics means naming specific behaviors and holding all participants to the same standard: no fabricated statistics, no deliberate misquotes, no guilt-by-association attacks that have nothing to do with the policy at hand, no threatening language toward opponents, and no tactics designed to shut down debate rather than advance it. These are not censorship. They are the rules of a game that can only be played if both sides agree to play it honestly.
What Happens When This Fails
The researchers who study political hostility have found a pattern that is worth stating plainly. Escalating hostile rhetoric moves through distinct stages. It begins with adversarial debate, in which opponents argue hard but still treat each other as legitimate rivals. It progresses to incivility, in which the argument becomes personal and disrespectful. It continues to intolerance, in which opponents begin to question each other’s right to participate. And it ends in belligerence, in which rivals are no longer treated as adversaries to be defeated but as enemies to be eliminated.12 That last stage is where democratic politics ends.
The United States has not reached the final stage. But the trajectory of the data points in that direction. Threats against Congress have tripled since 2017. Political violence has claimed lives in Minnesota and at college campuses. A majority of Americans report self-censoring to avoid conflict. Trust in the factual basis of public debate has dropped to historic lows. None of this is inevitable. All of it is reversible. But reversal requires more than a wish for things to be different. It requires that the people who participate in democratic debate, from elected officials to journalists to citizens who share information online, choose deliberately to argue by a different set of rules.7
An Argument Worth Having
The Centercratic Party does not ask Americans to pretend there are no hard disagreements. There are. It does not ask them to stop arguing. Arguments are how democracies reach decisions. What it asks is that those arguments be conducted in a way that leaves the people who disagree still capable of finding common ground when the argument is over.
Justice Sotomayor’s apology was not a small thing. It was a public acknowledgment that the line between legitimate disagreement and personal attack is real, that crossing it is wrong, and that crossing it reflects poorly on the person who does it regardless of how strongly they believe they are right. That acknowledgment, coming from one of the most visible institutions in American life, is a small but honest example of what this principle looks like in practice. It is also a reminder of how rare that kind of accountability has become, and how much work there is to do.
Tomorrow, this series examines Principle 6: Seek Unity through Broad Support, and why policies built on narrow majorities tend not to last.
Paul J. Chapman is the founder and Executive Director of the Centercratic Party and the author of “Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic.” He publishes The Center Voter at centervoter.com.
Notes
1 Centercratic Party. Party Principles, 2026. https://centercratic.party/our-principles/
2 SCOTUSblog. “Justice Sotomayor Apologizes for ‘Inappropriate’ Remarks About Justice Kavanaugh.” April 15, 2026. https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/04/justice-sotomayor-apologizes-for-inappropriate-remarks-about-justice-kavanaugh/
3 Chapman, Paul J. Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic. Centercratic Party, 2026. Drawing on: Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone. Simon and Schuster, 2000; Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. Crown Publishers, 2018.
4 Pew Research Center. “Americans’ Feelings About Politics, Polarization, and the Tone of Political Discourse.” September 19, 2023. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/09/19/americans-feelings-about-politics-polarization-and-the-tone-of-political-debate/
5 Gallup. “Trust in Media at New Low of 28% in U.S.” October 2025. https://news.gallup.com/poll/695762/trust-media-new-low.aspx
6 Pew Research Center. “How Trust in Information from News Organizations and Social Media Has Changed.” October 28, 2025. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/29/how-americans-trust-in-information-from-news-organizations-and-social-medias/
7 U.S. Capitol Police. “Threats Against Congress Spiked in 2025, Extending a Three-Year Rise.” January 27, 2026. Reported in: NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/threats-congress-spiked-2025-rose-third-year-row-capitol-police-say-rcna256259
8 Chapman, Paul J. “The Democratic Party: From Bridges to Walls.” The Center Voter, January 30, 2026. https://centervoter.com/p/the-democratic-party-from-bridges
9 Chapman, Paul J. “Congress Is Now Irrelevant: What America Can Do About It.” The Center Voter, January 18, 2026. https://centervoter.com/p/congress-is-now-irrelevant-what-america
10 Chapman, Paul J. “I’m Independent! What Does That Mean?” The Center Voter, January 28, 2026. https://centervoter.com/p/im-independent-what-does-that-mean
11 IW Group. “The Civility Paradox: A National Survey of 3,000 U.S. Adults.” Claremont McKenna College Dreier Roundtable, October 2025. https://drt.cmc.edu/2025/10/04/civility-survey-3/
12 Abramowitz, Noam, and Ofer Kenig. “Hostility and Democratic Erosion: Introducing the Political Hostility Scale.” Democratization, November 2025. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13510347.2025.2581840