Peter H. Schuck
One Nation Undecided
I believe that One Nation Undecided is a unique contribution to public affairs discourse in several respects. First, it is written in a dispassionate, non-partisan, and non-ideological spirit. This distinctive spirit is captured in the title of an earlier collection of my short opinion pieces, Reflections of a Militant Moderate: Cool Views on Hot Topics. This balanced analysis is rare in today’s vituperative, hyper-partisan, zero-sum policy wars. In truth, I do not much care where readers come out on these five issues so long as they think clearly about them. Part of what makes each of these five issues so hard is that plausible arguments can be mustered on various sides of each issue. And precisely because these issues are all hard, we should want our fellow citizens to ponder plausible arguments on various sides before reaching their own conclusions.
Editor: Judi Pajo
One Nation Undecided
Peter H. Schuck One Nation Undecided: Clear Thinking about Five Hard Issues That Divide Us Princeton University Press 440 pages, 6 x 9 1/4 inches ISBN 978 0691167435
Available here →July 27, 2017
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Peter H. Schuck
Peter Schuck is a law professor at Yale who also earned a master’s degree from Harvard in political science. He has worked in a variety of professional settings: private law practice in New York City, “public interest” law work in Washington, D.C., service as a policymaking official in the federal government, and a long career as a Yale Law School professor. He has taught and written about a wide variety of legal and domestic policy topics in more than a dozen books, numerous scholarly articles, and many op-eds and other short pieces in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other media.
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American public debate is impoverished because its dominant voices suppress the factual uncertainties at each hard issue's core.
Against MF · Conspiracy theory is a subset of populism, which is why showing its factual errors never dissolves it. On: Supplying people with correct information is what dislodges a false or contested belief
Against IA · German thinkers from Leibniz to Nietzsche knew far more about their Ottoman neighbours than their published work admits. On: Supplying people with correct information is what dislodges a false or contested belief
Against TM · The welfare queen survives because stories demand antagonists, detail and resolution, and only better-told stories can dislodge her. On: Supplying people with correct information is what dislodges a false or contested belief
Alongside JM · Wherever Jews have been granted legal equality they have done disproportionately well at capitalism, and that has causes. On: Supplying people with correct information is what dislodges a false or contested belief
Alongside MM · The attack on the hockey stick was an industry-funded campaign built on fallacious statistics. On: Supplying people with correct information is what dislodges a false or contested belief
Alongside MD · Confidence about animal consciousness outruns the evidence, and skepticism here helps animals rather than harming them. On: Supplying people with correct information is what dislodges a false or contested belief
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