Ep. 44: Mike Lee on Civility, Rhetoric, and Disagreeing Better
We Made This Political Podcast · Lauren Hall and Lura Forcum
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Show Notes
Lura Forcum and Lauren Hall interview Mike Lee, director of the Civility Initiative at the College of Charleston and host of When We Disagree, about how to improve disagreement through both debate and dialogue. Lee argues dialogue requires letting go of winning to humanize conflict and preserve long-term relationships, while debate uses evidence and stress-testing to clarify issues and strengthen arguments; done well, each supports the other. Hall shares a pandemic-era student government conflict involving Slack disputes, Blue Lives Matter symbolism, privacy, and free speech, which revealed the need for dialogue alongside principled adjudication. They discuss conflict avoidance on campuses, perspective-taking and mentalizing, structured on-ramps and accessible topics to make disagreement less threatening, and whether media can scale healthier models via parasocial contact. Lee ends with optimism about people’s hunger for connection and the return of sunshine in Charleston.
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00:00 Dialogue vs Debate
00:41 Podcast Introductions
02:20 Civility Initiative Explained
03:30 Why the Distinction Matters
05:56 Campus Conflict Case Study
10:09 Forbearance and Relationships
11:26 Do Students Want to Win
15:13 Debate Kids and Parenting
18:56 Active Listening Can Weaponize
23:52 Conflict Avoidance on Campus
27:26 Three Ways to Spark Debate
31:35 Curiosity Shift Drill
33:33 Debate as Perspective Taking
36:46 Mentalization Against Tribalism
40:28 Can Good Debate Scale
43:43 Adam Smith and Sympathy
47:58 Parasocial Contact Through Media
52:12 Teaching Dialogue in Class
54:32 Adversarial Collaboration Model
58:51 Hopeful Closing and Plugs
Resources
You can find Mike’s books here:
Creating ConservatismWe Are Not One People: Secession and Separatism in American Politics Since 1776
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