INTRODUCTION

YOU ARE A SERIOUS, well-educated voter. You read print and online media, listen to the views of opinion leaders and organizations that you trust, discuss current events informally with interested friends, and generally try to keep up with current events. You want to participate responsibly in the democratic process through which the policies that govern us are formed, but you find this difficult. Busy with your family, work, and other private commitments, you don't have much spare time to navigate the daunting complexity of the substantive policy issues. Social groups and peer pressure urge you to take clear positions on these issues. You might feel more comfortable if you could conscientiously do so. But you feel uneasy in taking firm positions on these important issues because, in all honesty, you know that you haven't given them all that much thought or done your homework. So what is a conscientious but understandably distracted citizen like you to do?

I wrote this book for you. It is about hard public issues and how Americans should think about them before deciding where they stand. The success of our deliberative democracy — in which We the People and our representatives really do decide how such issues are resolved — depends on citizens' knowing what they are talking and voting about.

What makes an issue hard? Why are some issues getting even harder, while others seem to become easier?* Is more public debate on hard issues needed? What do I mean by clear thinking about issues? What is the quality of today's debates? How much must citizens know about the issues in order to think clearly about them, and how realistic is this? What can this book hope to contribute to these debates?

This chapter answers these questions in general, and the chapters that follow get down to specifics. But which ones? The list of domestic policy decisions on which Americans sharply disagree with one another — in the voting booth and in conversations — is very long. No single person could explicate most of them. To do so would require far more knowledge, technical skill, time, and patience than any individual (certainly this one) possesses.

The reader's patience is short, so I focus my analysis on five domestic policy issues: poverty; immigration; campaign finance; affirmative action; and conflicts between religious and secular values. Why these? Reasonable people will disagree about the most important issues facing the nation. The first — poverty — is an enduring challenge to the American dream. The next two — immigration and campaign finance — are perennially controversial, especially during election campaigns. The debate over affirmative action remains as robust as ever, even after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality in 2016. (The Court did not endorse its policy merits and the decision was a narrow one, limited — as the majority emphasized — to Texas's "sui generis" plan.) The final issue, which I shall call "religious accommodation" as a shorthand, has always been controversial in our public life, and its prominence today is especially high in light of two recent Supreme Court decisions, discussed in chapter 6.

Each of the five is a very hard issue according to the criteria I present immediately below — although some of them are more hotly debated, affect more people, are more politically sensitive, and raise more basic constitutional issues than others. And some issues that I do not analyze here are even harder and arguably more consequential — for example, climate change and the financing and delivery of health care — are more complicated. But trying to compare the hardness of different public issues (rather than of, say, different minerals) is a fool's errand. Each of the five vitally affects our democracy and society. We have argued about all of them for so long that their contours are relatively well defined and thus amenable to the kind of close analysis presented in this book. And the analytical structure that I use to dissect each of them invites the reader to apply it to other issues not considered here.

WHAT MAKES AN ISSUE HARD?

In my usage, an issue is hard to the extent that the following characteristics are inherent to it: Hard issues also have external or contingent aspects (e.g., political conditions, timing, leadership, unexpected events, international developments).

• It is a public and federal issue. Government institutions, especially at the federal level, play an important role in resolving it through the political process and in embodying it in public law. In contrast, most issues never make it on to the public agenda at all.

• It is highly salient to a large number of people. This means that they care deeply, passionately, and perhaps even militantly about it. People tend to have at least provisional opinions or intuitions about where they stand on it when it enters their world.

• It constitutes an ensemble of interrelated disputed questions. We may try to treat the issue as if it were analytically discrete or self-contained, but in reality its knot of questions interact in complicated, opaque, and hard-to-disentangle ways.

• It is historically inflected, bearing the strong imprint of earlier struggles that continue to haunt current debates, affect the terms of discussion, and perhaps limit the menu of future options.

• It consists in part of complex empirical disputes that our existing knowledge cannot authoritatively resolve and on which even the experts are usually divided. Hard issues, moreover, often are subject to a "meta" empirical issue — i.e., whether the empirical disputes have in fact been settled or are instead still open to dispute. Efforts to persuade the public that a given issue is or is not still open to serious, responsible debate is a high-stakes game played by competing interests. Climate change is probably the clearest current example. Reformers typically cite a looming crisis that must be addressed immediately, while those who favor the status quo or emphasize our ignorance or uncertainty usually favor delay, urging more deliberation, better information, and thus a more durable public consensus.

• It is embedded in normative disputes. The contested values are usually widely held and deeply felt by their proponents. Depending on the nature and content of these values, they may be more or less sensitive or tractable to empirical facts that might (or might not) seem relevant to them. Thus, people who employ a utilitarian framework that values a particular policy according to its consequences (often measured by its costs and benefits) will want to know which conditions cause which effects (among other empirical facts) before they choose a preferred policy or action. In contrast, others may assess the desirability of a policy or action deontologically — i.e., in light of whether it conforms to...