There’s a lot to like about Respect and Loathing (not least the Hunter Thompson reference!): it breaks new ground by using empirical methods to investigate a theoretical concept; it is ambitious, taking on a key element of the current democratic crisis; and it is engaging and readable. It’s a real achievement and will inspire many young graduate students to emulate its methodology, leading to a useful rapprochement between political theory and political science. I also agree with a lot of the book: it is incredibly level-headed and sensible. I want to investigate two claims about which I wasn’t fully persuaded: first, is the liberal respect paradox really a matter of recognition respect? Second, is an egalitarian pluralist ethos the right response to the crisis of respect?

The authors interpret the liberal respect paradox as about recognition respect, borrowing this term from Stephen Darwall. Recognition respect is “given to people simply because they are fellow human beings and therefore equals in terms of the respect they deserve” (15). It treats all persons as of equal fundamental worth and as deserving equal dignity. The authors show evidence that liberals are somewhat more likely than conservatives to refer to ideas of respect and equal moral worth when explaining what equality means to them (31). But Democrats are significantly less likely than Republicans to say they can respect opposing partisans. While liberals believe abstractly in recognition respect, the authors argue that liberals struggle to grant recognition respect to their political opponents in practice (15, 24, 27).

But when Democrats say that they struggle to respect people in the opposing party, do they mean “I struggle to ‘grant them recognition as equal human beings’ [recognition respect] or ‘look up to or admire them’ [appraisal respect] or ‘find their ideas worth listening to and taking seriously’ [civic respect]”? If liberals really struggle with the first, one would expect them to support policies that strip opponents of basic rights, to dehumanize them, and to exclude opposing partisans from citizenship or equality before the law. Yet we don’t see evidence of this. So while I recognize the liberal respect paradox, I don’t think it is best interpreted as an unwillingness to grant recognition respect. Rather, I think it is a failure of appraisal respect and civic respect.

What is the evidence that the liberal respect paradox represents a failure of recognition respect? The authors cite the difference in answers to two survey questions. When asked in the abstract, 74 percent of Democrats said that it is important to grant people respect as fellow human beings, whereas only 65 percent said it was important to respect opposing partisans as fellow human beings. This drop was larger than that among Republicans, 68 and 67 percent respectively. So there was a 9 percent drop in support for recognition respect among Democrats compared to only a 1 percent drop among Republicans.

I find it difficult to interpret this as evidence of a crisis of recognition respect among liberals. Another way to read it is that nearly two-thirds of each party firmly support extending recognition respect to their opposing partisans. The solid majority don’t support stripping the other side of basic rights, dehumanizing them, or taking away their citizenship or equality before the law. I found the headline characterization of the liberal respect paradox as a matter of recognition respect to somewhat exaggerate the findings. Another piece of evidence invoked is the Recognition Respect scale (97–98), but only one of its four questions—“Republicans/Democrats should be given respect simply because they are fellow human beings”—struck me as clearly evoking recognition rather than appraisal or civic respect.

Lots of findings in this book do show respect is in a bad way in contemporary American democracy. But, given the protean nature of the term, most of its findings are better interpreted as showing that appraisal and civic respect are in a bad way. When only 10 percent of Democrats say they find it easy to respect Republicans, it’s not clear that they don’t find it easy to respect Republicans’ equal worth and dignity as human beings. What strikes me as more likely is that Democrats are saying they find it difficult to admire them, to listen to them, and to find their views worthy of serious consideration. This is still very bad news for democracy. But it’s not quite as bad as if liberals were unwilling to recognize the basic humanity of the other side.

The authors don’t spend much time on appraisal respect, but it involves respecting someone’s achievements, good judgment, or past actions. It is a kind of respect one has to earn from others through one’s performance: one has to be someone others look up to. It’s not hard to see why strong partisan disagreement would undermine appraisal respect: if one thinks opposing partisans are deeply misguided, it’s hard to respect their judgments or actions. The failure of appraisal respect is probably part of what is going on when liberals say they struggle to respect the opposing party’s voters.

The authors spend more time on civic respect, an important new concept. Civic respect involves “listening to and taking seriously the ideas of one’s fellow-citizens” (50). This need not involve talking face-to-face: it includes reading about opposing views through the media and considering the reasons behind them. Civic respect requires the acceptance of a plurality of legitimate and reasonable political views. It requires not engaging in political stereotyping, and trying to sympathetically understand the positions taken by the other side, even when one does not agree: not dismissing these views as based in ignorance or misinformation. Civic respect involves the acceptance of reasonable disagreement as a permanent and legitimate fact about democratic life, and a willingness to engage respectfully with one’s co-citizens despite these disagreements. The authors argue that it should be extended to a very wide range of views, so long as those views accept procedural democracy, endorsing the equal political liberties and rights to free expression and association of all citizens.

My read of the authors’ evidence is that there is a genuine crisis of appraisal and civic respect. Liberals believe that Republican voters are ignorant, racist, sexist, and homophobic and so their ideas are not worth listening to or engaging with seriously. Part of the problem, as the authors show, is social segregation: a majority of people have little social contact with those who voted for the opposing party. The book shows that those who have more heterogeneous social networks are less likely to stereotype the other side and more likely to show civic respect. Indeed, they show that younger Trump voters have the most heterogeneous social networks and therefore are least likely to stereotype and most likely to exhibit civic respect!

The authors also argue that a key reason why liberals fail to give Republicans civic respect is because they accept a moralized worldview that focuses on dismantling structural injustice. Addressing these disadvantages requires systemic change and is believed to be a collective responsibility. Thus, people who do not take action to eradicate structural injustice are complicit in maintaining an unjust society. The more strongly liberals hold this social justice worldview, the less willing are they to respect those who disagree with them.

One of the book’s most interesting arguments is that there is an important tension between a strong, moralized commitment to social justice and the ability to grant civic respect: “the more robust the idea of justice that is part of a theory of substantive egalitarianism … the harder it will be to grant respect to those who disagree” (13). When liberals endorse a strong theory of substantive equality, they find it difficult to respect partisans who do not think that a substantive egalitarian vision is something the state should actively pursue.

The authors suggest that weakening the strength and confidence with which liberals hold their substantive egalitarian views will ultimately make it easier for them to respect partisans with whom they disagree. Though they consider a variety of other remedies, they place their main bet on getting people to hold their views of justice more fallibilistically: to recognize that their own vision of justice is just one among many other equally legitimate ways of ordering a plurality of competing values.

The authors recommend an egalitarian pluralist ethos (138). Egalitarian pluralists prize equality but recognize that several different values matter—including “love, loyalty, identity, liberty, and order” (137)—and that these values need to be balanced against one another and may conflict. In cases of conflict, different people may reasonably choose to rank these values differently. While there is a certain “moral minimum”—including basic rights and procedural democracy—that should not be traded off, one must accept that there are a variety of legitimate ways to prioritize between egalitarianism and competing values: Republicans reasonably prioritize one set of values, while Democrats reasonably prioritize another. One question I had was whether the authors think that there can be correct answers about how to rank a plurality of competing values, or at least better and worse answers, or whether the answers are ultimately indeterminate and up to the personal decision of each voter.

While I like the idea of lowering the temperature and stridency of our political debate, I’m not sure I can sign onto the egalitarian pluralist idea. I believe my most strongly held convictions about justice are correct. I believe there are right and wrong ways to balance competing values, and that at least some of the ways that opposing partisans balance these values are wrong. For example, I believe the current massive inequalities of income and wealth in the United States are unjust and should be narrowed. I have considered the reasons that some invoke against redistribution: considerations of desert, entitlement, property rights, or economic efficiency and opposition to government regulation. I see some force to these reasons, but they seem to be decisively outweighed by the harms that economic inequality is inflicting on the life-chances and status of many people in our society, and to social solidarity and the fabric of our democracy. So I think that those who balance competing values in a way that would allow the current levels of economic inequality in the US are simply wrong. They may be smart, reasonable people, but I think they are mistaken. What I am uncertain about is whether the egalitarian pluralist can also believe this.

If egalitarian pluralism cannot allow that some convictions about justice are correct and others mistaken, then it may ask too much of people to abandon confidence in their most strongly held convictions of justice. If weakening one’s confidence in one’s substantive values were the only way to rescue civic respect in a democracy, perhaps one should bite the bullet. But I don’t think there is an insurmountable tension between a strong, moralized commitment to social justice and civic respect. Believing that opposing partisans are mistaken does not commit one to denying them civic respect. Because justice is a complex and multidimensional value, one can believe that, in cases of reasonable disagreement about what it substantively requires, justice demands a fair democratic process to resolve the disagreement. This process should situate the participants equally and treat them all with civic respect. So justice has both procedural and substantive components, and these two dimensions must be weighed against one another. Sometimes a view of justice that is substantively mistaken should carry the day politically, when it is supported by a majority of reasonable citizens in a fair democratic process, simply because procedural justice requires this, even though the decision does not reflect the correct conception of substantive justice.

So while I agree that there is a crisis of civic respect, I wonder if the value-pluralistic remedy is the right one. We can continue to have confidence in our judgments about substantive justice without weakening our commitment to civic respect, so long as we recognize that justice has an important procedural component, and that this often trumps achieving just outcomes. One need not weaken one’s demanding convictions about substantive justice to treat opposing partisans with respect; all one needs to do is to strengthen one’s convictions about procedural justice. It is procedurally unjust to deny other people an equal share of political power, even if one does so in order to implement the substantively just policy. So long as liberals truly believe in the importance of procedural justice, they can hold their substantive convictions about justice with confidence.