"My view is that while you do occasionally have differences you ought to have a process where you can sit down and talk about things. How else do you solve problems?"
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There is a quiet power in how Dan Miller smuggles something normative into something that sounds merely practical. “My view” softens the landing, presenting the claim as personal preference rather than doctrine, but the sentence quickly hardens into an “ought”: disagreement isn’t a crisis, it’s a manageable condition if adults commit to procedure. The keyword isn’t “differences” so much as “process.” Miller isn’t romanticizing civility; he’s arguing for an institutional habit of conversation as the default tool of governance.
The subtext is a rebuke to politics as performance. “Occasionally” downplays the reality that conflict is constant, which makes the line feel like a politician’s idealized version of civic life. That’s strategic: if you admit the full scale of polarization, you also admit how hard it is to reverse. By shrinking conflict to something episodic, he makes deliberation sound achievable again.
Then comes the clincher: “How else do you solve problems?” It’s a rhetorical question that pretends there are no alternatives, even though modern politics offers plenty: brute-force majorities, procedural obstruction, media-driven pressure campaigns, courts, executive workarounds. Miller’s question works because it frames negotiation not as one option but as the only legitimate one. In an era when “talking” is often dismissed as weakness or delay, he recasts it as the grown-up mechanism of power: sit down, listen, bargain, repeat.
The subtext is a rebuke to politics as performance. “Occasionally” downplays the reality that conflict is constant, which makes the line feel like a politician’s idealized version of civic life. That’s strategic: if you admit the full scale of polarization, you also admit how hard it is to reverse. By shrinking conflict to something episodic, he makes deliberation sound achievable again.
Then comes the clincher: “How else do you solve problems?” It’s a rhetorical question that pretends there are no alternatives, even though modern politics offers plenty: brute-force majorities, procedural obstruction, media-driven pressure campaigns, courts, executive workarounds. Miller’s question works because it frames negotiation not as one option but as the only legitimate one. In an era when “talking” is often dismissed as weakness or delay, he recasts it as the grown-up mechanism of power: sit down, listen, bargain, repeat.
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| Topic | Relationship |
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