How To Ultimately Win The Argument

Sunday, May 10, 2026

Nancy Pelosi gave a commencement address.  Nothing unusual about that.  The speech has; however, become a bit controversial.  There is a good political reason why.  But there is also an undiscussed religious one.

Pelosi went after Trump as an existential threat to democracy.  Not shocking, but a bit overstated, don’t you think?  This is where the political controversy erupted:

Meaghan Mobbs, the director of the Center for American Safety and Security at the conservative nonprofit policy group Independent Women, ripped Pelosi’s radical call-to-action.

“Nancy Pelosi’s speech reflects a dangerous trend in American politics: treating ordinary democratic disagreement as an existential battle for the survival of the republic,” she told The Post.

“When senior political leaders compare political opponents to threats on the scale of the Civil War or the collapse of democracy, they help fuel the paranoia, rage, and moral absolutism that have contributed to a surge in left-wing radicalization and political violence.

That just about sums it up.  I mean, if you are looking for an actual existential threat, try something like this. But here is the part I found most interesting:

“Our founders believed that they could establish a democracy because they believed in the goodness of the American people,” she told the roughly 300 graduates.

Not really – they believed in the potential of the American people to be good, but they knew the conditions had to be right for that goodness to flourish.  They knew that goodness was not natural, that it had to be cultivated, individually and socially.  Casting your political opponent as an existential enemy does not cultivate goodness, it only makes for ugliness.

My linked example of an actual existential threat a couple of paragraphs ago was a story about a man in Kenya that converted from Islam to Christianity and his family subsequently attacked him and cut his hands off.  That got me thinking.  The only difference in these stories is the level of violence – both treat differences as existentially threatening.  Which is quite revelatory.

That is a tactic generally employed when your own case cannot stand on its own.  When you cannot convince people to think like you based on the merits of how you think, then you cast the alternative as horrible, awful and terrible.  But in the end the tactic produces things undesirable, whether it be our current politics or the removal of hands.

The Apostle Paul urged the church in Thessalonica to “examine everything; hold firmly to that which is good.”  After all, Jesus said, “So then, you will know them by their fruits.”

Thus we know Islam is a false religion because it bears such hideous fruit and we know the politics of people like Nancy Pelosi are toxic because they produce more toxicity.  But this also places a burden on us.

We need to be good.  We need to cultivate good in others.  The world will be better and we will win the argument.