Written by John Wood Jr. (Center bias) and originally published on the OmniAmerican Society.
I was recently watching a debate between Steven Crowder (a popular, irreverent, and influential conservative personality known for the show “Louder with Crowder” and his “change my mind” open campus debates with students) and esteemed Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy, who I think it’s fair to say is one of the more prominent educators in America.
The pairing caught my eye as I was scrolling through YouTube. But what was fun to see was that, in their debate, they had a surprising chemistry, albeit a combative one.
The topic was free speech and affirmative action on college campuses in general and Harvard’s record on free speech and ideological and racial discrimination in particular. (Crowder sees Harvard as having discriminated against white and Asian students through its affirmative action policies, a matter which has been the subject of notable court cases.)
For the most part Crowder and Kennedy were on way opposite ends of the issues, with the former arguing that Harvard has perniciously and systematically marginalized its conservative students and faculty (to the extent to which it has conservative faculty) and Kennedy denying this and arguing instead that it is the Trump administration that is guilty of extortion through its attempted revocation of government funds from the university. There was common ground between them on various points, including a shared view that Harvard’s mandatory DEI statements (eliminated in 2024) were coercive and wrong.
But the most interesting part of their exchange for our purposes came during the Q&A segment. A conservative leaning man, moved by the basic congeniality of the event, asked how we can have more grace as a society “in these discussions that are so difficult”?
“We have a terribly divided society,” Kennedy observed. “And we’re not going to be able to make the sort of society that we wanna have if we are constantly, daily seeing one another as enemies.” Then he came to his substantive recommendation. “…it’s worth spending some effort, time, energy, on making a distinction between being an enemy—and being an adversary.”
“You looked at me when you said enemy!” Crowder cut in, jokingly.
“No!” Kennedy replied. I’m sure he must have known Crowder was being the funny guy that he is, but Kennedy explained earnestly that he sees Crowder as an “adversary” but not an “enemy”…a point with which Steven Crowder warmly agreed.
“I think that that distinction is an important one,” Kennedy said in closing. “And one that we need to dig in to and dredge up—what are the qualities that can enable us to be adversaries and prevent us from being enemies?”
Kennedy’s answer was right out of the Braver Angels playbook. More than that, it was an earnest affirmation of the sort of civic friendship figures from Aristotle to Thomas Jefferson to Yuval Levin have seen as indispensable to the project of self-government.
Steven Crowder did not disagree. But he did offer what amounted to a challenge to this emphasis on grace which is worth taking very seriously for us in the movement to bridge the divide.
“I think grace is important,” Crowder began, “I think truth is paramount. And I think grace in the absence of truth ends up being kind of a useless self-help book.”
That is the crux of Crowder’s concern. But what he goes on to say from there is worth recounting as well. He continued in a reflection on Marcus Aurelius, the enlightened Roman Emperor, and his emphasis on “doing the right thing for the sake of doing the right thing.”
“This is very much prescriptive to how we should live as Christians” except for “the absence of grace.” Here Crowder moves in theological territory, contrasting the attitude which says that we “do the right thing for the right thing’s sake—and then die,” with the Christian view that says “do it because it’s all but filthy rags if not done for the glory of God, and that we all have grace shine upon us especially as it relates to eternal salvation.”
I suspect that, for Steven Crowder, there is no grace in the theological sense without accepting the truth (as I suspect he believes it) that there is only one God and one Savior by whom we have access to that God. I suspect also that, for Crowder, there is limited value in the interpersonal grace Kennedy affirmed if it comes at the expense of insisting people arrive at the right answer on the evils of communism, of identity politics…just as for many people on the left a feel-good civility to our political opponents that undermines our ability to insist on the evil of fascism and racism is really not a good thing at all.
Let us take Steven Crowder and Professor Randall Kennedy as examples. They communicated raw facts and interpretations to each other on the meaning of public versus private institutions when it comes to government funded universities, the harms done by affirmative action, and the relative comfort and discomfort conservatives feel being open about their politics at Harvard and other Ivy League university campuses.
But in their tone, in their humor, in their grace for one another, they were also substantively communicating the fact that each felt that the other was a human being possessed of dignity and worthy of respect. That in turn allowed them to be “adversaries” instead of “enemies” while still engaging in the antagonistic collaboration (to borrow a phrase from the late writer and philosopher Albert Murray) of competitively pursuing truth as it exists in the world of politics together.
Were such grace not present, were they to have seen each other as enemies, the same disagreements could be justification for lying, deceit, and ultimately recourse to violence and war. For such is the pattern of human history.
So in this instance, let us take our cues from Professor Randall Kennedy and Steven Crowder.
