America's Slippery Slope to Nowhere
The most inadequate and even destructive policies in American government are spooned down our throats through a decades-old political lever known as the “slippery-slope” argument. Today, it’s employed indiscriminately by idea-deprived politicians who have no other arguments in their arsenals. The slippery slope demands that you and I accept, without evidence, that giving an inch to our political adversaries is equal to cratering our core aims and values. Beyond imposing impossible expectations on a democracy of 300 million people, the slippery slope gives all the power to extremists. It chokes progress and sucks the trust out of public institutions, private enterprises, communities of faith, and, more recently, friendships and families. The slippery slope offers a false choice between protecting our right to form a militia and preventing kids from being murdered in school. It tells us that the best way to protect the innocence of chil...