Dionne: Believe it or not, well-reasoned debate is not dead

This is a perspective that David Brooks has been advancing in his New York Times column, and it is reflected in James and Deborah Fallows’ engaging account of their journey across the United States, “Our Towns,” published earlier this year.

As Deborah Fallows told Slate’s Isaac Chotiner, the conversations she and her husband had during their travels were “heavily weighted toward ‘in my neighborhood, at my schools, on our main street, what people need here, what people want from my town.’ ”

It’s striking that those working to better their patch of ground are rarely ideological about whether to rely on government, businesses or not-for-profits. They know all three have to pull together to make a place work.

My vote is to celebrate all this while remembering, as many localists do, that some problems require national action. We’re better off having a federal Social Security and Medicare program, and it will take a comparable effort to get health insurance to everyone. It’s also true that a nationwide economic market needs more than patchwork regulation, and that wealthy places can better maneuver through their difficulties than poorer localities.

But the new localism should make us think harder about how national policy can encourage local innovation and initiative.

Social Mobility vs. Economic Equality: The basic question is whether we are primarily interested in a society that provides expansive opportunities for people to rise, even if we maintain large disparities in income and wealth; or if instead we see the priority as closing those wealth and income gaps and offering better pay to those in poorly compensated lines of work.

I’d argue that this is a false choice. As former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen has pointed out, high levels of inequality are associated with lower rates of social mobility — and “economic mobility in the United States has not changed much in the last several decades.” If you care about mobility, you have to care about inequality, too.

Nonetheless, this is a productive controversy because it requires us to be more precise and more candid about what we mean when we talk about “the American Dream.”

Guaranteed Jobs vs. Guaranteed Income: The growing concentration of wealth and the threat posed to work by technological change has heightened interest in establishing a universal basic income, the subject of Annie Lowrey’s recent book “Give People Money.”

Although UBI is, broadly speaking, a progressive idea, some conservative thinkers such as Charles Murray have embraced versions of it. Critics of the UBI from the right just don’t like redistributive income guarantees. On the left is a fear that, as the economist Jared Bernstein has argued, the UBI would be used to rationalize dismantling all manner of other social programs. I am partial to using aspects of the UBI in tandem with guarantees of well-paid work that focus on parts of the country with substantial unemployment.

OK, we can now return to the president’s latest tweet. But please don’t believe anyone who tells you that we are no longer a thinking people.