The Champagne Summit began as an afternoon on the side of the Annual Symposium and outgrew it. It now meets every Independence Day, and again on Election Day every four years, to take up whatever the country is arguing about that season.

The format is the Symposium’s: a moderator, a question, five minutes per speaker. We publish the opening remarks. The argument after the second glass is poured stays in the room. There are no cameras at our roundtables, and correspondents are identified only by their towns. [Here’s why →]

It is the Symposium’s idea in a lighter key: neighbors and colleagues with a glass in hand, arguing on the merits and, more often than not, parting as friends. If more of the country argued this way, fewer arguments would end in a shouting match.