There will be no more presidential debates before the November election. That announcement has made many people sad. Why? It’s not because people will thereby miss out on an enlightened and truthful discussion of the crucial issues facing the United States and civilization itself. It’s not because voters cannot otherwise access the positions of the candidates.
No, it’s because people enjoy a good fight, a matchup in a winner-take-all contest. They want to see their candidate win and the other person on the mat.
My suggestion: stick to watching sports. The issues facing this country and the world are too serious for the pedestrian, manipulated, and optic-driven absurdities that have become the norm in a political context. Maybe such debates work in local and state elections, where they might be calm and reasoned discussion, but not at the federal level.
As we’ve observed, the major corporate networks cannot be trusted to manage them in ways that are conducive to genuine and revealing discussion. Especially these days, all that they generate are viral memes and clips.
What’s being tested in these debates anyway? It’s not a vision really. It’s not policy specifics. It’s not judgment, tenacity, courage, or conviction. It’s purely theater and that depends entirely on the setup, the structure, the quality of moderators, the prep time, the possible foreknowledge of questions, the strategies, and the exigencies of the moment.
In other words, they do nothing to achieve the only possible objective, which is to better familiarize voters with the issues and how candidates will perform in office.
I’ve variously served as a debate judge in high school debates. I never had a good feeling about it and I was never clear if the students truly benefited from the experience as compared with another setting in which they could practice public speaking, e.g. Toastmasters.
The student teams were randomly assigned the job of taking side A or side B and then unleashed to spew forth according to a clock. They had stacks of memorized note cards citing this expert or that, this fact or that, this data set or that, along with various bromides.
It became a parade of fallacy: strawman, hasty generalization, false dilemma, post hoc ergo propter hoc, appeal to authority, red herring, tu quoque, burden of proof, sharpshooter fallacy, and so on.
Both sides did this in every debate. As a judge, I wanted to call both sides losers in every case. It was not intelligent. It was not enlightening. It was not thoughtful and considered. It was just a speedy barrage of nonsense. And I wondered what lesson the students were taking from the experience. Did they conclude that truth is not real and that rhetoric alone always wins the day? Far from making the students better thinkers, I wondered if the setting only inculcated cynicism.
It’s true that the kids learn public speaking and that’s better than nothing but surely there are other ways. If your child or grandchild is proud to be on a debate team, fine, and maybe there are fine ones out there. I can imagine a homeschool co-op running a valuable experience. But from what I’ve seen, these settings are not valuable learning experiences.
For years, people have urged me to debate this or that person. I’ve variously taken up the task and done fine, I suppose. But the whole bit actually enrages me simply because the setting nearly always devolves into a spectator sport, nothing but a consumption good for the audience to see people hating on each other.
What precisely does that achieve? Nothing, in my view.
As a result, I generally refuse to participate. Not only that, I won’t attend them either—or watch them online—because I never really learn anything from them. They do not advance understanding except in rare cases, and that entirely depends on the structure. Maybe I’m too squeamish but there is something about being in a sea of voracious consumers looking for one-liners, rhetorical blasts, bust-em-in-the chops takedowns, that actually sickens me.
The structure of the last two presidential debates offered nothing by way of improved understanding of anything. The most recent matchup of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris did not question their understanding of the Constitution or explore areas of managerial expertise or even delve into issues in any detail.
The moderators turned it into a contest over which person would make the best social-media influencer. If people start to think of the president as only that, that’s a serious problem. And yet that seems to be where we are.
Two years ago, The Epoch Times invited me to be a moderator at a fascinating event that put on display the candidates in a primary election for the Republicans in Tennessee. It was a new style of debate. They had actual experts on various topics ask real questions based on expertise and each candidate answered with follow-ups. Everyone was polite and it was instructive and helpful, really advancing public political culture.
The hope was that this better structure and model would catch on, and it would have if the goal was actually to improve understanding and elevate. But that is not the goal sadly. Instead both media and spectators these days want a gladiator fight purely as a consumptive device. We should really stop indulging that. It does no one any good.
What this country needs more than anything else right now is seriousness in its public political culture. The issues are all too crucial. We have wars heating up around the world, a massive and unsustainable public debt, crushing strains on the standard of living, a health crisis, rising and grim illiteracy, major problems with corruption and agency capture, growing public distrust not only of all commanding heights but of elections themselves, and media more interested in clicks and surviving competition than informing people of truth.
In what ways do the debates as currently constructed address any of those problems? They do not. They merely exploit the devastating decline we are enduring for purposes of public entertainment. It’s bread and circuses and nothing more. We are better off ending it under these circumstances.
It’s actually possible to imagine a public forum in which civilized and mature discussion takes place with actual intelligent moderation and long-form answers that are not gamed. Sadly that is not going to happen, in which case we are better off without.
