This is no longer how it works. At the presidential level, debates are functionally useless. And below that level, it’s even worse.
My intent here isn’t to write about politics and the presidency but, instead, the increasingly common idea that public, broadcast debate is the best format for adjudicating issues. Since that probably derives from the tradition of debate in American politics, though, it’s useful to point out how that system is broken.
Imagine a presidential contest between two candidates who saw the scheduled debates as opportunities to earnestly present their points of view and challenge their opponent’s. There are three scheduled, each lasting 90 minutes. Commercial breaks bring the total down to, say, 80 minutes apiece, so four hours in total.
The Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, the gold standard, lasted 21 hours. There were seven encounters, in which one candidate spoke for an hour, followed by the other candidate speaking for 90 minutes. The first candidate then had half an hour for a rebuttal. So, of course, there was more detail, more compelling rhetoric! There was more time to present points, and there were more opportunities to prepare what the candidates were going to say.
A critical point here is that the spoken word conveys information at a much slower rate than does print. Read the preceding paragraph again to yourself and then read it out loud. See the gap? Now imagine the difference in giving someone an hour to read something vs. an hour to watch a discussion. In which case is more information conveyed?
Even those three 90-minute debates posited above probably won’t draw the audience that presidential debates used to. Instead, many people will see only snippets of the debate on social media — often the ones that their political coalition found most useful. And that’s assuming well-intentioned actors! Throw in a candidate who wants only to steamroll his opponent, and the informational value of the affair collapses almost entirely.
Which brings us to the predilection for calls — particularly from young conservative men — that nearly everything be subject to “debate.”
It’s not immediately clear where this pattern began, and it doesn’t really matter. Maybe it simply evolved out of the cable news world and such shows as “Crossfire.” Perhaps it was the rise of commentator Ben Shapiro or the weird subplot in the 2016 campaign that Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) should win the Republican nomination solely because his supporters salivated at his dismantling Hillary Clinton in a debate. Whatever the provenance, it is now an established tactic, so much so that it has inspired memes and cartoons alike.
It certainly would not have become what it is without the internet and social media. A combination of internet-dependent things — echo chambers in which people become convinced that they are both well-versed and correct, a system that rewards viral dissections of one’s opponents — helps drive the idea that real-time debate is the best mechanism for resolving disagreement.
Perhaps the most important factor, though, is the internet’s reinforcement of the idea that people can become experts on anything by “doing their own research.” Often this simply means substituting the views of an actual expert for the views of someone who is questioning the expert, rewarding the perhaps innate sense in people (and particularly young men) that they know better than the people who are telling them what to do. Without this sense that anyone can reach conclusions about complicated issues that are as valid as those of people who’ve spent years studying the subject, though, this call for “debate” immediately collapses. After all, in no objective sense does an entertainer-turned-podcast host have an equal claim to expertise as an expert. But in a world where the words of a woman who spent four years of college and 10 years in the field on a subject sit alongside Alex Jones in Google search results, figuring out whom to trust is seen as a coin flip.
(There’s a corollary here, of course: the decreased confidence Americans have in institutions and expertise. It has been useful for various actors — snake-oil salesmen, politicians, criminals — to cast authority as suspect and unreliable. It has been easy to cherry-pick examples when that has been the case, maligning authority in general. In this carefully crafted world, that Google-result equivalence is much easier to draw.)
What’s also important here is that the audience for debates between figures of authority and those who derive power from professional skepticism has, almost without exception, already made up its mind. You don’t think that the question of the efficacy of vaccines can be resolved by a debate between Robert Kennedy Jr. and a robustly educated doctor who is an expert on vaccines, as podcast host Joe Rogan has demanded, if you don’t already side with Kennedy. You and he differ only in the degree of your skepticism.
Of course some purported experts are dishonest or wrong! The debunked idea that vaccines are linked to autism derives largely from an abuse of the medical research process. But there is a process, however imperfect, for vetting and evaluating claims about science and medicine. It involves other experts reviewing and considering the subject. It involves testing methodologies and writing lengthy papers articulating competing claims and arguments. That autism research was retracted — not that anti-vaccine advocates are universally willing to accept it.
Now imagine a scenario with an expert who is objectively correct about a subject. She is challenged to a debate by a guy who read a thing online and she agrees to participate. It turns out, though, that the expert isn’t very good at debating — or, as is very often the case, her opponent is disinterested in actually debating in favor of yelling at and belittling her. For those watching, the effect is that the expert was unable to defend her position. Clips spread on social media. The idea that the objectively correct position is indefensible spreads widely. No one reads her research — not that most people would understand it even if they did.
The reality is that these seemingly incessant calls for debate are lazy cop-outs, ideally suited for the rhetorical moment. No one is sitting through a 21-hour-long series of debates. Few people read policy papers from candidates. We have trained ourselves to be less well-informed and convinced ourselves that we’re smarter for doing so.
We have turned “debate” into a cudgel meant not to inform but to entertain, to validate our skepticism and to feed our dislike of our opponents. Change my mind: Maybe we should stop?
