Christopher Hitchens, whose legacy I profiled in this magazine in January, was asked in 2009 about the state of public rhetoric and debate in America. His reply was not sanguine. Reflecting on his training in English debate and the parliamentary model, he noted that the American institutions of “debate” are misnamed:
“There’s never been a debate in the Senate. Though I’ve heard there’s been such things reported as having occurred, there’s never been one as far as I know. All that happens is that different senators or representatives get up and give the speech they were going to give anyway and then sit down. They don’t exchange. They don’t do thrust and parry, at any level at all. It’s just, ‘Here’s my view on this, and now the honorable gentleman can give his.’ There’s no interpenetration of opposites. The same is true of presidential debates now, which I think in fact are wrongly so-called. The ground rules of the presidential debates are the two candidates can’t speak directly to each other. That means by definition it’s not a debate. It’s all run through the moderator. It’s more like a joint press conference. By contrast, most TV supposed ‘debates’ are merely shouting matches, where there’s no attempt, really, to state contrasting positions.”
Americans can be forgiven, then, for thinking they are watching two people have a debate when they aren’t really. When it’s 10 people on the stage, as the Democratic Party arranged for two consecutive nights, the chances that there will be even a moment of “interpenetration of opposites” rather than shouting matches and canned speeches are close to zip. Buzzwords and empty signaling dominate politics now, and there are half a dozen-plus little-known candidates trying to make a good first impression. So even more likely than shouting matches or joint press conferences or debate is something more like two hours of small talk, really.
When you see these spectacles billed as debates and when the pundits and talking heads provide extended after-the-fact commentary about who won and who lost, just remember that what you watched was not really a debate. And nobody really won or lost. They’re not organized that way. The only real loser is our ideas and habits around disputation and argumentation, which get messier and messier every time we hear a “Lil’ Marco” levied or have to imagine that seven different new trillion-dollar spending plans can be funded by taxing the same Wall Street institutions, all without anybody challenging one another’s ideas in a serious way.
That’s not debate at all. That’s bait.
