The first 2020 presidential debate between President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden was a lively one. Insults were thrown, credentials were mocked, and interruptions were plentiful. Many, including yours truly, were quick to lament the querulous spectacle.
The idea of formal debate holds a vaunted, almost mythical place in our collective imagination. Coverage of political debates often invoke hoary notions of “civil discourse” and “democracy in action.” Yet this reputation of politesse and civility is largely unearned, and it is useful to remember that last week’s debate was not something altogether unprecedented.
Political debate, as with most other methods of civic and political activity, comes to us from Ancient Greece. If one is looking for the “father of debate,” then the Greek teacher Protagoras of Abdera (c. 490-420 B.C.) is as good a candidate as any. Protagoras was a sophist, an educated scholar who would, for a fee, teach youth the arts of rhetoric and politics. Of course, as a sophist, Protagoras promulgated the objectivity-denying idea of philosophical and existential relativism (“man is the measure of all things”), or what we now call “sophistry.” For this, he was denounced soundly by Plato in his Apologies and dialogues of Theaetetus and Protagoras. The so-called “father of debate” eventually drowned at sea while fleeing Athens after being charged with impiety.
As time passed and Enlightenment ideals took root, debate became more focused on civility. As Frank Whelan has observed, by the 19th century, the rules of formal debate in England had evolved such that one clerk of the House of Commons described the ideal decorum as “a body of educated gentlemen when meeting … at a rather formal dinner.” Yet norms only take you so far. For instance, members were forbidden from accusing each other of lying. “To get around this unwritten rule, in 1906 a young MP named Winston Churchill in the heat of debate said his opponent was guilty of a ‘grave terminological inexactitude.’”
Trump lacks Churchill’s felicity, but he’s not entirely removed from the American rhetorical tradition. John Randolph, for example, was a congressman and senator from Virginia and one of early America’s most, shall we say, vivid rhetoricians. “Like rotten mackerel by moonlight, he shines but he stinks,” Randolph once stated of a congressman whom he held to be clever yet dishonorable. “You pride yourself on an animal faculty, in respect to which the slave is your equal and the jackass infinitely your superior,” he declared of Rhode Island’s Tristram Burges in a debate on the House floor. Compared to Randolph, Trump’s claim that “there’s nothing smart about you, Joe” is downright tame.
