Here’s how Stoermer describes Liberal Nationalism and the role it plays in american politics:
There’s a belief system that combines two things — first, that change must happen through official channels (voting, courts, proper debate), and second, that this procedural faith is wrapped in American exceptionalism. The system isn’t just legitimate. It is sacred because America itself is exceptional.
Now here’s where it gets complicated. Klein says the project is “the American experiment.” Newsom builds on that. Kirk said the same things, but meant something completely different. Kirk’s American experiment would destroy Klein’s and Newsom’s — he wanted to dismantle multiracial democracy, restrict voting, and return to what he called the real Founders’ vision. That would end everything Klein and Newsom claim to value.
Yet Klein’s nationalism enables Kirk’s. By treating Kirk’s anti-democratic project as legitimate discourse within the American experiment, by claiming they share common ground, Klein validates extremism as just another voice in the great American conversation.
And I keep wondering: Does the white Christian nationalist movement understand something about liberal nationalism that we don’t? Do they realize that as long as they frame their goals in terms of the Constitution, the Founders, and the American experiment, individuals like Klein will always find common ground with them?
I found other notable liberal figures saying similar things while perusing twitter. Notably senator John Fetterman recently insisted that americans (sorry, I refuse to capitalize demonyms. Sue me) should stop calling Trump an autocrat and pleaded for toning down the anti-Trump rhetoric. To me this attitude plays right into MAGA’s hands. This is the kind of stuff that whitewashes bigotry and helps reactionaries move the Overton window further right.
I would venture that in a similar situation, on this side of the pond we would be out on the streets, striking the economy to a screeching halt. But in the US, there seems to be this nationalist bootlicking mentality that prevents people from even considering direct action, simply because they believe the system will somehow fix itself and everything will be honky dory in the end.
I can’t help but think the US of A was never truly the haven of freedom we were told it was. And as much as I appreciate the comparably stronger fighting spirit of the working class here, I’m not sure it will be enough to resist the rise of the far right here in Europe either, propped up by the ever influential american politics. I’m a pessimist, so please give me hope, or don’t. Thoughts, please?
Not sure what your point is? You want to justify your lifestyle as MAGA healthy?
What’s your point?
Fuck off retard, let the adults speak
You mean let the ones speak who support your twisted narrative and the ones opposed shut up?
Congratulations!
I’m not completely clear on Stoermer’s thesis. I’m not clear on the meaning of “liberal nationalism”.
In my experience, appeals to American Exceptionalism are usually from the political right, not the left.
A large difference here is that a president is elected for 4 years. There isn’t a lot we can do about it until the 4 years are up. That’s very different from a parliamentary system, where the prime minister can be forced out even before there is a new election.
dazz:
Yeah, Fetterman is a huge disappointment. I don’t know how much of it is related to his stroke, but reports are that he behaves erratically and isn’t the same person he was before he was stricken.
There are always people who are too quick to label and end up exaggerating, but that isn’t true in the case of Trump’s critics. He truly is a wannabe autocrat. I’ve posted this video before:
TRUMP CAUGHT ON CAMERA: says he wants “his people” to obey him like in North Korea
Then there was his weird and creepy “Long live the king” statement. He self-identifies as a wannabe autocrat and he acts like one. Anyone who doesn’t take that seriously is making a big mistake. Trump thinks out loud, and some of the thoughts that we all hoped were just thoughts have unfortunately come true.
Let’s call a spade a spade, and an autocrat an autocrat.
I seem to remember you don’t like to watch videos, but this is a short one, please give it a go. There’s also a pretty comprehensive writeup in the video description if you want to check it out.
To the best of my knowledge, Stoermer’s point is that liberals have historically resisted necessary changes in the US for fear that that would piss off people on the right, prioritizing the fictional common conception of what it means to be american based on fundational myths. IOW, tolerating intolerance for the sake of unity. Until shit hits the fan, and then the price to pay for that is way bigger than it would have been otherwise
Of course Trump is an autocrat, but I’m more interested in discussing why there seems to be no resistance from the liberals in the US to the brazen betrayal by the right, of those supposedly sacred american values that are assumed to keep the nation united.
You know, the motto “when they go low, we go high” doesn’t seem to be working great, does it? I think the main issue is that there’s no true left wing in America willing or capable of pushing back against the rising fascist movement there
I did watch it (before posting my earlier response).
I’m not sure what he is referring to there. The Democrats aren’t all liberals. Some Democrats are pretty conservative. And they cannot just wave a magic wand and make changes. When they have won in recent years, it has been with a very thin majority and with some conservative Democrats unwilling to vote for their agenda.
Neil Rickert,
To me that sounds exactly like the attitude that Stoermer describes in his video, something like: “what else can we do other than trusting the system?” all the while the (far) right is blowing up the system from within.
I don’t know, Neil, if you have watched the video and you still don’t know what he’s talking about, maybe I made it all up or something.
I’m not saying that you made it up. But I have no idea what he thinks the Democrats could have done to change things.
I can’t speak for him, but I don’t think this is about liberals or democrats, or maybe it is, I don’t know. As I said in my OP, I think the problem is that there never was a true left wing movement in the US to push back against social injustice.So the problem metastasizes until there’s nothing anybody can do
dazz:
I worry about that too, but there are some hopeful signs. Trump’s approval rating is in the toilet. The No Kings protests drew some five million protesters. Governor Newsom in my state of California has a measure on the ballot that would authorize mid-cycle redistricting to offset the sleazy move by Republicans in Texas to steal House seats. The Democratic governors of Illinois, New York, and Maryland are working toward that, also. In Congressional hearings, Democrats are going after Trump administration officials with an intensity I have never seen against any administration.
I also think that this is a critical mass situation, where the resistance will snowball at some point when enough people are on board. The crazy shit that Trump is doing is pushing us toward that point. Let’s just hope that we reach it before democracy dies completely.
dazz:
People with dignity and scruples are always at a disadvantage with respect to people like Trump, who has neither. They restrain themselves and abide by norms, while Trump sets out to violate them. They have consciences, and Trump does not. They value honesty and want to tell the truth, while Trump lies his way through life.
So yes, they’re at a disadvantage, and that is partly what Stoermer is bemoaning. But there are hopeful signs, too. Democrats are getting down in the dirt in a way they haven’t before while still maintaining their moral standards. Think of Newsom and Pritzker. Newsom is outright trolling Trump, posting Trump-style tweets, referring to “grandpa” “not taking his dementia meds”, and so on. Not only are the criticisms valid, but they also get under the orange skin of the famously insecure Trump. I think the days of “when they go low, we go high” are over, at least until Trump and any mini-Trumps are out of the White House and America is safely back in the hands of the grown-ups.
keiths,
Well, Newsome also said that
As you said before, we need to call a spade a spade. Kirk was no free speech maximalist who simply wanted to debate libs. He was a far right troll who was normalizing hate speech for profit (and a Russian asset as well, adding another layer of treasonous filth to his legacy), but Newsom says we need to continue his work, and no fucking body bats an eye!
You seem to have a lot of faith in the Democratic establishment and their ability to turn things around within the system, just as Stoermer said, but are there really any meaningful checks and balances left to do that? Trump already controls the executive, the legislative, the judiciary, the military and he’s now moving to control the media as well. He’s rounding up people on the streets to perform an ethnic cleansing, sending the National Guard to blue states, and Democrats think the appropriate answer to that is to fight for a few seats in the House. I don’t know, Keiths, not convinced to be honest.
I’m not seeing it, not gonna lie. Trolling Trump on twitter seems way too tepid a response to me, but what do I know. As I said already, the situation calls for much, much more decisive action from everyone on the left in the US. Protests are fine, but those don’t really work without general strikes IMO, but most of the working class in the US is not unionized and I don’t think they have any real class consciousness anyway.
I don’t know, it all seems to boil down to democrats trusting the system will somehow fix itself, but will it?
I’ll start with your opening position:
My reading of American history (and yes, I studied it with some diligence) is that these beliefs were always intended to be limited. Yeah, founders wanted free and fair elections – but limited the vote to white adult male property owners – an estimated 5% of the population. And even that wasn’t enough; they wanted to pre-select the candidates not according to public preference but according to their own idea of what sort of man qualified and could be trusted to see things their way. And they erected more protective barriers against public participation, because direct election was not trusted, so even Senators were elected by slates of electors – and those electors were chosen to ensure no Senator could be elected who didn’t fit the mold.
What they intuitively understood, and what the Trump experience is hammering home, is that the American public is deeply conservative in what liberals consider the worst way – they distrust “the other” (those who don’t look or speak like them), they’re deeply uncomfortable with the notion of women having independent intelligence or that they deserve equal rights, they know intuitively that people who are different are inherently criminal, unintelligent, not the sort you’d want as a neighbor. It’s not coincidence that America is by far the most religious nation in the First World. Liberals fear the notion of a constitutional convention, because polls tells us a majority would enthusiastically do away with the bill of rights – except the second half of the second amendment.
So I see Americans, in depressingly large numbers, as being die-hard Trumpies opposed to same-sex marriage, abortion, integration. And solidly in favor of bring prayer to the Christian god back into the classrooms and workplaces. It’s no accident that Fox News draws more viewers than all other news networks combined. And it’s no accident that women were the very last group to get the right to vote (long after negroes), and that the two times Trump won the election, he ran against a woman. The second time, people knew how unqualified Trump was, and he still beat a woman rather easily. And any understanding of what’s happening needs to include an explanation for Republicans in Congress watching American political beliefs and values melt away and doing nothing to stop it.
So yes, it’s good for any political system to rest on the will of the people, and provide a means for that will to be expressed unimpeded. I think Americans are now realizing that you can only freely elect a dictator once – there will never be an opportunity to vote him out of you don’t like it. Sure, there will be regular elections. Historically, worldwide, autocrats never lose elections. Republicans are working hard to control voting for a good reason – who controls the polls controls the results.
dazz:
To be fair to Newsom, he did specify exactly what he meant by continuing Kirk’s work: engaging in “spirited discourse”. No one who’s paid any attention to Newsom would construe his statement as an endorsement of Kirk’s ideology.
Kirk was a creep, no doubt, but that isn’t incompatible with supporting free speech. He did say this, for instance:
You can argue about how consistent he was in his support of that principle, but his statement was pretty unambiguous. And it makes sense. For anyone whose ideas are as detestable as Kirk’s, free speech protections are hugely important. It’s ironic that among the people on the right who are now sanctifying him, few are condemning the Trump administration’s assault on free speech.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve never been more worried about the future of American democracy. I’m just pushing back against your statement that “there seems to be no resistance from the liberals in the US to the brazen betrayal by the right, of those supposedly sacred american values that are assumed to keep the nation united.” There is resistance from the left and from the population at large, and I’ve pointed to some positive signs of that resistance.
It sounds like you’re at the point where you think that nothing can be done “within the system” to save it. What sorts of things “outside the system” do you think need to be done?
Flint:
That’s what’s most disturbing to me about the present situation. The Us-vs-Themming is rampant, and a significant swath of the American population is buying into it with Trump’s encouragement. I grew up in Indiana among neighbors and friends who were decent, salt-of-the-earth types for the most part, the kind of people who would go out of their way to help you out when you needed it. While there was certainly some us-vs-themming, it was nothing like it is now. For that and a bunch of other reasons, I have a hard time reconciling their support of Trump with their character as I remember it.
The world will always be plagued with irredeemable people like Trump, Stephen Miller, Kash Patel, and the like. What’s disturbing is that so many seemingly decent people wholeheartedly support them.
I’m no longer in contact with most of my Indiana friends and neighbors, and I tend to avoid discussing politics with the ones I’m still connected to. You live in deep-red Alabama, IIRC, so you have more contact with MAGA types than I do, now that I live in a liberal city on the west coast. In their everyday behavior, are they as decent as they were before they became Trump supporters? If so, do they not see the tension between that and their support of Trump’s depredations?
It’s important to bear in mind that nobody is coercing the large majority of “news” consumers to select Fox News from all the alternatives. And I think while Murdoch himself may be conservative, he has found the source of Big Money and serves it what it pays for. Trump has tapped into the mother lode of public sentiment, and those values are his, so he need not calculate, only emote.
Flint:
Which is crucial, since calculation is definitely not his forte. Some people portray Trump as a great political strategist, which always makes me laugh. Trump’s strategy is basically just to be himself, raw and unfiltered. Though it boggles my mind, there are a lot of people like Bill who are attracted to that.
Flint,
So you think the that the majority of americans are now MAGA? I know Trump won the popular vote in the 2024 election, but didn’t consider that to be possibility, since for all I know, people who don’t vote are disproportionally liberals/leftists.
I never said that Newsom endorsed Kirk’s ideology, all I’m saying is that portraying him as nothing more than someone who engaged in spirited discourse is still whitewashing Kirk in my book. It’s like those (a lot of people, in fact) who label Kirk as a “conservative activist”. I think words matter, and those things only help normalize bigotry within conservatism. Not too long ago, pretty much everybody would agree Kirk was a right-wing extremist, a far right troll.
I don’t believe and never will, that Kirk gave a flying fuck for freedom of speech. This is a trick of the far right that is as old as time: they co-opt the left’s narrative, in an exercise of projection, because in doing it it’s implied that the left is against free speech, and any criticism is taken as proof of that.
Again, general strikes would be a good start. Stopping the economy on its tracks can be very persuasive.
Not exactly. I think the MAGA people are a very dedicated minority, so no insult or evidence can ever matter to them. But I think there has been a distinctive rightward swing in the general population. Imagine the response across the entire broadcast and blogosphere if Biden had done any of a randomly selected sample of what Trump has done. Trump polls underwater, but Democrats poll worse. Compare the different coverages of Biden’s age vs. Trump’s age.
Yes, I agree this normalization has been a problem. Even the most vitriolic right wing voices are given neutral descriptions like “debater” or “podcaster.”
Yeah, whenever Trump accuses anyone of anything, you know it’s an admission of his own behavior. Projection is one of his most effective lies. I think we agree that it’s not that Trump and the right wing lie, it’s that it works so well.
Good luck with that. Nationally, Presidential elections are determined by very narrow margins. Generally less than 2% either way. We see “millions” protesting nationwide, but if every one of those marchers went on general strike, they’d be no more than an economic blip. There’s a world of difference between being unified and being polarized.
dazz, to Flint:
Far from it. Less than 20% of Americans identify as MAGA, and only around 50% of Republicans. Trump support ≠ MAGA support.
No, they aren’t disproportionately liberal. Some of the polling data is for all eligible voters, and some is for likely voters or people who voted in the last election. The Trump/Harris split was roughly the same between both groups.
I know, but you seem to regard Newsom’s approval of Kirk’s willingness to debate as somehow legitimizing Kirk’s views.
When has Newsom characterized Kirk as “nothing more than someone who engaged in spirited discourse”? He has said that he’s “deeply offended” by Kirk’s views. It’s possible to approve of Kirk’s willingness to discuss and debate while despising his views. That’s where I am, in fact.
There’s an argument to be had over whether engaging with a creep like Kirk is counterproductive. There was an analogous concern among evolutionists, with some believing that merely engaging with creationists was a victory for them — an implicit acknowledgment that there was a legitimate scientific debate to be had. With Kirk, it was a tradeoff. Yes, there was a risk of inadvertently legitimizing his positions, but he also had a huge following, and it’s important to reach the persuadeable portion of that following. I would argue that engaging was the better choice. On the other hand, engaging with someone like Nick Fuentes, who only has a fringe following, would be counterproductive.
Whatever his motives, he did provide a platform for opposing views, sometimes at a cost to himself. He seems to have taken a beating at his Cambridge Union debate, for instance, based on the reports I’ve read.
keiths:
dazz:
That’s unlikely for a number of reasons. General strikes aren’t really a part of American culture, the percentage of the work force that is unionized is small, and political strikes are actually illegal here.
But I don’t think this can be ruled out, because turnouts vary quite a lot. One of Trump’s lies about the 2020 election was that he couldn’t have lost, because he received more votes than any previous Presidential candidate. Which he did, it’s just that Biden got more votes.
For one term, Alabama actually had a Democrat as Senator because his opponent, Roy Moore, was shown to be a sex offender. But that didn’t mean more votes for Democrats, it meant that Republicans found nobody they could stand to voter for, and stayed home.
There is an excellent chance that Trump is sufficiently unpopular among Republican voters for the same thing to happen – they won’t vote for Trump (or his toadies) so they won’t vote at all. I think that is very likely if SCOTUS somehow discovers that the 22nd Amendment means the opposite of what it said, just like they “discovered” this with the 14th Amendment when it worked against Trump.
Most national elections are close enough that if a couple percent of voters for one party decide not to vote, that determines the winner. I have no national data to suggest whether offended Republican voters are more likely to vote Democrat, or to stay home. But historically, the vast majority will vote Republican because they always have, and don’t understand any of the issues.
keiths:
Flint:
Turnout doesn’t matter for those polls that look at eligible voters as a whole, not just likely voters or past voters. My point is that if there were disproportionately many liberals among the nonvoters, the polls that looked at eligible voters would have shown significantly less support for Trump than the ones that looked only at actual voters or likely voters. We didn’t see that.
He keeps repeating it, too. I can’t decide whether he’s deliberately lying or just too dense to understand the math. Ditto for his mathematically illiterate claim that he’s going to bring drug prices down by percentages greater than 100%:
Flint:
That would be great. My message to Republican voters: If you’re disgusted with Trump but can’t bring yourself to vote for Democrats, that’s OK. Just stay home, and you’ll be doing the entire country a favor.
Right, that seems to be happening here in Europe as well. The Overton window is moving further right by the minute, and I agree with Stoermer, a lot of it has to do with how Democrats/Liberals have been handling the situation for decades, even centuries, tolerating brazen bigotry for the sake of unity, until it becomes obvious that unity is impossible with people who are not concerned with tolerance at all.
That’s why I’m a pessimist (more on this bellow in my response to Keiths)
Someone who wants to engage in political discourse and really wants to debate is someone who does so in good faith. For fucks sake, that was not Kirk and we all know that. Newsom knows that, and you don’t characterize someone like Kirk as a champion of spirited discourse unless you’re trying to appease MAGA, while MAGA is out in full force demanding retribution even before the motivations for the assassination are known. Is MAGA willing to engage in “spirited discourse” about who Tyler Robinson was and why he killed Kirk? No! they “knew” it was a leftist crime the split second they learned about Kirk’s death! Newsom could have easily said that he’s all for free speech and spirited discourse without implying Kirk was too, just make it very clear there are limits to the things that are debatable, that good faith is a necessary precondition for discourse, and not everyone deserves to be debated. Imagine someone killed a paedophile and someone said: “I’m deeply offended by his choice of sexual partners, but the guy championed sexual freedom and we should debate outraged pedos to avoid sowing division”. Do you honestly think MAGA will still be feigning support for open discourse once they’ve completely wiped out democracy?
What people like Klein, Newsome and Fetterman are doing is enabling MAGA, falling for their trap, and letting them control the narrative. The bigots know they can keep pushing the boundaries and Liberals will always choose to go high, there’s no real pushback and so things keep getting worse. Meanwhile, the statistics say that something like 80-90% of the political murders committed in the US are committed by right wing extremists, and despite of that, Liberals are letting MAGA control the narrative and convince people by the millions, that violence comes from the left, and using that to justify attacks on democracy, freedom of speech, the media, etc…
When is it going to stop? Is it too late already?
Maybe, just maybe, he managed to ammass such a huge following precisely (or partly) because Liberals kept avoiding calling a spade a spade, and they keep enabling hate speech superspreaders?
I know, that’s another reason why this looks to me like a catch-22 situation. How could there be a culture of protests against social injustice in the streets, when it’s frowned upon to push back against bigotry in public discourse to begin with? I understand there have been massive protests in the past in the US, like the Civil Rights Movement, but correct me if I’m wrong, those are always met with state violence there. So much for the freest country in the world.
But maybe there’s another way to make some progress: stop playing their game. Stop enabling misogynistic, racist, homophobic, transphobic and aporophobic dirtbags. Take control of the narrative and tell them you’re willing to debate, but what needs to be debated is that good faith and intellectual honesty are necessary prerequisites for productive exchanges of ideas, and that hate speech is out of bounds, unless they’re willing to be treated accordingly. Defuse the MAGA narrative, explain that it makes no sense to tolerate intolerance, and take the masks off those liars so everybody can see their true colors.
I think riches and power have always been attractants – probably buried deep in our evolutionary history. To men, and women. I joke that some MAGAs seem a step away from offering their wives as concubines!
Trump is full of contradictions – he is so obviously stupid, and yet it must take a certain amount of craft to seize power so comprehensively, and crush opposition. I think Flint nailed it above though:
He just has to be himself, and people love it. Go figure.
As to the future of democracy: to echo Henry Ford, you can have any colour you like as long as it’s red. Crush the left, perpetual power, a confimatory election every 4 years to give the illusion of choice.
dazz:
What does “in good faith” mean to you, in the context of political discourse and debate? It’s clear that Kirk was a creep and that he saw debate as a tool for advancing his detestable political agenda. He was never going to change his mind, no matter how compelling the arguments of his opponents. It’s questionable whether he would have continued to advocate for free speech in a thoroughly MAGAfied world where his views were ascendant. However, he was willing to give his opponents a platform and debate them publicly. That doesn’t make him a saint or even “a great kid”, as Bill put it, and it doesn’t legitimize his hateful views. It just means that he was willing to debate. He really did want “spirited discourse”. That’s all that Newsom was acknowledging, as far as I can tell, and it’s all that I am acknowledging.
Yes, and Kimmel was right about that, which is yet another reason his suspension was ridiculous. But don’t forget that this isn’t just about liberals vs MAGA. There’s a political spectrum, and there are people in the middle who are capable of changing their minds. Many of them already have, which is why Trump’s approval rating among independents had cratered to 29% the last time I checked. Would the left’s refusal to engage with the right sway people who are right-leaning? An unwillingness to engage could be seen as evidence of closed-mindedness or an inability to defend leftist positions.
Wasn’t Kirk in favor of free speech and spirited discourse? I didn’t pay much attention to him until after his death, but I haven’t heard anything to indicate that he wasn’t. His whole shtick was to host debates on college campuses. “Prove me wrong” was the tagline.
First, putting Kirk on a par with pedophiles isn’t going to be persuasive to his supporters. Second, imagine a world in which pedophilia was legal and a large percentage of the population supported it. Would it be the right move to refuse to engage them, and not to try to convince them that they were harming children? Discussion doesn’t imply approval. You can be adamantly opposed to someone and still engage with them. Think about the Hamas/Israel peace negotiations. Those negotiators probably revile each other, but they still talk to each other, and for good reason.
No, but I think nevertheless that liberals should debate and discuss with them, without in any way indicating support for their positions.*
I just can’t see how engaging with them amounts to letting them control the narrative, and how refusing to engage with them would benefit the left.
Also, lumping Newsom in with Fetterman is unfair. Fetterman argues that we shouldn’t label Trump an autocrat. Newsom doesn’t hesitate. For example, of Trump’s actions during the invasion of Los Angeles, Newsom said “These are the acts of a dictator, not a President.”
What are the ways in which you think they should be going low, but aren’t?
keiths:
dazz:
I don’t think it’s frowned upon. I’m just explaining why it doesn’t happen in the form of general strikes.
Trying to dictate what can and cannot be debated is something neither side will accept from the other.
When their hatreds are a major point of contention, how do you avoid the topic? If we want to argue against Kirk’s position that successful black women are DEI hires, we can’t just say “we’re going to argue against your position, but if you try to argue for it, we walk.”
All of that can be done while still engaging with them, and I’d argue that we can better achieve those aims if we do engage with them.
Your moral indignation is justified, and I share it. I just don’t think that liberals are legitimizing MAGA views or letting them control the narrative simply by acknowledging the willingness of someone like Kirk to engage in debate.
* There are plenty of unprincipled free speech advocates who are for it only because they see it as advantageous for their side. I heard a clip of an interview with Ted Cruz, who has come out strongly against Trump and Brendan Carr on the Kimmel issue. In that interview, Cruz basically said that if we allow government censorship, conservatives are going to suffer when the Democrats are in power. He wasn’t defending the principle; he was just thinking about what was best for his side.
keiths,
I don’t know if I can respond to that without repeating myself ad nauseam to be honest, I might try tomorrow, but it saddens me to see you swallowing the MAGA narrative that people like Kirk are all about free exchange of ideas, hook, line and sinker. That’s exactly the kind of attitude from Liberals that’s helping MAGA neo-fascists get away with their liberticidal agenda.
Hitting below the belt is against the rules ONLY if the referee enforces it. If one contestant uses this as a normal technique and it’s not enforced, then what the other contestant does really isn’t important – if he retaliates in kind, you don’t have a valid contest, and if he doesn’t he loses anyway. The sport of boxing died basically because rules weren’t enforced and decisions weren’t objective. A few cheaters won but ultimately everybody lost.
Today’s politics are much the same – one side has decided that the rules – the rule of law, the importance of precedent, the influence of practice and tradition, even the notion that decisions should reflect some principles other than predetermining the desired outcome – means that the concepts of good faith or the loyal opposition have been lost. The other side gets to choose between permanent minority status and permanent anarchy because those are the only options available.
Biden nailed it when he observed that for Republicans, elections can have only two results – either they win, or the election was rigged! Too many Americans have by now bought into the idea that the opponents can’t win a fair election, because their very act of winning renders the election fraudulent ipso facto. We’re all going down a one-way street. Since elections cannot be fair and free, they aren’t really elections and all that matters is power. Trump has been consistent in undermining the notion that elections are fair and their results matter.
In other news, Disney/ABC has decided to bring Kimmel back, but this isn’t much of a victory because nearly every outlet is owned by either Nexstar or Sinclair, and they are NOT going to air Kimmel. So Kimmel will be live on all 8 stations nationwide that ABC actually owns.
dazz:
It’s clear that you think I’ve been hoodwinked, but I’m still fuzzy on exactly what I’ve been hoodwinked about. To me it’s a simple matter of fact: Kirk went to campuses to debate students. He wanted spirited debate, and he got it. I didn’t have to swallow a MAGA talking point in order to reach that conclusion. I simply observed what Kirk did.
I mean, the guy flew across the Atlantic, visited both Cambridge and Oxford, invited the students there to challenge him, and engaged in open debate with them. (And according to the reports I’ve read, got pwned.) If he didn’t want spirited debate, why did he carefully create all of the conditions that led to it?
You seem to be saying that if we acknowledge Kirk’s desire for spirited debate, we’re somehow giving him undue credit. I’m not seeing it. It doesn’t make him a hero, it doesn’t legitimize his hatred, it doesn’t validate his arguments, it doesn’t even mean that his motives were pure and that he cherished the principle of free speech. He very well might not have. It just means that he wanted spirited debate. And that’s not surprising, because spirited debate appears to have won him a lot of converts. It benefitted him.
I don’t see any inconsistency in saying that Kirk was a racist, a homophobe, a transphobe, a misogynist, a generally horrible person, and a guy who sought spirited discourse with his opponents. Where’s the contradiction? What’s false about any of that?
There’s plenty about Kirk to criticize in reality, so why insist on saying something untrue about him that could undermine our credibility with fence-sitters?
Exactly, thank you Flint. I could never be half as eloquent as you are.
keiths,
You just don’t get it. Kirk wasn’t interested in debating libs, it was all about controlling the narrative and getting libs triggered, because that’s what gives these people views in social media, which is what their ultimate goal is, not debating in universities.
They don’t argue in good faith, and the tactic is simple: they vomit an outrageously racist, misogynistic, homophobic, etc. talking point just to get a reaction from the left/libs,if that gets thoroughly debunked by their interlocutor, it doesn’t fucking matter, they just move on to the next talking point, rinse and reapeat. When all is said and done, it doesn’t fucking matter if they’ve been thoroughly defeated, because the goal was not to debate anybody, the goal was to control the conversation: If they manage to slip in 30 bigoted talking points, that’s 30 bigoted talking points libs have engaged and helped normalize in public discourse. That’s 30 times they’ve successfully managed to control the narrative. Kirk regularly edited those interchanges to make it look in his social media like he was owning the libs and getting them triggered. He exploited other people’s will to debate in good faith, and that’s why he was so successful at recruiting idiots into the MAGA movement. You claim we need to debate these con artists in order to convince independents who are in the fence, but how’s that been working for you so far? Not great, I would argue. The only thing it accomplishes is to help neo-fascists move the Overton window (here I am repeating myself, as always) further right, one fallacy at a time. Once those “independents” are already right wing enough, good luck with getting them to fall on your side of the fence.
A problem is that US politics are binary.
dazz:
He went to the trouble of getting on a plane, crossing the Atlantic, driving to Cambridge and Oxford, debating the students there, but he had no interest in doing that?
Debating in universities was a means to an end for Kirk. He wanted to promote his racist, homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic agenda, and he saw spirited debate as a way of doing that. People debate for a reason, and that was Kirk’s reason. The fact that we disapprove of his agenda is irrelevant to the question of whether he wanted debate. He definitely did.
If you think liberals shouldn’t debate people like Kirk, fine — there’s an argument to be made for that, just as there’s an argument to be made for not debating creationists. But whether it’s a good idea or not is separate from the simple, verifiable fact that Kirk wanted debate. I see no point in denying that when his whole shtick was to engage in debate, post YouTube videos, and try to sway people to his point of view. He clearly wanted debate.
Which may be true by your definition of good faith, but it doesn’t change the fact that Kirk did argue. I’ve only seen a couple of snippets of him in action, but in those snippets, he actually presented arguments for his point of view. They were piss-poor arguments, but they were arguments. He was debating his opponents.
Trump’s approval among independents was 46% in January, and it was 29% when I last checked. That means that 17% of independents have already changed their minds, for whatever reason, and there are presumably others who still support Trump but aren’t diehards. Are you saying that liberals shouldn’t try to persuade the persuadable? Should we just throw up our hands and cede the independents to the right?
Independents constitute a large percentage of the electorate. We can’t afford to write them off.
ETA: I looked up the numbers (from Gallup), and independents constitute 43% of the electorate, versus 28% who are Republicans and 28% who are Democrats. That’s huge.
Also, why put “independents” in quotes? There truly are independents here (but Bill isn’t one of them, lol). I’m an independent, though obviously my views align more with the Democrats than with the Republicans.
I give up. For whatever it’s worth, I can’t explain what I mean any better than I’ve already done.
dazz:
You’ve expressed yourself well, and I think I understand what you’re trying to say, but correct me if I get it wrong:
When I and others acknowledge that Kirk sought spirited debate, you think we’ve fallen for a false MAGA narrative and that we’re harming the liberal cause. We’re enabling people like Kirk who don’t argue in good faith and just want to repeat their odious talking points. They don’t really want open debate; they just want to exploit us. We’re playing their game, inadvertently amplifying their views, and treating them like legitimate opponents whose views simply differ from ours when in fact they are right-wing extremists and trolls. We’re being played, and it’s better not to engage with these people. Is that a fair summary of your position?
I’ve already explained where I disagree with you, so I won’t repeat myself unless something is unclear.
I’m still fuzzy on a few things, though: What does “in good faith” mean to you, and what would it take for a MAGA person to convince you that they were arguing in good faith? If they were, would you approve of engaging with them, despite their vile views? If engaging with people like Kirk is the wrong move, then what should liberals be doing, and would it be effective in swaying people?
This is a difficult question to answer, at least in part because it is a leading question – it implies constraints on what might be acceptable as a reply.
I think back to the “debates” between creationists and “evolutionists.” Note that this description is already loaded, in that it implies that “evolutionism” and creationism are just two sides of the same coin of religious belief. Creationist “debaters” did the same thing Charlie Kirk did – they defined the playing field in advance. Then the creationists did things like insist on selecting the moderator, and on the venue, and on the audience, and on what materials were sold in the lobby. Similarly, to “debate” Kirk you had to play in his ballpark according to his rules of engagement and decorum. At which point, Kirk engaged in what can to be labeled the “Gish gallop” – produce one false, incomplete, or misleading statement after another knowing that a detailed refutation of each statement (a) rested on knowledge the audience was known to lack; (b) would require time and attention not possible within the debate format; and (c) elicit cheers and jeers from an audience known to be favorable to Kirk’s politics or they wouldn’t have been there in the first place.
And so scientists debating creationists didn’t have a chance – they were trying to present nuanced and detailed scientific knowledge to a hostile audience looking for ratification of their beliefs, in a format that made such an informed presentation impossible. You simply aren’t going to convert a Charlie Kirk audience into liberals playing by his rules. You can’t explain the nature of political history at a pep rally. People like Kirk violate Moynihan’s dictum – they think they are entitled not only to their own opinion, but to their own facts.
Trump succeeds in politics not because his positions are more cogent or better supported or more convincing. He succeeds because he lies constantly and prodigiously. His narrative concocts an imaginary world where he gets to make up all the facts as needed, and spew them at an audience that can’t be arsed to know any better. In this context, “good faith” would mean both being entirely honest with the facts, and being willing to accept the facts presented by the opponents, and being willing to listen to the opposition and respond directly to the points they make.
I think you’ve argued your position well. “Change My Mind”/Prove Me Wrong” is a trick. A born-again Republican is really not in the business of having his mind changed. He’s not seeking to be persuaded; he’s serially sealioning, delivering lectures disguised as debates. He talks like a video on 1.25x, Gish gallops, relies on his skill as a debater, which is all these things ever reward. I wouldn’t go up against him because I don’t think on my feet well enough. I’ve seen people give him a good tonking, but that helps him too, just by broadening his reach.
keiths, to dazz:
Flint:
The only constraint is that the answer should address the question. Dazz is drawing a distinction between good-faith and bad-faith argumentation, so he must have criteria in mind by which he distinguishes the two. I’m just curious about what those criteria are, because they may differ from mine.
My second question is about whether a lack of good-faith argumentation (by his criteria) is the sole reason that dazz thinks we shouldn’t engage with the Kirks of the world, or whether there’s something else. More specifically, I’m wondering whether dazz thinks that someone who shares all of Kirk’s odious views but argues for them in good faith is worth debating.
Because of the “ism” suffix? If anyone makes that argument, it’s pretty easy to refute. There are plenty of isms that have nothing to do with religion, and any scientist debating a creationist is going to be talking about scientific evidence, not making religious arguments.
Evolutionists were under no obligation to accept the creationists’ terms of debate, and liberals are under no obligation to accept the debate terms of their opponents, either. Those are negotiable, and I’m certainly not arguing that liberals should accede to any and all conditions that their opponents seek to impose upon them.
In the snippets I’ve seen, the combatants weren’t playing in Kirk’s ballpark and following his rules of engagement and decorum. The venue was the Cambridge Union and the rules of engagement were perfectly reasonable and didn’t seem to favor Kirk. The moderator was a Cambridge student, not someone chosen by Kirk. Judging by their reactions, most (if not all) of the audience members were hostile to Kirk’s views. Kirk didn’t Gish gallop, at least not in the snippets I saw, and he was making actual arguments and citing evidence. I think his arguments were poor, but, at least in those snippets, he was truly debating. I’ll watch more of that debate to see if that impression holds generally.
You can say that again. He’s been particularly moronic the last couple of days.
And his supporters are either suckers who can’t figure that out, or even worse, they don’t care about his dishonesty since they’re on his team.
(Related: Border czar Tom Homan was caught on tape accepting $50,000 in cash, in a bag, from undercover FBI agents before the election. The DOJ quietly squashed the investigation, but the story finally came to light a couple of days ago. People are naturally furious. Megyn Kelly’s response:
She’s saying it out loud. She truly doesn’t care about corruption as long as it’s on the part of someone on Team Trump. Just imagine her howls of outrage if it had been an official in the Biden administration.)
It’s unrealistic to expect them to be entirely honest, but that’s OK. We don’t need to. Part of debate is showing that your opponents are either mistaken or lying about relevant things.If they ignore what you’re saying or dodge your questions, you can point that out. If they dispute your facts, you can cite your sources.If they change the subject, you can change it back.
I’m not saying that will work with every opponent. Some are incorrigible and incapable of having anything approaching a normal debate. They aren’t worth the trouble, but based on what I saw in those snippets, you could have an actual debate with Kirk.
My larger point in response to you and dazz is that given all that there is to criticize about people like Kirk, there’s no reason to say that they’re unwilling to debate if they actually are willing, and there’s no reason to treat them as a monolith, all guilty of the same debating sins, if in fact some of them aren’t. They vary in style, as do we. We don’t gain anything by making false statements about them. Our credibility is at stake. This is one of those areas in which “when they go low, we go high” actually makes sense as a strategy and not just as a nod to principle.
Allan:
Of course he isn’t, but the point of debating him isn’t to persuade him, it’s to persuade others who are actually persuadable.
All I can say is that I’ve seen instances where he’s not like that. I’ll reserve judgment until I’ve watched more clips of him in action.
I hate the debate format and would much rather see these debates take place in writing, with plenty of time for people to reflect and formulate their arguments as precisely and as comprehensively as they wish, but unfortunately, that isn’t something that most of the YouTube target audience would be willing to wade through.
It gains him more attention, but it also gains more attention for the views of the people who are tonking him. And the cost of not debating him is that his audience doesn’t see the opposing arguments, or worse still, thinks that the opposing arguments must be so poor that people are afraid to take him on.
Good faith vs bad faith comes into play when the debater is open to learning more on the topic. However, debates are, probably more often than not, about performance, sleak delivery and gaining reputation or notoriety. Charlie Kirk’s debating was a niche in his career conservative activism. He’s a conservative activist/campaigner/fundraiser in first order, while debating was secondary.
In Charlie Kirk’s debates, good faith or bad faith or interest in the topic is not a thing. The thing is to keep talking points afloat with the specific Repub spin, e.g. guns are always a constitutional right whereas “well-regulated” and “security of the State” in the same amendment shall be hushed down, immigration is always bad and illegal and a theft of jobs when foreigners do it (nevermind Americans who study, work and retire abroad, and nevermind the establishment of USA by colonial immigrants), welfare is bad when “inner city people” receive food stamps whereas farmer subsidies shall never be mentioned, etc.
This ties to the rules of this website. “Always assume good faith” seemed important from Lizzie’s point of view, because she wanted to learn what IDiots were getting at. However, IDiots did not have even remotely the same motivation. IDiots say IDiot things and are always happy to spread their gospel on yet another venue. The correct answer to IDiot evangelism – after having learned what they were getting at – was not to assume good faith on their part, but to expose the fact that they don’t have it.
Erik:
Right. Debate isn’t limited to showing that your opponent’s arguments fail. You can also show that they’ve resorted to dishonesty, Gish gallops, subject-changing, strawmanning, etc. You’re not helpless against those. If you can show the audience that your opponent is doing those things, their credibility will take a hit. Debate can be beneficial in those cases even if your opponent isn’t arguing in good faith.
That’s why I’m asking dazz to describe what constitutes good-faith argumentation in his view. Personally, I think debate can be productive even if my opponent is dishonest, doesn’t truly care about free speech, only wants to win, doesn’t care about the truth, is unpersuadable, etc, as long as there’s a genuine back-and-forth in which each of us lays out our arguments, defends them, listens to the other’s criticisms, and responds to what the other person says. It’s the true back-and-forth that makes a debate a debate.
I don’t even care if my opponent doesn’t believe a word they’re saying, as long as they engage in a back-and-forth that is actually responsive to what I’m saying. An argument is strong or weak, or true or false, independently of whether the person making the argument actually believes it. Arguing against a feigned belief can be as relevant as arguing against one that is fervently held.
The most annoying thing about debating Bill is that he rarely debates. Unlike Kirk, he doesn’t want spirited debate and generally runs from it. I would much rather have an opponent who stood their ground and engaged.
ETA: I should probably add that given a choice, of course I would prefer an opponent who was honest, didn’t misrepresent the facts, actually cared about truth, was open to persuasion, and so on. My point is that those aren’t strictly necessary, even if they are preferable. It’s the responsive back-and-forth that is essential.
I see that you’re not clear on basic terminology. You apparently think that “liberal” and “the left” are the same thing. They are not.
In actual reality, the founders of USA were liberals of the time – so-called classical liberals, i.e. supporters of “free thought” as opposed to conservatism of the time that sided with single state religion and monarchism. In the rest of the world (as opposed to USA), the concept of liberalism conveys the meaning of either classical liberalism or neoliberalism, neither of which is leftism at all. Get it through to your skulls, Americans – liberalism is rightist, not leftist.
Whether the prime minister or president can be forced out, it has little to do with “we” (did you mean just you? or did you mean people in general? anyway, both are wrong). It is a specific prescribed constitutional procedure by which they can be forced out, and the procedure normally starts with some members of the parliament. Forcing the president or the prime minister is about the parliament, not about “we”.
In USA the procedure is the impeachment of the president, a procedure that begins in the Congress, i.e. it is in fact the same as under a parliamentary system – because the Congress is a parliament, as you (very likely don’t) know. The only difference is that in USA the impeachment procedure never once worked out during the entire history of USA, whereas in other countries the same procedure, called vote of no confidence for the prime minister, it often does.
The real difference about a parliamentary system versus whatever you call the system in USA is not the procedure of impeachment or vote of confidence, but the fact that in the rest of the world there are two persons – a president and a prime minister – whereas in USA you have only one person – the president who also functions as prime minister. The importance of having two persons instead of one is to balance party politics – which is at play between the parliament and the government – with the continuity of the country – which is what the president is for. The commander in chief (of the army) is the role of the president, not of the prime minister. The president may be accountable to the “people” (i.e. in practice only to the constitutional court), but the prime minister shall be accountable to the parliament. To emphasise that the prime minister is accountable to the parliament, the prime minister is never elected by the people directly, but rather selected by the parliament after parliamentary elections.
The founders of USA had some clue about the dangerous power of being elected by the people directly – the president would sideline the Congress by arguing that he was elected by the people and therefore is only accountable to the people. Hence the founders created the Electoral College – a necessary move by the founders, but insufficient. A populist president like Trump is still able to claim popular support as grounds for everything he does and the Congress has nothing to counter this with. A better move would have been to create a separate office of prime minister who comes from the Congress and forms the cabinet (the government) based on the Congress, whereas the president is a fallback institution when the parliament is too stuck in partisan bickering that they cannot come up with a prime minister by a deadline – which is how the constitutions of the rest of the democratic world work.
I hope you see the checks and balances that come into play by having two persons, the president and prime minister, instead of one. It’s the checks and balances that USA does not have. The impeachment of the president is in the constitution in USA, but never once worked in reality, because the founders of USA, liberals in their own mind, could not figure out the necessary checks and balances for it. The founders of USA did not create a republic as it is understood these days, but an electable term-limited monarchy, as is also known from medieval Balkans.
I have educated Americans on these easy and simple things throughout decades about a million times. They never learn. They are eternally stuck on the unshakable faith of the superiority of their exceptionalism while they have zero clue what exactly is exceptional about it and that it’s actually inferior, not superior. Americans – both liberals and conservatives – are ignorant of that the Congress of USA is a parliament and that the words “republic” and “democracy” mean the same thing (the first being the Latin equivalent of the ancient Greek term). The dictums “America does not have a Parliament – we have 2 Houses of Congress” and “America is a Republic, not a democracy” are passionately affirmed by Americans as golden proof of American Exceptionalism, but it is really evidence of their invincible ignorance.
So, Liberal Nationalists are just liberals who, as Americans would say, “love their country” i.e. they think that USA is the best country in the world, no other country is even close, and immigrants from other countries are a (if not the) problem. None of this is or can be associated with the left because liberalism was never leftist in the first place.
Oh, and what is “the left”? The fact is that in USA there is no politically effective left. There are two right-wing parties.
I’m going to make one final comment here and then I’ll take a step back because I don’t think I have anything else of value to add to the conversation. You guys are a lot smarter than me so I’ll just read what you have to say and hopefully learn something. Thanks Keiths, Flint, Allan, Erik, Alan, Neil and everyone for commenting.
At the risk of repeating myself, I’ll say that no, I don’t think we should debate bigots, for the reasons I’ve already mentioned. Some topics should be off limits. People who are on the fence on topics like racism, sexism, homophobia, etc… can hardly be defined as independents IMO, and the (main?) reason why the fence these days is there is precisely because Liberals have been enabling far right extremists and letting them control the narrative. Not too long ago it would have been unthinkable, even for the tea party right, to even consider that racial profiling and rounding up people to throw them into concentration camps in foreign prisons without due process would be acceptable and worth discussing. If you want to start convincing people, you need to start changing the way you do politics, but that’s probably not going to happen because Liberals seem incapable of understanding that what they’re doing, what they’ve been doing for eons, is simply not working, quite the contrary, it’s contributing to the downfall of democracy. To parrot Stoermer again, Liberals are always willing to let the right get away with things like stripping reproductive rights from women, or performing a fucking ethnic cleansing in broad daylight, all for the sake of unity, which requires trusting the system. Unity with people who have no interest in finding common ground with them.
And that’s it. As you can tell, I’ve run out of ideas to share here, so I’ll read what you have to say with interest. Thanks again everyone.
There are different debate formats. The most equal debate is public moderated timed debate one on one on a topic. The speakers are to hold to the topic and address each other’s arguments in turn. An example is the kind of debates that William Lane Craig had. This is the least problematic kind of debate, but there usually is no formal scoring, so the audience is free to come up with their own opinion of as to who won. So the impact on the audience will be usually subjective, which is a problem.
All other debate formats are worse than this. For example the debates of political candidates: They are trained to address the question at hand with the first half of the sentence and then pivot to talking points favourable to themselves or to plain self-praise. Such debates are confusing to listen to and the impact on the audience is exactly that – so confusing that most people never watch or listen. The audience will only pick up from secondary sources things they want to hear or see. The result is people like colewd who do not know anything whatsoever from their own experience – and for the sake of “common ground” they firmly think that everybody else knows as little as them. You may quote Trump’s fascism at them and their response is “How do you know that this is a real quote? It is your baseless assertion without evidence.”
Then there is policy/politics in addition to debate and this is where Dems have failed. You can have the better arguments and win the debate, but if the actual goal is to have the kind of life as outlined by your arguments, you will have to live it and enforce it. Debate really does not matter at all in achieving this. It should be clear that people little care about rational arguments and facts. They may be pleasantly attracted to nice words, but mostly they just follow and adapt to whatever happens. Trump is using this. Trump never won a single argument, never scored an intellectual point, never got a fact straight. What he got is win elections, then unleash the full force of his administrative powers while overstepping them. He replaced experts with loyalists, clearly signifying that it does not matter what tariffs are or which job creation numbers are true – things are whatever Trump says they are because he is the president, and whoever objects too much will be fired, slapped with lawsuits, cancelled or deported. What Dems need(ed) to do was to enforce rule of law – convict the insurrectionist and the thief of government secrets, prevent him from standing up as a presidential candidate. That’s the law, so it was the absolutely correct policy. The facts and arguments were there and they were correct – yes, Trump is an insurrectionist and thief of government secrets and Putin’s puppet and utterly incompetent and dictatorial – but Dems failed at the policy: Given the facts, this is the sort of guy that you lock up. You don’t just debate him and complain about him. Trump deserves no debate on equal grounds. Loon criminals are to be treated for what they are – outside the norm, not as the norm or close enough.
I have watched Trump administration flunkies invited onto left-leaning news shows with the stated purpose of debating the moderator about some news item. And I’ve seen two general approaches. With one, the Trump flunky engages in the Gish Gallop, spouting one falsehood after another, which devolves into a swearing contest where the moderator says “your claim isn’t backed by the facts” and the flunky says “Yes it is, do your homework.” The claim that a debate format allows for correction of lies doesn’t work in practice. The whole idea of the Gish gallop is that there are simply too many lies and not enough time to correct even one of them.
But the more normal case, as with Stephen Miller, is for Miller to start nonstop spouting Trumpy talking points. The moderator tries to break in and is simply shouted over, usually for minutes on end, before simply cutting off the guest and ending the segment.
Both approaches are illustrations of bad faith.
And then there’s testimony before Congress under oath, where lies are theoretically grounds for perjury. I notice that “conservatives” have mastered this format. They can’t recall, they repeat talking points, they are unresponsive to questions, they change the subject, they even accuse their questioners of open bias. So these people can be questioned for hours without ever actually answering a single question – or even admitting to something they have previously said on the record.
Erik:
I’d say the most equal form of debate is when it’s done in writing, with no time limits for responses, over a number of days, but of course most people don’t have the patience for that. Face-to-face confrontations in a YouTube video are more appealing. As Allan mentioned, timed debates can end up rewarding skilled debaters for their debate skills and not for the cogency of their arguments.
Skill still matters in a written debate, but it’s less important relative to the strengths and weakness of the opposing arguments.
They tried. They impeached him twice, including for the insurrection, and it was Republican senators who voted to acquit, not Democrats. They also supported the criminal cases against Trump. None of those were squelched by Democrats.
Dems wanted him convicted, and they tried, but how could they accomplish that short of breaking the law, which would have been disastrous?
I fault Merrick Garland for slow walking the federal cases against Trump. That’s a true example of what Stoermer is complaining about: Garland was so determined to maintain the appearance of the DOJ as apolitical and impartial that he ended up making it partial toward Trump. I fault him personally for that, but not Democrats in general, because Democrats wanted those cases to be prosecuted quickly.
Flint:
It can if you’re well-prepared and have the facts at your fingertips. Pete Buttigieg’s appearances on Fox are a great example of this. Marshal the facts, be ready to cite your sources, anticipate what “facts” and sources your opponent will cite, and be prepared to undermine those.
The key is to stop the gallop by pointing it out and refusing to let your opponent change the subject. You have to do it in a way that doesn’t give the impression that you’re being evasive. Not everyone can pull it off, but it is possible, and when the gallop is pointed out to audience members, a lot of them will be able to see it.
Yeah, I can’t recall ever seeing a productive debate involving Stephen Miller.
Their stonewalling doesn’t stop those sessions from being productive for Democrats. The evasions and convenient memory lapses are basically confessions, and people can see that. The key is knowing when and how to press for answers. Watch Eric Swalwell go after Kash Patel:
Insults fly in shouting match between Patel and Rep. Eric Swalwell
Swalwell is a former prosecutor, and it shows. Those guys deal with lies and “memory lapses” all the time in court. He made Patel look ridiculous, and none of it depended on Patel’s cooperation.
The written debate format flourished during Protestant Reformation. I have read many books from old times that are meant to debunk an earlier specific book or a list of opposing talking points.
To be equitable, written answers need to be size-limited (the same idea as timing in a spoken debate). It is the comfiest to read the entire debate later in one single publication. For this to happen, there needs to be an organiser who determines when and how the debate is over, and then publish it.
You can make the debate format as equitable and rational as you want for the debaters, but the problem with any possible result is that if you watch or read the entire thing, you are in the 1% or less of people who should have watched or read the entire thing. Hardly anybody goes through the time, effort, and background research necessary to understand anything, much less to engage in the relevant discussion knowledgeably.
It is lucky for us to have colewd who authentically demonstrates his utter stupidity and raw hypocritical bias, so that we can see that such people exist. The thing is that they are the overwhelming majority, but they do not usually speak out. The sad thing is that when they do speak out, like colewd, discussion with them is pointless and worthless due to their absolute ignorance and unwillingness to learn. They think that it is impossible to be as stupid as they are, or that it is impossible that anybody can be significantly wiser than themselves. They think that prompting Grok is research, that absolutely all statements are opinions or points of view and that there can be common ground between total lunacy and facts. This is the mostly silent absolute majority of the voting population. We need to draw all possible lessons from this fact, because they will draw no lesson at all, ever, on anything.
Nah, they have not really mastered it. It’s that they get away with it because they (Republicans) are in the majority. Perhaps the most glaring example was Kristi Noem’s “Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country.” The correct response to such an answer is to fire the person immediately and ban them from all official positions for the rest of their life. The correct response has not happened because Republicans are in power, not because they have mastered anything.
The fact that everybody needed to recognise a long time ago is that impeachment never worked. Yes, I remember the impeachment of Trump for the insurrection, but it did not work – as always. However, I do not remember a lawsuit against Trump for the insurrection. I remember plenty of Trump’s lawyers getting disbarred and convicted for election lies, but the important thing would have been to convict Trump for election lies and, even more importantly, for election rigging. I remember Michael Cohen going to prison for paying off Stormy Daniels, but it was Trump’s scheme to pay off Stormy Daniels, so why did not Trump sit in prison for this when Michael Cohen demonstrated that it was a prison-worthy offense?
In a country of law and order, none of these questions should exist. In a country of law and order, Trump would not be the president, or at least not a president for a full term, much less for a second term. Conclusion: USA is not a country of law and order.