Political debate shouldn’t become a performance

I have a groundbreaking confession to make: I hate watching people debate.

This is not because I hate arguments. I think disagreement is important. I think it is our right as citizens to be able to challenge each other, to ask uncomfortable questions, to speak without being silenced and to defend what you believe. What I hate is the way that political debate has turned into a competitive sport of sorts where the goal has shifted from understanding somebody to trying to beat them.

If your algorithms are anything like mine (aka you are a young adult who’s interested in the political, social and economic state of the world), you’ve probably come across those stupid marketing-approved short clips of public debates between some guy with a microphone and a random pedestrian whose answers are often spliced together and taken out of context. Maybe you’ve had the misfortune to come across one of those pathetic Jubilee videos on your feed, with the title being some nonsense like “One Swiftie vs. 20 Kanye fans” or something. Because apparently the best way to have a productive conversation is to put one person in a room with 20 people who already disagree with them.

Typically, these videos all go one way. Someone sits or stands across from an opponent whose views differ from their own, asks a question, gets an answer and immediately responds with another question. The other person stumbles. The debater smiles. The crowd reacts. Then, 30 seconds later, the clip is on TikTok with a caption saying some kind of variation of:

“REDNECK Republican GETS COOKED!!”

“BLUE-HAIRED Democrat GETS ANNIHILATED!!”

“BRAINWASHED Conservative GETS OBLITERATED!!”

“TRIGGERED Liberal GETS DESTROYED BY FACTS AND LOGIC!! [insert fire emoji] [insert fire emoji] [insert fire emoji]”

Congratulations. You won the argument. But did you change anyone’s mind? That’s the part I rarely see.

People like Charlie Kirk and Dean Withers became well-known in part because of this style of political content. Kirk built a significant part of his public persona around debating college students, while Withers has also made a name for himself through viral political debates via livestream.

Politically, I am much more likely to agree with Withers than Kirk. If I had to choose whose politics I find more compatible with my own, that answer would not exactly be a difficult one. But I can agree with someone’s politics and still dislike the way they argue.

Withers and Kirk come from very different political perspectives, but both have participated in the same larger culture of viral political debate: find someone who disagrees with you, put a camera on the interaction and then see who can come up with the better response. The clips that spread aren’t necessarily the ones where two people thoughtfully explain their positions; they’re, instead, the ones where someone gets caught off guard, then someone delivers a particularly clever comeback and then the audience gets to decide who “won.”

The problem, to me, is that being good at debating is not necessarily the same thing as being good at persuasion. Someone can be completely unprepared for a question and still believe the same thing they believed five minutes ago.

Someone can stumble over their words and still have a legitimate argument. Someone can lose their train of thought because they were nervous while standing in front of a crowd, surrounded by people staring at them and, oh yeah, being recorded for the entire internet. None of those things magically make the other person’s position correct. Online, that distinction seems to disappear.

We treat the person who had the fastest response as the winner and the person who couldn’t immediately respond as the loser. It doesn’t matter whether the argument was complicated or whether the person simply needed time to think. The debate has a winner, so apparently the debate worked.

However—and I don’t know if this is obvious or not—but politics is not a boxing match.

If someone spends an entire conversation trying to embarrass me, why would I suddenly walk away thinking, “Wow, they really gave me some points to ponder! I might’ve even changed my mind!”?

I would probably walk away thinking they were annoying. Then I would tell my friends about how annoying they were.

The goal of debating seems to have shifted from making the other person think to making everyone else watching think that you’re smart.

Honestly, I get why people watch it. A good comeback is entertaining. Watching someone get completely caught off guard can be funny. I have watched these videos myself. Sometimes I see a particularly good response and laugh to myself and think, “Okay, that was actually pretty good.”

But it’s important to remember that entertainment and persuasion are two different things.

If the real audience is thousands of people watching a 45-second clip on their phones, then the person sitting across from you might not even be the audience that matters. The audience is the comment section. The people sharing the clip. The people saying, “GET ROASTED!!!”

And those people usually already agree with you. Rather than a thoughtful explanation that may take a few minutes but supplies context and the more of the argument, a humiliating one-liner takes five seconds. The five-second version gets posted. The comments fill up with people saying that their side won. Everyone goes home feeling a little more certain that the other side is stupid and dumb and ugly.

To be clear, there is nothing inherently wrong with debate. Being challenged can be valuable. Hearing an argument you disagree with can force you to reconsider what you believe. I just find it hard to believe that humiliation is a particularly effective way to make that happen.

If the purpose of political conversation is actually to change minds, maybe we should stop treating every single disagreement as if it’s a boxing match. Maybe we should ask questions without immediately preparing the next rebuttal without even hearing what the other person has to say. Maybe we should let someone say, “I don’t know.” Maybe we should admit when we don’t know either. And maybe, we should stop asking who won.

Because if I walk away from an argument with exactly the same beliefs I had before, while the person I argued with walks away even more convinced that I am an idiot, what exactly did I accomplish?