Debating to Lose
Preaching to the choir only works if the choir is in the audience.
The combination of a two-week beach vacation and a decreased need to commute during the summer teaching hiatus meant I listened to fewer podcasts than usual lately. Catching up, I was able to scroll past some topics that were OBE but the June 20 episode* of the Ezra Klein Show, “Is This America’s Golden Age? A Debate.” struck me as sufficiently evergreen to be worth a listen. It featured a Munk Debate on that topic between Kevin Roberts and Kellyanne Conway, arguing for the affirmative, and Klein and Ben Rhodes opposed. It was before a hostile Canadian audience who, by their own admission (it was an Oxford-style debate), were overwhelmingly against the resolution.
What struck me was just how poorly the affirmative team argued. Whatever one thinks of their politics, Roberts and Conway are highly-intelligent people who make a living making arguments. But, aside from a CPAC or similar audience, I just can’t imagine who would have found their arguments the slightest bit persuasive. Indeed, they often produced guffaws from the crowd.
While the episode was in my Overcast feed and Apple’s, it is unfortunately not featured on the NYT show page. Which is odd, in that it’s subscriber-only content and I’m a subscriber.* Alas, this also means a transcript is not available and, in this instance, ChatGPT can’t produce one for me.
But, essentially, Roberts and Conway simply regurgitated Trump campaign talking points about how awful things were during the Biden administration and hammering the familiar themes of illegal immigration, gender ideology, and the plight of the working man.
Oddly, Klein argued the affirmative better than they did, pointing out how much progress the United States has made in comparison to the rest of the developed world over the past 35 years or so. Naturally, of course, he then made the case that Trump is destroying the institutions that got us there.
While I think Klein and Rhodes would have won on the merits, regardless, an affirmative case framing the argument more broadly than Trump vs. Biden would have stood a far greater chance to win under Oxford rules. Given that more than two-thirds of the audience disagreed with the resolution going in, the advantage was theirs.
*My guess is that the Munk folks were willing to allow Ezra to share the audio with his audience, but wanted to otherwise retain control of the content, which they require a paid subscription to access.
When making arguments for dumb people, smart people will only succeed if they present the smartest dumb argument.
So it’s all sophistry at best.
I found Conway to be particularly bad in that debate. She sounded like a college sophomore, not someone who had worked in the White House.
Roberts wasn’t great, either, but was definitely better than his partner. Conway often just spouted Trump-like campaign rhetoric.
And it seemed to me that at best they were promising the Golden Age was to come, not that we were in it now.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Pretty much the Soviets claimed the same thing for all 70 years the USSR remained in existence. BTW so did the PRI governments in Mexico regarding the Mexican revolution (1910-1921) until the early 1980s.
It’s a standard authoritarian move.
@Kathy:
The past was great and the future will be great by becoming the past. The death of creativity that is conservatism.
@Michael Reynolds:
There’s a cargo cult feel to the whole thing. In this case they want to revive repressive social attitudes and mercantilism, but without strong unions, living wages, and especially not high marginal tax rates.
So they want to revive the parts that re not relevant, without the parts that made things work better.
Your intro raised the immediate question – what did they mean by “this”? Apparently the affirmative side limited “this” to 2025. Roberts and Conway may be intelligent. (I question Conway and I know nothing of Roberts except his title.) The simple fact is that no one, no matter how clever, can make a case that Trump 2.0 is a “golden age” without lying. Making a case that’s its a new “Gilded Age” would be easy.
Propaganda works well when you’re talking to people in the bubble. Leave the bubble, and you look a bit dumb. I’m sure some people who stay in the bubble too long and get too much positive feedback forget that it’s all BS.
@Michael Reynolds: It’s of a piece with Reagans plan. The U. S. was losing jobs to third world countries, so turn the U. S. into a third world country.
@Michael Reynolds:
“Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today.”
Everyone’s having a laugh over Trump’s suit against WSJ for their story about his note with drawing. Via Political Wire Brian Stelter understands the game.
I tend to think this is a case of Trump and the base inflating a conspiracy theory and now it’s hard to dismount, but Trump’s reaction argues there’s more to it.
I didn’t watch the debate and have no desire to.
I think a big problem is that “golden age” is entirely subjective. FWIW I think we are quite distant from any reasonable definition of a “golden age” and I doubt anyone could convince me otherwise.
@Steven L. Taylor: “I found Conway to be particularly bad in that debate. She sounded like a college sophomore, not someone who had worked in the White House. ”
She’s a Fox Blonde motor mouth liar. Start with ‘alternative facts’ and work down from there. When you spend years lying faster than most people can keep up, you don’t win real intellectual debate.
@Steven L. Taylor: “And it seemed to me that at best they were promising the Golden Age was to come, not that we were in it now.”
Pie in the sky, the state will fade away, ….
My experience in online discussions with MAGA people is that they ape Trump’s conversational style. They argue by assertion, seldom bother with evidence or logic, denounce any contrary facts or opinions as “fake news” or lies, and accompany the whole with frequent insults aimed at the intelligence, morals and lifestyle of anyone who disagrees with them. Since it has been so successful for them for years, I doubt Roberts and Conway would see any reason to change. They probably had great fun trolling a hostile audience.
The MAGA movement has always been more about submission than persuasion–it’s the equivalent of O’Brien from 1984 holding up four fingers and demanding that Winston see five.
I dont think you can argue it’s a Golden Age but its hard to claim that any period in the past was truly better except for specific subgroups if you are talking an “Age” being a 5-10 year time period. If you are talking just specifically this year then I think you might be reasonably able to find single years in the past that were better.
Steve