Part I: Why it’s so hard to debate a gaslighting moron.
I was on the debate team in high school. (I know, you are shocked!) And I was pretty successful in my first varsity year as a junior. I left high school so I never had a second year, but my former teammates were extremely successful that year.
The hardest debates I had were not with the well prepared teams that made sensible, plausible arguments. I knew how to question and rebut them. Sometimes we couldn’t quite overcome them. Far more often we did.
The really hard debates were the ones with teams who had no idea what they were doing. They would put forward a number of seemingly random, outlandish ideas backed not by reasons evidence but by absurd notions and false claims they pulled out of the air.
Sometimes debaters who did this actually had a nice speaking style even though what they said made little sense.
What was hard was that we had to keep track and make some sense of their weird sequence of claims enough to be able tto answer them without losing track of your own key themes and lines of argument. The danger was that if you tried to answer everything they said it was difficult to give a choherent speech or you would spend way too much time simply saying that their “evidence” was made up and their logic faulty, which could sound mean. And if you just let some stuff slide because it didn’t fit, a dumb judge (and there were far too many of them) would give it credence it did not deserve.
We won most of those debates with those who didn’t know what they were doing. But I was never happy with the speeches I gave because it was almost impossible to make them into the coherent thematic whole I always aimed for.
And we lost a few, not because we didn’t have the better argument but because an incompetent judge couldn’t distinguish between a barrage of ill-considered and often dishonest ideas put forward with some flamboyance and a compelling argument.
Part 2: How to debate a gaslighting moron.
I’m a little obsessed about the debate and the reaction to Biden’s bad performance. So two more things today about it.
First I want to follow up on my post about the difficulties of debating someone like Trump.
Marlene Katz pointed out in a comment that he should have been prepared for a debate with Trump and that his prep team screwed up royally.
I totally agree. Biden and his team should have known what was coming. Trump is Trump. And there is a way to counteract what Trump does–spewing lies, failing to answer questions, and making a series of absurd disconnected “arguments.”
As David Frum pointed out, there was a good reason not to debate. You give credibility to Trump by standing next to him and having the moderators treat him like a normal, honest, sensible president.
Biden wanted to debate to show his competence. That was probably the right call. But then to make it work you need to preparer for what you know Trump will do and offer a total contrast.
The worst thing you can do is try to be canned to the gills (as we used to call it back in high school debate) with facts and figures to answer Trump point by point. As I said in the last post, if you do that, you fail to make your own case and forth the themes of the campaign.
Biden’s team evidently thought that showing you are a master of facts and figures is the way to show you are competent.
That’s crazy. No one expects those facts and figures and, as Trump shows, no one fact checks.
The goal of the debate is to make your own case, set forward your themes as clearly and forefully as you can. You can drop in some numbers, but they must be subordinate to the themes.
IN other words, you show you are competent by presenting your overall thematic approach as strongly as you can.
And then, to deal with Trump’s kind of presentation, you need to explicitly address his dishonesty.
You given an example or two And then say, “I’m not going to waste your time or mine focusing on the nonsense he says. I’m going to tell you the truth about what we have done well in the last four years and what I want to do in my next term.”
And instead of rebutting each and every dishonest criticism and exaggeration Tump made about his own term you say something like,
“And unlike Trump I’m not going to lie about my record. I’m going to be honest about both the good things we’ve done and where I know we can do better. I can’t be the president you want me to be if I falsely claim everything is great. The job of every administration is to deal with the challenges of the moment. So I’m going to tell you what our present challenges are and what I’m going to do about them.”
And then just use the event to make your case, ignoring most of the nonsense coming out of his mouth.
IN other words, show the difference not just in policy but in characters as forcefully and slowly as you can.