Debate Must Be Closed Before It Can Be Opened
Editor's Note
Since the founding, America’s republican character has been defined by a healthy and vigorous spirit of public debate. There are certain positions, however, with which you cannot debate at all — certainly not if you hope to survive as a country. This was true in the lead up to the Civil War, and Chris Bray argues it is true now of a class of politics defined less by thought than by emotion — and emotional disorder, at that. In order to reclaim the spirit of republican debate that was already apparent to Tocqueville, Bray argues that we must start by shutting certain perspectives out entirely.
“No sooner do you set foot on American soil,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “than you are stunned by a kind of tumult.” To be an American is to engage in political debate, constantly and obsessively. “An American cannot converse, but he can discuss,” he wrote. They don’t make small talk, but go straight into a political diatribe, the substance of which seemed to make up the entertainment of daily life in a young nation. Ranting about the government, Tocqueville thought, seemed to be “almost the only pleasure of which an American has any idea.”
Our deepest and oldest cultural instinct as people who share a constitutional republic with increasingly democratic features — see, for example, the 15th Amendment, the 17th Amendment, the 19th Amendment, and the 26th Amendment — is to argue with one another. To debate is to steer; political discourse is participation in the life of a nation and a community. You respond to bad ideas with good ideas, and the failures of free speech can be addressed by more free speech. America is the New England town meeting, generalized as an idea. Citizen Smith rises with an important point, fellow citizens. Let’s hear what he has to say.
But we’ve hit a wall — what Christopher Rufo has described as “Cluster B politics.”
“Like the culture of narcissism,” Rufo writes, “our digital age has distinct psychological traits, heavily influenced by the rise of personal pathologies and the power of social media. For this generation, the cameras are always on. The audience is always watching. And the old narcissism has transformed into hysteria, moral theatrics, emotional volatility, self-indulgence, and outbursts of violence.”
How do you debate someone who expresses their political views by shooting a CEO in the back, or firebombing a Tesla dealership, or screaming in your face that you’re a Nazi? How do you debate Chris Murphy or Jasmine Crockett, or Joy Reid, or a district court judge who cites the musical Hamilton as a legal authority? How do you respond to Cluster B discourse in a factual, logical, well-ordered way?
It increasingly seems to me that you simply don’t, and the great need for a culture of debate is the need to find the limits of our patience.
A recent exchange between two pseudonymous accounts on X illustrates the point. In a series of posts, the user posting as “Finnegans Take” demanded that repulsive MAGA trash take ownership of the million-plus people who have already been brutally slaughtered by Elon Musk and his evil Department of Government Efficiency. The user who posts as “Coddled affluent professional” declined to bother, entirely. Not debating the claim that the withdrawal of USAID cash for AIDS medicine had already murdered hundreds of thousands of sick people in Africa, he offered a kind of eye-rolling response: “It’s an empirical claim that you can’t help conflating into a moral issue because you’re emotionally dysregulated and don’t understand the importance of epistemic and methodological standards.”
Soon after, “Coddled affluent professional” summed up his view of political debate in the current environment:
From the center to the left, politics has primarily become a means of sating narcissism and fulfilling psychological, social, and emotional needs. With a cacophony of mediocre, extremely needy and self-involved people as ‘thought leaders’ it’s no surprise that the blob uniparty is effective primarily in developing patronage networks and providing social status for its own elites.
He’s describing a world in which political debate isn’t political debate, but a performative maneuver built on a foundation of status anxiety and a struggle for social position. We’re trained by long cultural habit to regard debate as the basis for a functioning society: everything works because you argue about it until the most rational position prevails. What do we do when that premise implodes? What’s the rational response to WHY ARE YOU MAGA TRASH MURDERING EVERYONE!?!?!? If there isn’t one, what do we do about it?
Take five minutes out of your day to consider a recent essay by the journalist Laura Weiss, “The Pandemic Never Ended,” which was published on March 16 at the website of the New Republic. Weiss argues that we failed to learn the lessons that Covid-19 was trying to teach us. We rejected truly vigorous government protections, and we turned against the kind of strong leadership that would, for example, compel us more forcefully to mask up and endure extended lockdowns. The great failure of the pandemic is not enough government power, not enough doing stuff.
Weiss is arguing about government and policy, but her argument isn’t political – it’s entirely psychological, an anguished expression of her own emotional crisis. Here, read a full paragraph:
“Those of us who could work at home sat on our couches, scrolling through the horrors, watching television, getting cocktails to go, and disinfecting groceries. These were the placid yet unsettling days that walling yourself off from the world brings — fear, uncertainty, and isolation. For many, this was the central trauma of this period. But for myself and hundreds of millions of others globally, the trauma wasn’t only about these beginnings, it’s about the horrors we still experience today.”
We sat on our couches and got cocktails to go while we watched television; our horror and trauma will never end. This is not argument, and it can’t be debated. Her big conclusion: “There is no justice without health justice for everyone.” For example? The pandemic finally provided us with universal basic income, but now the government has stopped paying people to not work, which proves that we didn’t learn the lesson the virus was trying to teach us.
Your time and energy — our time and energy — are finite. Marching out to the virtual public square to do ideological battle with your fellow citizens, you’re being an American. You’re engaging in our oldest public habit, “almost the only pleasure of which an American has any idea.” But personal discernment becomes far more important when the public sphere becomes an asylum. We have to learn to disengage appropriately, and we have to learn to identify people who have no contribution to make. Debate remains central to the project of the American republic, but we have to act on the understanding that some people make a lot of noise without ever saying anything. The alternative to selective withdrawal is total withdrawal, and the breakdown of discussion. The less we debate the crazies, the more we can debate. Shut some voices off.
Personally, I’m starting with Laura Weiss.