The Death of Debating America

Mark Oppenheimer at the Wall Street Journal mourns the death of the practice of real debate in America:

It used to be that high-school and college debates mirrored, in a salutary way, political debates. In school, young men and women learned to research topics and then debate their rivals, using all the tools of oratory, including sound reasoning and witty flourishes. But scholastic debate today is very different, and its sorry state has consequences for the health of the republic.

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As the Chronicle of Higher Education and others have reported, some college debaters now practice “postmodern debate,” in which they argue theoretical questions about the process of debate rather than the topic at hand . . . . Predictably, debate traditionalists (like me) are upset about this postmodern turn. A commentator on the National Review academic blog said that the trend toward postmodern debate “shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with the increasing politicization of college campuses these days.”

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Of course, debaters in a previous age were encouraged not only by the norms of their sport but also by the norms of the political world many of them hoped to join. Compared with, say, the Kennedy-Nixon debates, today’s presidential debates are a travesty. After the last debate, on Wednesday, what voters will remember most is not any eloquent articulations of the candidates’ aspirations, but rather their tiresome efforts to pander to Joe the Plumber. And last week, we witnessed the extraordinary spectacle of candidates agreeing not to address each other directly. Tom Brokaw tried to stop Sen. McCain and Sen. Obama when they began actually debating!

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It’s unlikely that debate will fully recover. Oratory is too battered—in the schools by a misplaced egalitarianism, in national politics by an anti-intellectual populism. It’s a shame. Crowds thrill to Barack Obama’s words, as they once thrilled to Ronald Reagan’s. That both men could be attacked as “mere” orators, as if words did not convey ideas, and as if ideas could not change the world, reflects a cynical side of America. As we debaters would say, Be it resolved: In the battle for good debate, the lesser angels of our nature are winning.