After last night’s performance, many of us are wondering about the state of our politics and our leaders. We are worried about the state of political discourse in the United States. We are experiencing, or have experienced alienation from close friends and dear family members over acerbic speech. And the debate, the Nationally televised, globally watched Presidential debates for many, I think, was an oasis, a respite – or at least a break from the burning speech we are all immersed in.
Unfortunately what Trump and Biden gave us was little more than a High School interp competition dramatic reading of your Aunt’s Facebook feed. People are stunned, they are disappointed, and worst of all, they are doubting the value of debate, of democratic deliberation, and have added the event to a long list of recent reasons to abandon political speech, conversation, and discussion completely. These two clowns are not the death of democracy, but unwillingness to share your political views with others sure is. They are the ushers showing us to our seats for the last show, closing night.
The Presidential debates though, historically, are not, and never have been some shining beacon of excellent debate, or even for that matter, excellent American discourse. The Presidential debates have always lagged and followed behind the best speech, simply because they are reflections of what works for us in argument and debate. And we do not practice these things, nor do we teach them formally. The Presidential debates are more a reflection of the state of argumentative discourse in society rather than a guidepost. They always have been.
Maybe we’d be better off without them.
The Presidential debates in their current form are the work of two tectonic American political figures: Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic Governor of New York, who ran for President against Dwight Eisenhower, and Newton Minow, a staffer on Stevenson’s campaign as well as on Carter’s and Kennedy’s as well. He served as one of our earliest FCC chairs in the 1960s where he is already famous for describing television as a “vast wasteland” in a speech he gave to Congress.
Stevenson’s motives were good – he believed that America needed a national conversation about the issues between the two parties, and that television was the best medium to do it. Television was underused for politics primarily because of Federal law. The 1934 Federal Communications Act explicitly required all broadcasters to provide the same number of minutes to every candidate they give time to. So if you allowed one political speech, you have to allow all the candidates the same thing, same length, no matter how irrelevant they are. Professor Ryan Neville-Shephard has a fantastic essay on how frustrating this law was for television producers of the time.
Stevenson had been deeply involved in this frustrating situation running against a powerful incumbent in Eisenhower. He appealed to Congress to enact a law, or laws, that would force the networks to provide time to the two parties to have a national program where issues could be discussed. Interestingly, Stevenson never advocated for debates, per se. They were certainly an option, but Stevenson’s goal was to give access to voters to see an engagement on important issues to help them become more informed voters.
Congress disagreed. They didn’t change the law at all, but granted a one year reprieve of the Communications Act’s demand for “equal time.” CBS offered the Republican and Democratic parties the space for 3 events, which Senator Kennedy and Vice President Nixon happily accepted (both men were extremely comfortable in public address/debate situations). The debates were watched by a large number of people – we don’t really know how many, but we do know that telephone calls were significantly down during the debates. An interesting marker that shows how one kind of communication can silence another.
Stevenson somewhat got his wish there, but it wouldn’t be until 1976 that Presidential debate would return in this way. A loophole in the Communications Act allowed for political speech if it was a “bona-fide” news event and the networks were covering it. Both parties turned to the League of Women Voters to be responsible for hosting debates and inviting the parties, while the parties negotiated the rules around questions, journalists, time limits, set decor, lighting, and everything else, including the setting of the thermostat in the room.
Stevenson’s idea, stripped down was to improve and increase the national political conversation by providing discourse from the leading candidates in a technological form that would reach people. He believed he was improving the quality of political discourse, decision making, and the like.
Did last night’s debate come close to any of his goals?
When was the last Presidential debate you remember that did such a thing?
After the League of Women Voters started to upset the two major parties with some of the decisions they were making, and showing that they were not the best organization to host a massive top-level political event like this, the parties turned to creating a research committee to investigate how to move forward with debates. Newton Minow was asked to be a leader in that research, and the result of that study (as well as another one being conducted simultaneously) was the formation of the Commission on Presidential Debates. The two parties agreed on the formation, and it was done – as a non-profit organization, they could host debates that the media could cover without worrying about equal time.
The Commission’s goals are straightforward: To create nonpartisan debates via a bipartisan commission (although no members of the commission have active political commitments, they all have served in partisan roles), to fundraise to sponsor and set up the debates, to educate voters, and to support democracy through providing access to reasoned discourse.
That’s sort of my phrasing. Here’s what they say:
The CPD was formed to ensure that the voting public has the opportunity to see the leading candidates debate during the general election campaign.
The nonpartisan, voter education goal of the CPD’s debates is to afford the members of the public an opportunity to sharpen their views, in a focused debate format, of the leading candidates for President and Vice President of the United States. The CPD’s approach to candidate selection has been driven by this goal.
These goals seem like good ones, if you think that the only way people can access candidates is by television. These goals are better achieved through the internet, through podcasting or netcasting, and through other means such as writing or social media. Who doesn’t get a chance to see the leading candidates?
If the goals are to sharpen the views of the public and to make sure that the electorate is exposed to the candidates, the question is why have a debate at all?
Last nights debate didn’t show us the candidates, it only showed us their aspect when they are performing in a timed, goofy event run by a newsreader. That’s not who they are.
It didn’t sharpen views, it raised frustration and anger. What point of the debate is supposed to improve my views, my understanding, my ability to navigate the landscape of national controversy?
We can change this and we need to. We need to abandon this whole project. The Commisssion’s obsession with hosting debates without knowing the first thing about what makes a debate valuable or what a debate is properly used for is a level of staggering ignorance. They can accomplish all of their goals better, and more ethically without being obsessed with hosting these terrible events.
Educators across the country assign students to watch the Presidential Debates and write about them. This destroys any chance of young people being anything but cynical or having the lowest bar imaginable for political discourse. Worse than that, these events teach us that speech doesn’t matter. That argument doesn’t matter. The reality is elsewhere; this is a cynical performance. Kamala Harris sums up this attitude toward debate perfectly here, where she laughs at Steven Colbert’s question because it assumes that debate matters.
This is the attitude that is being taught by debates. And yes, debate’s primary function is to teach. It teaches us what matters and what doesn’t, what valuable speech looks like and doesn’t, and who we can interrupt and who we can’t. It teaches us what reasoning looks like for human beings engaged in the world, and it teaches us how to think along side and with others, particularly those who we disagree with. But to Senator Harris, they are nothing but a punchline; a stupid event you have to do to be in politics. This is the legacy of the Commission’s incredible gap of research or knowledge in terms of debate education. They simply aren’t interested in consulting scholars on it.
We need to abandon these events and demand something else. We do not need exposure to candidates; we have too much. We do not need exchange of talking points; we swim in that. What we need is actual, legitimate debate that distances us from our daily exchanges and makes us reassess our connections and convictions, makes us think about our candidates in the light of how they question one another and respond to big questions, and how they see the country, themselves, and in effect, us. Such a discourse is a tall-order but if we publish, share, canvas, and convince others we might just get as lucky as Stevenson and get some movement away from these events to something that would actually help us.
In the next post, I’ll discuss the idea of “actual debate” in relation to the model of Presidential debates offered by the commission.