Why can’t we all just get along? For the conservative US media personality Ben Shapiro, America is irrevocably broken: left and right will never co-operate, and there will be no “detente”. He begins his 2014 pamphlet How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them with the words “All that matters is victory” – macho nihilism that makes sense only if you believe, as he does, that “politics is warfare by other means”.
Shapiro was an early star of the hyper-partisan debate genre now popular on YouTube and social media platforms with video clips bearing titles such as “Ben Shapiro DESTROYS Transgenderism and Pro-Abortion Arguments” and “Jordan Peterson OBLITERATING Woke LIBERALS for 13 Minutes Straight!” The format serves up the same variety of thrills that revenge movies such as Taken do: a hero with a special set of skills vanquishing a baddie. For its marquee names – perhaps the most prominent being Peterson, a right-wing Canadian psychologist best-known for raging about other people’s pronoun choices – changing minds isn’t really the point. Why bother trying if progressives willing to debate issues in good faith are as rare as “unicorns”, as Shapiro suggests in this rather paranoid pamphlet published by the David Horowitz Freedom Center – an organisation that claims to combat the efforts of the “radical left and its Islamist allies to destroy American values”? All leftists are bullies anyway: they just need to be put in their place.
The 11 “rules” in Shapiro’s pamphlet seek to teach readers how to do just that. They range from walking “towards the fire” (seeking out confrontation) to reframing the discussion in order to make its terms more favourable to your own side. Some of his suggestions – such as forcing your opponents to defend their assumptions and exposing their inconsistencies – are standard debating-club strategies from which anyone could benefit. Quite rightly, he urges his readers to “follow principle”, but denies the possibility that his ideological opponents are simply following theirs.
Instead, he presents those on the left as a zombie horde who win arguments only through “intimidation and cruelty” and are lying or deflecting from the issues at hand when they invoke, say, a right-winger’s racism. This, I suppose, is a phenomenon you encounter regularly when you’re the sort of person who tweets things like, “Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage.”
Despite the vaguely Trumpian tenor of the genre, DESTROYING ideological enemies is not exclusively a reactionary pursuit. On the surface, the MSNBC presenter Mehdi Hasan might appear to be a left-wing mirror image of the right’s Petersons and Shapiros. There’s a video up on YouTube in which he “DESTROYS Suella Braverman”; in another clip, “Mehdi Hasan DESTROYS Sputtering Trump Defender Over Trump’s Lies”. His new book, Win Every Argument, is in many respects a progressive answer to Shapiro’s pamphlet, offering much of the same advice and even structured in a similar way. Like Shapiro, Hasan believes that debating is “a rhetorical form of warfare” and he frames his book as “all about teaching you how to win”.
Hasan’s book is a larger work than Shapiro’s and consequently has a far broader scope. It begins in 428 BCE with an anecdote about how a well-crafted argument saved lives during the Peloponnesian War and ends around 260 pages later with Winston Churchill’s prescription for building rhetorical power through a process of “accumulation”.
Anyone who has seen him in action will know that Hasan is a virtuosic interrogator; his recent DEMOLITION of the US journalist Matt Taibbi and his claims of a Democratic conspiracy against conservatives was the confrontational TV interview in its most potent form. I happen to agree with Hasan, with whom I briefly worked at the New Statesman in the late 2000s, about many of his political positions – but I wonder whether this kind of journalism-as-warfare will, in the long run, do any favours for democracy, which requires winning people over, not just winning debates.
There is, however, a crucial difference between Hasan’s approach and that of Shapiro. Like his right-wing counterparts, Hasan might “relish and savour” arguments, but he does so because he believes them to be “the only sure-fire way to establish the truth”. He cites the French essayist Joseph Joubert’s remark that it is “better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it”. His objective is to interrogate claims, and this is only possible if you explore “both sides of the argument – not just the viewpoint you may personally favour”.
In other words, you can’t do what Hasan does (and win) if you immediately dismiss your adversaries and refuse first to engage with their positions honestly. “Your opinions and arguments are going to be worthless if they’re not based on a foundation of knowledge,” writes Hasan. He might sometimes play dirty (there’s a chapter in his book devoted to the persuasive power of the ad hominem attack) yet his victories are based on rigorous research, data, statistics, precedents, past statements and law.
The ethnonationalist right has made no secret of its willingness to pollute the public discourse with falsehoods – to “flood the zone with shit”, in the words of Steve Bannon – in order to fire up supporters and evade scrutiny. This approach has entered the mainstream political playbook, even in the UK. Trump, of course, was its grand master; he made 30,573 false or misleading claims during his four years in office, according to the Washington Post.
Faced with such outright mendacity, and in a media environment that obsessively mines the viral potential of the pugilistic debate format, we need forensic interrogators such as Hasan on the left or, say, Andrew Neil on the right, to flush away the shit that today’s political sleight-of-hand artists are pumping our way. Otherwise, how can any of us be sure of what to believe?
"How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them" by Ben Shapiro is published by the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
"Win Every Argument" by Mehdi Hasan is published by Macmillan.
This article is from New Humanist's autumn 2023 issue. Subscribe now.
