Democracy Requires Debate
There's no such thing as a free society where you never have to discuss things with people who disagree with you
There has been a ton of talk from left-leaning academics, journalists, and activists over the last few years about democracy. I can’t blame them; nobody can look at the events of last January 6, for instance, and not wonder how fragile American democracy really is. Republicans have also passed a number of laws to weaken voting rights, although it’s not clear that any of these restrictions actually changes election results. (It turns out, for instance, that there are similar numbers of felons in Florida who vote for Republicans as who vote for Democrats.) And gerrymandering- which used to be the equal province of both parties and a tool used by whichever party was in command, has become much more associated with Republicans in certain purple states.
So it’s easy enough to understand all the democracy talk: real worries about the future of the country, combined with a sort of campaign issue to activate Democratic voters to come to the polls.
The thing about democracy, however, is that it requires more than just a fair electoral system. It runs on society’s norms. I don’t mean legislative norms such as whether the courts are packed; I mean norms that govern all of us. I mean the norms of debate and discussion. And our online culture has systematically broken down those norms, with the loudest people in the conversation- on both sides- leading the charge to break them down. Including a significant number of the people who spend a lot of time loudly worrying about formal structures of democracy.
The basic governing norm of democracy is about debate. Human beings have conflicting interests as well as different opinions on major issues. An unfree society might respond to that problem through simple authoritarianism: an official opinion is handed down on a particular issue and everyone has to obey it. It’s worth noting that all societies have a bit of this authoritarianism in it, and as long as it is confined to a few issues that really are beyond the pale of debate, these strictures do not render the country unfree. Nobody argues that Germany isn’t a fundamentally free society, for instance, because Holocaust denial is banned. (Note that this is a different issue from whether you think this sort of thing is a good idea: a lot of us believe in a very strong First Amendment which would protect the right to utter even very offensive, untrue opinions. My point is simply that even if one disagrees with Germany’s policy on Holocaust denial, nobody would call Germany an authoritarian dictatorship simply because you can’t debate whether the Holocaust happened over there.)
And that sort of mild, benign authoritarianism can also be imposed by social stricture; and, again, a little of this kind of thing does not make a society fundamentally unfree. So, for instance, since the 1960’s, there has been a pretty serious social stricture in the United States against certain forms of very racist speech: you have a First Amendment right to call Black people the n-word, and nobody will arrest or prosecute you if you do it, but you will also very quickly find yourself without a job, with few friends, and in an incredibly isolated and harsh existence if you decide to do it. And again, that sort of thing does not make the United States an authoritarian country: every society in human existence has had speech taboos, and not being able to absolutely say the first thing that pops into your mind without facing a potential social sanction is not the same thing as living in a dictatorship.
But it’s worth noting, everything I just said only works in small doses. For instance, while a country with laws against Holocaust denial can still be a fundamentally free society, a country that has an extensive network of laws that effectively prohibit the expression of a slew of different opinions and impose what is essentially an orthodoxy of thought and speech would be an unfree country. For instance, if one imagines an alternate history of the United States where the Sedition Act was still the law of the land and was consistently enforced by whoever the ruling party was, that would result in an undemocratic country even if the franchise had been expanded and voting rights protected; a country where you can be thrown in prison for criticizing the positions of the government is almost the paradigmatic example of an authoritarian dictatorship.
More controversially, this is also true about social sanction. As I said, every society has taboos. We have always had a number of them, and many of them operate behind the scenes to such an extent that you might even be aware of them. But here’s a nice example: we all know there are atheists and agnostics who contend that all religion is human created lies and fairy tales. We’ve heard these people- they even had a cultural moment a few years back. But have you noticed that one time we never hear from these people is when a prominent person dies and the family is publicly expressing religious faith? If someone says something like “he’s up there looking down on us” or “he has been reunited with his loving wife in heaven” at a televised funeral service, they never cut to the head of the local secularist group saying “actually, he’s not, and these beliefs are wishful thinking”, even though that’s what the atheists and agnostics actually believe about the situation. Indeed, if any prominent atheist or agnostic were to say such a thing in those circumstances, they would lose their position in the culture, face boycotts and doxing, and face the full fury of cancel culture. You don’t even think about the existence of this taboo, but it clearly exists.
Again, though, it’s important to understand that while a free society can- and will- have a certain number of these taboos, a society that is full of such taboos, where every person at every turn can get canceled for saying the wrong thing, would not be very free. This is the dystopian nightmare that critics of “cancel culture” ultimately worry about. I don’t think we’re there yet, although there seem to be some spaces (especially in universities, and to some extent in entertainment and the media) where we are closer to that scenario than I would like us to be. But you could imagine a society where there were so many rules, the rules shifted so much, and everyone who violated them lost their jobs and faced doxing and harassment, that it could not be considered “free” even the First Amendment was respected. (It’s not a perfect analogy, because the First Amendment was not respected during this period, but much of the climate of McCarthyism was like this. There weren’t that many Smith Act prosecutions or congressional hearings, but a lot of people, especially in the media and government contracting jobs, lost their jobs, often based on shifting standards not known in advance, because of statement X or friend Y. And this had a serious chilling effect on liberal speech and liberalism more generally.)
So how do you avoid undemocratic speech rules. The government part of it is not particularly difficult- you have a court system that respects the First Amendment. We basically have that. Even holocaust deniers, KKK wizards, ANTIFA edgelords, and any other groups with extremist views enjoy free speech rights. Most of the things that get lumped into cancel culture receive strong legal protection both in theory and practice- nobody, for instance, goes to prison because they express a politically incorrect thought in a college classroom or because a high school yearbook surfaces depicting them in blackface.
But the private part of it is much more difficult. A ton has been written on cancel culture and political correctness. But there’s another aspect of it that I also fear we are losing: the norms of debate.
In theory, the rise of the Internet should have been the best thing to happen to debate. Suddenly, ordinary citizens who were neither media personalities nor college or high school debaters could engage in the activity. A thousand flowers should have bloom. This, in fact, happened for awhile: the early blogosphere, where anyone could publish an opinion, encouraged a lot of debate and discussion, including among people with very different points of view. Left bloggers and right bloggers used to cite each other, critique each other, sometimes make concessions to each other, and sometimes insult each other. It wasn’t siloed.
But the social media era is different. We now live in the era of the Twitter pile-on. But also, and less remarked upon, is that we live in an era of derailed debate. Just try to go on Twitter, find an intelligent person you disagree with who has some followers (it’s not hard), and reply with your opinion. Watch what happens. You’ll be greeted with a bunch of debate derailing tactics.
Ad hominem attacks. Ad hominems have been around forever; there’s a reason the expression is from Latin. But in modern Internet discourse, they are probably the single most common form of expression. Everything from calling someone an idiot (the most basic form of ad hominem) to more sophisticated forms where, for instance, someone says they never have to listen to your opinion, no matter how well argued, because of some other opinion you once expressed, or some supposed conflict of interest you have. For instance, the liberal writer Jonathan Chait supports charter schools. And literally every time he writes about it, he loads his analysis up with a ton of data, the results of studies, and complex argumentation. He knows the topic. It’s also entirely possible he is wrong- critics of charter schools have their answers to these arguments. But whenever he writes about it, a flood of people come out of the woodwork to argue that his opinions are illegitimate because his wife works in the charter schools industry. This is pure ad hominem attack- whether Chait is right or wrong on charter schools has nothing to do with what his wife does. But people who don’t like charter schools simply don’t want Chait to participate in the debate.
Straw men. Again, the straw man fallacy long predated the Internet. But there’s something about online discourse that really encourages it- it’s an easy way to play to your crowd, and it also looks like something else that would actually be useful (accurately giving a short summary of people’s views). Internet discourse is polluted with straw man arguments. I personally remember one I was involved in; I was in a discussion group on the First Amendment and pointed out that street protests were subject to some lawful restrictions under the First Amendment, especially in high traffic areas, because people had the right to drive the streets as well. (Essentially, while you have the right to go out on the streets to hold a spontaneous demonstration after a big news event, planned demonstrations that go off the sidewalks and onto the streets generally require permits, where the police will erect traffic barriers and ensure that cars and protesters do not get close to each other.)
Almost immediately, someone said “shorter Dilan Esper: it’s totally OK for people driving cars to run over protesters”. No, that wasn’t shorter Dilan Esper. Indeed, I kind of anticipated someone might say that, so I prefaced my statement about the right to drive the streets by pointing out that I was not claiming that people had the right to run over protesters, only that some street protests required a permit because they block traffic and interfere with people getting from point A to point B. No matter, this particular person (who was known as something of a troll) went ahead and said it. And then, he made it a kind of perennial ad hominem attack: I was the guy who advocated running over protesters. He would bring it up over and over again in other discussions.
Just like ad hominem attacks, straw men are poison for reasoned discourse. For any sort of discussion to happen, the parties have to at least understand what the other side is trying to say. I have heard, for instance, even very controversial issues like abortion discussed in good faith: New York Times writers Ross Douthat and Michelle Goldberg had a couple of good debates on the issue on the podcast they used to host together. But to do that, you have to make a point of understanding what the other person is actually arguing. You don’t have to like it or agree with it, but you have to understand it. The pro-choicer has to understand the pro-lifer’s arguments about human life; the pro-lifer has to understand the pro-choicer’s arguments about a woman’s autonomy.
The whole point of a straw man is to prevent this from happening, by assigning the worst possible position to your opponents, even if you know that isn’t what they are arguing. And, of course, it works in tandem with ad hominems as well. How many times have you heard a liberal say that conservatives’ ultimate goal is to impose a religiously inspired authoritarian fascism on the United States? Now how can you debate foreign aid to Israel with such a person? On the other hand, if you put aside all that BS (which the conservative has almost certainly never expressed support for anyway), you can have a discussion and a debate.
Evidence free assertions of motive. Let’s go back to the topic of charter schools. A ton of people work in charter schools, or work in the field of charter school advocacy. There’s a lot of money flowing around that particular sector, and there’s also a lot of people (especially from the tech sector) who fancy themselves policy wonks and have all sorts of (what they see as ) bright and brilliant ideas about education reform. Some of them have evidence behind them; others don’t. Some of them may be good ideas; some are clearly wacky. All of them could benefit from debate and discussion from education experts with different views.
Instead, you know what usually happens? “Charter schools are racist. They are one more attempt to segregate the schools and destroy the unionized public sector and the working class. The charter school movement dates back to the racist segregation academies founded in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education.” Is there any evidence for any of this? No. But that’s not the point. The point is to prevent any sort of debate that charter school advocates can participate in.
And I must say that the discourse of racism (and associated prejudices, e.g., sexism, homophobia, transphobia, able-ism, etc.) is replete with this sort of thing. We recently had Kyle Rittenhouse. There’s no evidence that Rittenhouse was a white supremacist. I suppose it’s possible that he was, though he denies it. And he’s certainly worthy of criticism for bringing an assault rifle to a protest and increasing the danger in an already tense situation. But there’s no actual evidence of his “white supremacy”.
Nonetheless, from the moment that the shootings happened until the present day, over and over again, he has been called a white supremacist. And the reason is that there’s almost no empirical discipline whatsoever anymore in the discourse of racism. Because of the shift to discussions of systemic racism (which is, unfortunately, a very real phenomenon), we are now in a world where just about anything can be asserted to be racist, and empirical claims don’t even enter into it. If enough people say Kyle Rittenhouse is racist, or draw ephemeral connections between his actions and some sort of racist structure, that’s the end of the discussion; he’s racist.
And tied to this is the fact that if you challenge this sort of assertion of racism, you will be called a racist as well. So few people do. Last spring, we had an orgy of publicity about how some shootings at Atlanta area massage parlors were an expression of anti-Asian racism. In fact, it was clear from the start that this was incorrect; crimes against sex workers (and people perceived to be sex workers) are altogether common, especially given the influence of anti-sex work religious beliefs and traditional morality in the United States. And it turned out that, indeed, that is exactly what happened. Evidence piled up, including the shooter’s own statements to the police. None of this mattered to some of the loudest voices. Indeed, they doubled down, making absurd claims such as the shooter’s own statements being worthless and irrelevant. This was particularly rich because many of these same folks amplified the claim (which was ever confirmed and was almost certainly false) made in an obscure Korean publication that the shooter yelled that he wanted to kill Asians. Apparently the shooter’s alleged statements were perfectly credible when they agreed with them!
And when these folks were challenged- oh my, it was bad. Immediately, “you are minimizing anti-Asian racism”. “We are dying and you want us to die.” Etc.
This is so, so common. People who think that subsidized child care is bad policy are misogynists. People who are concerned about teenagers being pushed too quickly into transition want the entire population of trans people killed. This sort of rhetoric is obviously not any sort of attempt to understand the issues or to discuss them; it’s simply taking advantage of the societal tic where we no longer need to actually back up claims of discrimination with proof (one of the easiest ways to get an article published is to draw a tenuous, evidence free connection between a current social or policy phenomenon and racism) to shut down debate.
“Nobody should have to debate their humanity.” I don’t remember the first time I heard this phrase, but it’s surely of recent vintage. Before I was alive, Black people won great victories by debating their humanity. (“Ain’t I a woman?”, asked Sojourner Truth. The form of the argument dates back at least to Shakespeare: “If you prick us, do we not bleed?”) Gay people won the right to marry by asserting their humanity. The feminist movement won its greatest victories by showing that women have the same rights as everyone else. Debating your humanity works.
But at some point, someone on the left figured out that it would be a wonderful rhetorical point to claim that some things are beyond debate. This immediately caused a couple of problems: (1) just because some things are beyond debate does not mean you don’t have to debate them to show it; and (2) many things are not beyond debate, and claiming that those are debates about “people’s humanity” are a very convenient way of avoiding debating things where you might lose the debate.
On point (1), obviously, I used a bunch of civil rights examples above, but an even better example of this is the dangers of tobacco. It was conclusively established no later than the 1960’s, with the Surgeon General’s report, that smoking caused cancer and lung disease. However, the anti-smoking movement did not say “OK, that’s it, debate’s over”. They couldn’t. They faced a powerful industry which was willing to pay for phony research and to get its message out there. But the anti-smoking movement kept at it, and eventually proved their case to just about all of the American people. (Interestingly, despite all the political polarization on issues of science, it doesn’t look like any movement has formed recently asserting that smoking is in fact not unhealthy and the science is wrong.) Just because you have proven your case doesn’t mean you don’t have to debate.
We are seeing that now with global warming. The scientific case that humans are causing the planet to warm are irrefutable. But over and over again, scientists continue to make that case. It’s probably “exhausting”, in the overused term of activists. But they do it. You have to. It’s a debate that has to be won if we are going to take action to save the planet.
As for point (2), the fact of the matter is that there are some really thorny policy debates under the rubric of civil rights. For instance, the general principle that racial and ethnic minorities should not suffer discrimination does not resolve the specific case of affirmative action, and people debate it back and forth. There are debates about trans-racial adoption as well. None of this is debating people’s humanity.
Where the “don’t debate my humanity” issue really gets invoked a lot is by trans activists. Again, the basic principle is broadly shared- there are still some right wingers who think that trans people shouldn’t have any rights at all, but those folks are, thankfully, a fairly small minority. But the trans issue causes some thorny problems in edge cases- in sports, in prisons, in sexual assault counseling, in teenage girls who develop Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria within discrete social groups, etc. These issues are worthy of debate.
But activists say that any such debate is “debating their humanity”. Indeed, anyone who debates such things wants them dead. Because, don’t you know, a lot of trans people have suicidal ideations. And in Brazil, there have been a string of murders of Black trans women.
Trying to rule a large swath of debatable issues out of rhetorical bounds is not new. It’s often a feature of wartime, for instance- Republicans got the band then known as the Dixie Chicks canceled because their singer said she was ashamed George W. Bush was from Texas. And more generally, they trafficked in allegations that anti-war speech came from a “Fifth Column” of people who took the side of the terrorists. (The recent, disgusting allegations by certain right wingers concerning Rep. Ilhan Omar are an echo of that sort of thinking.)
But as you can see from those issues, I think it’s very unhealthy for society. Where there are basic, legitimate public policy issues, like whether it is a good idea to go to war with Iraq, you have to be able to have healthy debate on them. And so it is with a lot of these trans issues: you can’t figure out when trans girls and women should and shouldn’t be eligible to compete in girls and women’s sports by saying that the debate is illegitimate and is “debating trans women’s humanity” or asserting that even having the debate will kill trans women. It doesn’t work that way.
You can debate, but you can’t discuss the evidence. This happens a lot in debates about things like affirmative action. There isn’t a societal norm that you can’t debate affirmative action- obviously it is debated, and sometimes gets prohibited by court ruling or voter initiative. But certain forms of empirical evidence cannot be debated. For instance, a Georgetown Law adjunct was fired for discussing the academic performance of her Black students on a Zoom call. In that narrow instance, I did not question the firing; I do understand that since that call was publicized, it put the school in an impossible position, because that professor’s Black students would hear what she said about them. But the broader notion that you shouldn’t ever talk about disparities among racial groups in academia is crazy! Indeed, I don’t see how you can even do serious ANTI-racism without discussing this. If it is happening, it is a problem that everyone should want to solve.
Another example of this concerned Rachel Nichols, who was ESPN’s excellent NBA analyst, host, and reporter. Nichols probably knows as much about professional basketball as any sportscaster in the country, and she was fired because she was surreptitiously recorded stating that ESPN was advancing the career of a Black sportscaster partly because of her race. The thing is, isn’t this exactly what supporters of affirmative action want? It’s pretty ridiculous to say that on the one hand, organizations have to diversify and promote the careers of minorities, but on the other hand, anyone who actually suggests, even in a private phone call, that an employer is actually advancing the careers of minorities must lose her job.
What is obviously going on is that the promoters of diversity policies have decided that it hurts their political project for the public to know too much about what they are actually doing. So they are insisting that the debate occur in extremely general terms and that nobody discuss specifics. But this sort of thing is a serious threat to freedom and democracy: a free society should be able to discuss the data and empirical information that informs whether affirmative action programs are a good idea.
There are surely other ways that debate is being squelched as well. Now, to be clear, I am not saying that the US is an unfree society or that people lack the liberty to go online and debate. But I do think these trends are all worrisome, and when put together, represent a sort of looming threat to our democratic values. Real democracy depends on free debate; American debate, which should have gotten freer on the Internet, is getting less free.