About the "Debate"

Teaching Rhetoric in the Post-Truth Era

If you have already seen enough hot takes about this topic, something that actually deserves more attention this week is the upcoming book The Education Wars, which does something the debate decidedly did not do, and addresses a number of pressing policy and societal issues in a coherent and accessible way. You can read my review and conversation with co-author Jennifer Berkshire by clicking here.

Okay, so about that debate:

[W]e must be able to employ persuasion, just as strict reasoning can be employed, on opposite sides of a question, not in order that we may in practice employ it in both ways (for we must not make people believe what is wrong), but in order that we may see clearly what the facts are, and that, if another man argues unfairly, we on our part may be able to confute him…

Nevertheless, the underlying facts do not lend themselves equally well to the contrary views. No; things that are true and things that are better are, by their nature, practically always easier to prove and easier to believe in.

-Aristotle, Rhetoric (350 BCE)

Joy is an act of resistance

-Toi Derricotte, from The Telly Cycle

On Thursday night, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump engaged in what some have called “a presidential debate”.

And in many surface senses, it was a debate— the kind of “debate” two angry, tired people have where the goal of each is to hurt and embarrass the other person.

Despite the two thousand takes on what a catastrophe it was for the current president, in a classical sense Biden largely “won” the debate¹. He mostly maintained his composure, seeking to burnish his credibility by basing his arguments in fact, by reminding viewers of his commitment to American ideals, and by presenting himself as a proud father of a son who served in the military.

In a classical sense, Trump “lost”. He lied, over and over again in a blatant and obvious way. Then he lied some more. He rarely answered a question directly, and in some cases— like a repeated question about providing childcare to Americans— he never answered it at all, even obliquely.

But this isn’t ancient Athens, and Aristotle wasn’t judging the debate.

Trump “debated” like someone who instinctively understands how the human brain actually makes decisions. He spoke to his base, and only his base. He used intense emotional language. He engaged in ad hominem attacks, put up straw man after straw man, mangled cause and effect, and blustered and lied again.

What these two men sought from the debate were very different goals. Trump likely wanted to come across as more confident and brash than Biden, for a base that values these qualities. Biden likely wanted to come across as cogent and coherent, and to present a calm, rational counterpoint to Trump.

The thing is, for those who understand even some of the policy issues being debated, Biden likely did sound mostly cogent and coherent. He mumbled and at times seemed to struggle with his well-documented and lifelong speech impediment, but he also displayed a depth of knowledge on actual subjects important to the presidency— even if he sometimes got details a little wrong. He seemed tired, and he probably was.

Unfortunately, anyone interested in cogency and fact-checking must already know that Trump is a liar and a blusterer.

It’s essentially his brand. This is a guy who lied about whether or not it was raining on his first day as president, and who continued to lie about it— and a thousand other things— for years thereafter. This is a guy who repeatedly said during the debate that Democrats want to make it legal to murder infants after birth (an easily debunked claim which, like most of the lies during the debate, was never fact-checked by the moderators).

They must know that the way a sentence feels leaving his mouth is more important to Trump than whether it is true.

Trump understands that emotional “truth” empowers people to keep on believing and doing whatever the hell they want, while facts and data are useful only if we’re willing to try hard to engage what social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls the “rider” (the more rational parts of our minds) to influence the “elephant” part (the more powerful, emotional parts)².

In a classical sense, what happened on Thursday was not a debate, since in Aristotle’s conception of rhetoric, “A statement is persuasive and credible either because it is directly self-evident or because it appears to be proved from other statements that are so.” Instead of persuasive and credible arguments, what we got was a series of open-ended two-minute intervals where the topics suggested (usually quite meekly) by the moderators were mostly just a mechanism (intentionally or not) to make it harder for Biden to beat Trump at Trump’s game of saying whatever came into his head in the forceful tone of an autocrat who can shape reality to his will.

The current rhetorical situation is that many Americans believe— because journalists, commentors, and Trump supporters have repeatedly framed it this way— that a major question in the race should be, Is Biden senile? And although—as the current president pointed out himself— Biden is only three years older than Trump, and although Trump should strike no reasonable person as especially lucid, coherent, rational, or even healthy— that framing has allowed Trump to “win” in many ways simply by talking loudly and forcefully, even if the things he’s shouting mostly make no sense.

Trump scored a fairly effective point mid-debate when Biden tripped over some of his words during an explanation, giving Trump the opportunity in his follow-up to claim, “I really didn’t understand what he said at the end of that sentence”— a quip he had presumably been waiting to use all night. (That this came from a guy whose most characteristic stylistic device is the verbal non-sequitur is deeply ironic, but that doesn’t really do Biden any good.)

Biden, in the current framing, is senile until proven otherwise because he used to be slightly more magnetic—even if he has by many accounts been a mediocre public speaker for his entire career. Trump, a guy who, before his presidency, was mainly famous for saying Ya fired a lot, can somehow toss out word salad and conspiracy theories and his behavior is more or less accepted because, basically Trump will be Trump— what can you do?

Biden, on the other hand, has the much harder task of seeming more youthful than he is while also seeming more calm, more informed, and more intelligent than the other elderly man in the debate. Thursday proved what everyone already knows about the second part— obviously Biden is more informed and grounded in reality than Trump— but Biden’s appearance, stooped posture, and occasionally mumbling and stammering delivery, did little for him on the first part.

I don’t really agree with the many talking heads opining that Biden’s performance was a disaster— it just didn’t really accomplish the feat of making a man in his eighties who seems to be struggling with some health issues seem like he wasn’t a man in his eighties struggling with some health issues. Many commentators have suggested that Biden was perhaps overprepared, that he had rehearsed the facts too much— which is very plausible. He was also probably ill during the debate, with his team explaining that his raspy voice was a result of a sore throat.

But although his delivery was uneven and he sometimes leaned too hard on bare facts, at times Biden was highly effective at using these facts he sometimes to make emotional points that might resonate with listeners, as when he pointed out that Trump is a convicted felon, or when he pointed out that Trump has been adjudicated to have committed rape.

More of that probably would have helped. But it is, after all, much harder to make a compelling two-minute extemporaneous speech— especially one that happens to be at least mostly true—than it is to just make stuff up in a charismatic way and keep talking until the clock runs out. Unfortunately, at times Biden was so concise in his answers that he was left with time on the clock— which, in a different context, might have made him seem prepared and confident, but which, in a contest to prove who was the most virile of two roughly-eighty-year-old men, didn’t help much.

In my last few years as a teacher, the realities of political rhetoric in the 24-hour news era weighed on me sometimes. High school rhetoric courses tend to be heavily informed by the Aristotelian ideal of argument— truth and facts guiding a well-organized presentation of an argument, relying on the credibility of the speaker and emotion, but in the service of an argument which is true. The number of think pieces in the past two days about Biden’s evident partial or total “failure” in the debate suggests strongly that in American politics, this kind of argument is not valued, and may in fact be counterproductive to “winning”.

That’s what happens when the media is a content machine and presidential debates are a sporting event.

Advertising, propaganda, and political speech are rarely successful because the content is true, or because the speaker has the gravitas of experience while lacking the charisma of pathological narcissism. Over two thousand years ago, Aristotle— who was of course not the first do to so— acknowledged that emotion has a powerful role to play in making arguments. Jonathan Haidt and other modern psychologists and neuroscientists suggest that emotion may be an even more powerful guide in making decisions than we already believed.

Does this mean students don’t need to learn rhetoric?

I don’t think so. As much as Aristotle was wrong about all kinds of things, I think he was right on the money when he said it was important to be able to argue a point from both “sides,” not so that we become better liars, but so that we recognize the elements that liars and other people making bad arguments are using.

I think what it does mean, is that a quality education needs to emphasize all three points of the rhetorical triangle— emotional, logical, and “ethical” appeals— as well as the oft-forgotten kairos, essentially, an appeal to the situation.

Kairos is the appeal that the Biden team clearly had the biggest obstacle in using— how does a president whose primary selling point is a long career in politics rise to meet a moment where the norms of politics that guided his career have been all but destroyed? How does a so-so debater with a lot of policy knowledge go up against a heavy-weight con-man who has mastered telling mobs what they want to hear? (Meanwhile, Trump understands the moment very well, appealing to multiple, sometimes-overlapping groups which simply dislike Biden, dislike Democrats, fear immigrants, and worry about inflation, while also using dog-whistles for more extreme groups which support white supremacy and religious dominionism.

It is easier to appeal to these groups with vague languages, vivid narratives that can’t be fact-checked because they are false on their face, and highly emotional language— such as Trump’s repeated false claims about immigration, like when he said Biden “decided to open up our border, open up our country to people that are from prisons, people that are from mental institutions, insane asylum, terrorists”.

If there is a winning strategy for that, I don’t think we saw that Thursday night (though Biden hinted at one when he responded to Trump’s claim about open borders with a strongly-delivered “Everything he says is a lie,” something which will likely ring true even for some Trump supporters.) Instead, we saw a series of mostly-missed opportunities to learn anything new about either man, heard a bunch of weird, absurdist lies from Trump— as well as a refusal to clearly promise to accept the outcome of the election— and some exaggerations from Biden, and got a painfully awkward anatomy-measuring contest involving golf handicaps at the end³.

As a rhetoric teacher, this kind of display hurts.

As a human being living in America in 2024, I don’t know that it matters a whole lot, in practical terms. While it would have been nice for everyone frightened of a further slide into authoritarianism to have been able to see a powerful, charismatic champion use truth to wage rhetorical battle on their behalf, it still would have been mostly just words. It is unlikely the debate changed many minds in terms of the general election, and I can only hope that people will remember that the actions of both men are more important indicators of what they will do as president (again) than any words.

More than all this: the context surrounding the debate is frightening and painful. What these two men said— as well as what they didnt’ say— reminded me forcibly that my transgender neighbors— who no one mentioned at all— are under attack. It reminded me that women and their doctors in many states have to consult local laws for permission to get treatment for ectopic pregnancies or other life-threatening health issues— and live in fear that they may be denied. It reminded me that most of the students that attend the schools where I used to teach are being targeted for their gender identity or denied a place in the history they are required to learn.

When the debate was over, I mostly regretted having watched it. I was not especially surprised, but I was sad to have had my expectations confirmed. For some reason, I found myself going down an internet video rabbit hole that mostly involved live Chappell Roan performances and clips of court cases involving conspiracy theories from the “ sovereign citizen” movement.

The former movingly reminded me that marginalized people continue to create their own spaces to feel safe and included, especially when the singer introduced a song by saying,

It means a lot to know that there is support in my home state [of Missouri]. There was just always a fear, growing up, that I would be too much for my hometown, or even here, in St. Louis, which is not true. It’s not true. And what performing in Missouri had taught me is that there are people like me everywhere, even in the tiniest of towns. And not people just— there are trans angels in every town. And I just want you to be exactly who you are here, not what anyone else expects of you. You are just allowed to be exactly who you want here, and dress however you want to, kiss whoever you want to. All I could ever ask for as an artist is for there to be joy in a room for two hours where there wasn’t any before. So thank you for that. Truthfully, you make the joy, so thank you for everything.

Roan’s short speech contained the awareness of situation and audience, the appeals to credibility, and the deep pathos of which most of the debate lacked. But what was especially moving was to hear lots of young people, many of them queer in a country that has increasingly— and dangerously— used them as a political punching bag for the past several years, singing along with every word of a song about the shifting complexities of love.

Of course Roan is explicitly working in the tradition of drag— and her mention of “trans angels” and images of safe, self-created queer communities acknowledge a tradition of deeply marginalized groups— especially gay and trans people of color— creating ball culture and other safe spaces as a way to find joy and victory in the midst of violence and oppression.

On the other hand, those videos of “sovereign citizens” sadly fumbling through their court cases, while not as uplifting, at least reminded me that the courts, though highly imperfect, at least attempt (largely) to stand on facts and established procedure.

Many of the arguments in the “debate” were a lot like those made by “sovereign citizens”— canned sloganeering and word salad (often down to repeating the same internet-provided talking points verbatim)— designed to create a sense of alternate reality.

The difference is that in court, instead of hapless moderators employed by a for-profit cable news network there are judges vested with the formal authority (and legal training) to push back on baseless claims and, where necessary, find defendants who refuse to follow the rules or engage in rational arguments in contempt of court.

The silver lining: all of this serves as a reminder that, in the end, we’re on our own, and by we, I mean everyone who wants to protect what’s working in our society and improve on what’s not working, and by on our own, I mean there are millions of us who can, if we choose, work together to address the problems that these two politicians mostly failed to talk much about— problems like climate change, attacks on LGBTQ+ people and other marginalized groups, defunding of public schools, and conflicts across the globe which threaten the lives and freedom of innocent people. If you’re as dispirited by the debate as I am, hopefully that will help you direct some of your focus to local issues, where you can have a major impact. Hopefully you will celebrate truth, love beauty, and find and create joy and community where you are.

1. For example, Aristotle lays out in Rhetoric three modes of persuasion, often called logos (appeal to logic), ethos (appeal to credibility), and pathos (appeal to emotion).

“Persuasion is achieved by the speaker's personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible. We believe good men more fully and more readily than others: this is true generally whatever the question is, and absolutely true where exact certainty is impossible and opinions are divided. This kind of persuasion, like the others, should be achieved by what the speaker says, not by what people think of his character before he begins to speak. It is not true, as some writers assume in their treatises on rhetoric, that the personal goodness revealed by the speaker contributes nothing to his power of persuasion; on the contrary, his character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion he possesses. Secondly, persuasion may come through the hearers, when the speech stirs their emotions. Our judgements when we are pleased and friendly are not the same as when we are pained and hostile. It is towards producing these effects, as we maintain, that present-day writers on rhetoric direct the whole of their efforts. This subject shall be treated in detail when we come to speak of the emotions. Thirdly, persuasion is effected through the speech itself when we have proved a truth or an apparent truth by means of the persuasive arguments suitable to the case in question.”

2. In Haidt’s theory of the elephant and the rider, the elephant in the analogy is the non-conscious part of our brains, including passion and emotion; the rider is our comparatively weak, conscious and “logical” side.

3. (The last words in the debate were actually Biden saying to Trump, “You are a child.” Which, fair.)