Dan Calabrese: Here's Why Conservatives Often Fall Short When Debating Ideas
The winner of a debate is usually the party that frames the terms of the discussion. If you can’t do that successfully, you can lose a debate even though your ideas are superior.
Consider a scenario: Two debaters on stage. One is prepared to argue that health care works better when people pay their own doctor bills. But the other debater starts, and goes on at great length about how his ideas are better for getting people “covered” by insurance.
That’s not what the first debater wanted to talk about at all, but his opponent is so persuasive with his talk about how everyone needs to be covered, the debate moderators keep coming back to that point in the questions they ask.
The first debater gets sucked into the how-to-cover-everybody discussion and never even gets a chance to make his points about why it’s better if people just pay their own bills.
The first debater had the superior idea. But the second debater set the terms for the debate and won.
Too often conservatives fall short in the discussion of ideas because they allow the left to set the terms for the debate.
How many discussions of policy start with the question, “What should the government do to help?” If you believe the correct answer is nothing, but everyone else has assumed the government should act and is merely discussing how and how much, you’re not even speaking the language of the other people involved with the discussion.
Obviously the news media play a large role in this. They cover most issues as if it’s a foregone conclusion that government action is a positive and essential thing. They know little about how business works or about how wealth is created, but they know how elections work and how laws are passed, so they talk about everything as if these are the most important things that happen.
If conservatives are going to start persuading people that our points of view are correct, we have to start changing the terms of the debate. That begins by challenging the premises of those we’re debating.
For example, when a journalist asks a candidate for office how much he paid in taxes, the conventional instinct is to assure everyone that you paid substantial amounts in taxes. You want to be seen as a good citizen.
But since when do conservatives believe it’s good to let the government take lots of your money? What if conservatives answered such questions by saying we paid as little in taxes as possible, and instead we invested our earnings in the more productive private sector, where jobs are created and businesses grow?
Or what if, when someone asks if it’s mostly the rich who benefit from a policy, we stop emphasizing how little the rich benefit, and start making the case that the rich are the wisest allocators of capital, and that everyone does better when they direct the flow of money instead of politicians?
If conservatives don’t start setting the terms of the debate in ways like this, we will never really win the debate because we’re left to try to outdo the left at its own game. When will we ever be able to win a debate like that?
This is difficult because, in too many cases, conservative politicians aren’t really sure why they’re conservative. They embrace conservatism because they come from a red district, or because they like the idea of lower taxes and smaller government, but they haven’t really thought through why it benefits people.
So as soon as the left and their media friends come along with the usual criticisms, they wilt and become defensive.
Someone needs to teach grassroots conservatives how to change the terms of the debate and stop conceding important premises to the left. The left will be unprepared for this, since it’s been so many years since its premises were seriously challenged.
But it needs to happen, and not only conservatives but the country as a whole will benefit if it does.
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