Debating to Lose

The combination of a two-week beach vacation and a decreased need to commute during the summer teaching hiatus meant I listened to fewer podcasts than usual lately. Catching up, I was able to scroll past some topics that were OBE but the June 20 episode* of the Ezra Klein Show, “Is This America’s Golden Age? A Debate.” struck me as sufficiently evergreen to be worth a listen. It featured a Munk Debate on that topic between Kevin Roberts and Kellyanne Conway, arguing for the affirmative, and Klein and Ben Rhodes opposed. It was before a hostile Canadian audience who, by their own admission (it was an Oxford-style debate), were overwhelmingly against the resolution.

What struck me was just how poorly the affirmative team argued. Whatever one thinks of their politics, Roberts and Conway are highly-intelligent people who make a living making arguments. But, aside from a CPAC or similar audience, I just can’t imagine who would have found their arguments the slightest bit persuasive. Indeed, they often produced guffaws from the crowd.

While the episode was in my Overcast feed and Apple’s, it is unfortunately not featured on the NYT show page. Which is odd, in that it’s subscriber-only content and I’m a subscriber.* Alas, this also means a transcript is not available and, in this instance, ChatGPT can’t produce one for me.

But, essentially, Roberts and Conway simply regurgitated Trump campaign talking points about how awful things were during the Biden administration and hammering the familiar themes of illegal immigration, gender ideology, and the plight of the working man.

Oddly, Klein argued the affirmative better than they did, pointing out how much progress the United States has made in comparison to the rest of the developed world over the past 35 years or so. Naturally, of course, he then made the case that Trump is destroying the institutions that got us there.

While I think Klein and Rhodes would have won on the merits, regardless, an affirmative case framing the argument more broadly than Trump vs. Biden would have stood a far greater chance to win under Oxford rules. Given that more than two-thirds of the audience disagreed with the resolution going in, the advantage was theirs.

*My guess is that the Munk folks were willing to allow Ezra to share the audio with his audience, but wanted to otherwise retain control of the content, which they require a paid subscription to access.