Debate Bro Rhetoric and its Role in Civil Discourse

In a time when public discourse often feels like combat, the line between civility and incivility has grown thin. Yet, true rhetorical skill lies in knowing when to wield each.

Illustration by Jade Cuevas/POLITICO (source images via iStock)

These days, vitriol is both ubiquitous and addictive for those spewing that vitriol (it feels good to vanquish one’s enemies) and spectators who see the spewing as a form of entertainment. People would rather shoot insults—or worse—at those with whom they disagree, and others take joy in watching those people do so. None of this is particularly civil in nature. For most, this may portend the end of civil discourse. However, many people who feel that way may inadvertently equivocate the meanings of the word “civility.” The common meaning of the term is politeness. However, the political meaning denotes public engagement guided by reason toward mutually advantageous ends; this does not necessarily involve being polite. Thus, I believe we can have civil debate without being civil. What might this mean for civil (in both meanings of the word) society?

I believe the revilement induced by the verbal sparring we see in lieu of dialogue can be transmuted into something good. Also, I believe compassion and active listening are important, but they are not everything. A famous Bible passage (and song lyric) says, “there is a time for every purpose under heaven.” Every purpose. That includes caustic language as well as congenial language. Ultimately, the problem is that focusing solely on compassion or anger, respectively, is a woefully incomplete rhetorical education. I contend that rhetoric must be taught in a way that sees particular modes as situationally contingent rather than morally fixed. For civil society to work, civility and incivility must have their places.

There is a Time and Place for Everything

An important term in rhetorical theory and practice is “Kairos,” often translated as “window of opportunity,” or the confluence of time, place, subject, and audience, and its impact on how we speak and act. One of the implicit lessons in the term is the idea that “appropriate or inappropriate” is the primary dichotomy to consider, “not right and wrong,” per se; the time, place, subject, and audience will dictate what one should or should not say for the utmost persuasiveness. So, most situations call for a level of civility, but some may not. Even I have made the conscious decision to add causticity to an argument based on my “kairotic” assessment of a situation; they saw civility as weakness, so I made my point in less civil ways. This is what Aristotle was getting at when he defined rhetoric as the ability, in any given situation, to discern the available (i.e., appropriate) means of persuasion.

I bring this up because, recently, Politico published an article titled “Winning Is the Only Thing: My Journey Into the Viral, Vicious World of Political Online Debate.” Politico’s Catherine Kim writes of two self-proclaimed “debate bros,” Andrew Wilson and Brian Atlas, who see debate as a particularly masculine contest of domination; using dialogue to enhance and get to the truth of a matter is not really their goal. For Wilson and Atlas, debate is verbal combat, a martial art all would do well to master. This is the raison d’être of Debate University, their set of courses for learning how to “dominate any discussion.” “Debate Bro rhetoric” seems to be about embarrassing another person and prioritizing antagonism (destructive enmity) over agonism (constructive and honest dialogue across differences)—the person who does the best job of humiliating the other “wins” the debate. To be clear, humorous degradation, not persuasion, is the objective.

Anger and Erudition

Wilson and Atlas’ embrace of invective is not novel. In fact, ancient philosophers saw the importance of being able to spew causticity effectively. Entertaining the benefits of anger—both having it and manipulating it—was a salient aspect of classical Greek rhetorical education. Though Plato and Socrates were not enthusiastic about rhetoric as a learned skill (They thought eloquence and persuasion were part of the natural demeanor of a virtuous philosopher), Aristotle and his contemporaries recognized that persuasion could necessitate vitriol or congeniality if the Kairos dictates it.

In Book II of Rhetoric, Aristotle writes, “The Emotions are all those feelings that so change men as to affect their judgements, and that are also attended by pain or pleasure. Such are anger, pity, fear, and the like, with their opposites” (My emphasis). You can see that no emotion should go ignored; certain emotions can affect judgments in certain ways, and anger can be just as rhetorically appropriate as civility. Aristotle elaborates with anger in particular:

We must arrange what we have to say about each [emotion] under three heads. Take, for instance, the emotion of anger: here we must discover (1) what the state of mind of angry people is, (2) who the people are with whom they usually get angry, and (3) on what grounds they get angry with them. It is not enough to know one or even two of these points; unless we know all three, we shall be unable to arouse anger in any one. The same is true of the other emotions. (My emphasis)

We see here that Aristotle expects those who aspire to be effective speakers to acquire the ability to arouse anger, not necessarily mitigate it. Apparently, sometimes we may want our audience to be angry; it can be quite the motivator, disrupter, and distractor. It should be no surprise, then, that “invective,” typically understood as insulting or abusive language, was part of formal rhetorical education in ancient Greece; it was one of the 14 exercises that make up the Progymnasmata, a favored form of rhetorical education.

Clearly, it was seen as a necessary skill, something that every speaker should have in his or her pocket just in case the Kairos suggests its use.

All this said, would Aristotle approve of Debate University’s emphasis on humiliation? Not quite. Using the word “insolence” to describe the act of deliberately shaming someone solely for the pleasure of oneself and/or others, Aristotle writes:

Insolence is also a form of slighting, since it consists in doing and saying things that cause shame to the victim, not in order that anything may happen to yourself, or because anything has happened to yourself, but simply for the pleasure involved. The cause of the pleasure is that he thinks himself greatly superior to others when ill-treating them. One sort of insolence is to rob people of the honour due to them; you certainly slight them thus; another is to act for the mere pleasure of it; hence boys and rich men are insolent, as they are happy and think themselves superior when they behave thus.”

Although Aristotle does not condemn insolence outright, the implications are there: the fact that it is done solely “for the pleasure involved” seems less than virtuous for Aristotle, and attributing the act specifically to boys and rich men implies that insolence is the tool of those who don’t take life seriously, either because they don’t know any better (boys) or are so untouchable they don’t care who they insult (rich men).

Aristotle believed there is a time and place for everything, and instructors of rhetoric should teach as much of that “everything” as possible. Aristotle, who taught his own course on rhetoric, would approve of an institution that approached rhetoric more holistically. He would disapprove of an institution that focused on a single tactic, which, for Debate University, is mordant humiliation. The problem with Debate University is that it is too one-dimensional.

So, How Should We Look at Debate University?

I am of two minds about Wilson and Atlas’s take on debate.

On the one hand, and as I’ve discussed, basing education on shaming, humiliating, and other slights is inappropriate if taught for their own sake and not as kairotic considerations. But perhaps we should recognize the fact that Debate University is exposing the power and skills of rhetoric to an otherwise uninterested audience. Kim writes that Debate University “isn’t your nerdy debate club from high school, where buttoned-up students. . . hope that the extracurricular scores them a spot at an Ivy League school.” No, it isn’t, and that seems to be by design.

Wilson and Atlas show some rhetorical savvy of their own, taking the concept of audience consideration seriously. How can we expose rhetorical skill to a wider audience, an audience not as academically inclined as “nerdy debate club” members? Wilson and Atlas found an answer: speak their language. Lean into the anger already festering in our society. It is the anger that gets them in the door. It places them in a space of rhetorical learning that is sold as antagonistic but may also expose people to argument and counterargument, the formality of traditional debate, the occasional benefits of humility, and the need to do research and know what one is talking about before speaking on it. Though this last one is done as preparation to, as Wilson says, “counter punch and hit really, really hard,” knowledge of others’ viewpoints and understanding why they have them may be another positive side effect. (If the importance of research is all that Wilson and Atlas succeed in instilling in people, they will be heroes in my book.) Lastly, Debate University dedicates a video warning people to choose one’s battles and refrain from caustic argumentation with friends and loved ones. There is a silver lining to Debate University’s cloud of toxicity.

On the other hand, humiliation for its own sake and not for a greater cause—e.g., clearing the way for a genuine search for truth—may be a waste of time and energy for all involved. Yes, anger and calumny can be explored for their rhetorical efficacy, but isolating shame and humiliation as a central point—or the only point—in debate is misguided. Regarding Debate University, my issue is not with the fact that Wilson and Atlas promote incivility and vitriol to embarrass opponents. My issue is that they mainly do that and seem to care nothing for the truth. They teach logical fallacy—something inherently detrimental to any search for truth—as a weapon to be used, not a cognitive distortion or misunderstanding to be avoided. Though they are also in erudite company with this idea (the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote a whole book encouraging the use of logical fallacies to “win” an argument), the one-sided presentation of the multi-sided phenomenon of rhetoric is a mistake.

One could say my issue with Debate University is teleological; their goal, not necessarily what they teach, is the issue. They teach the right things (e.g., thorough research) for the wrong reasons (to hit “really, really hard.”) Ultimately, Debate University’s contribution to rhetorical education is tragically lopsided.

There is No One Facet to Rhetoric

To be clear, I think it is a mistake to “lop” any one particular side. Focusing solely on civility for its own sake can also be problematic. As much as I appreciate organizations like Braver Angels, an organization that claims it is “looking for common ground and ways to work together” and “support principles that bring us together rather than divide us,” its exclusive focus on civility and mutual understanding, though direly needed, is not the entirety of persuasion and active civil life. For example, Braver Angels is an organization that promotes sharing viewpoints with substantially less emphasis on persuasion, to emphasize inclusion, empathy, and balance in conversations between conservatives and liberals. This is good and a necessary part of a good speaker’s repertoire. However, it is not the whole story and, frankly, can’t be. Sometimes, we need to settle on the truth or an appropriate course of action moving forward. Agreeing to disagree is not always an option.

To Braver Angels’ credit, they published an article criticizing their practices on their own blog. In “A Mild, Sympathetic Critique of Better Angels Debates,” political scientist Michael Harrington writes that Braver Angels’ approach is noble but limited. He argues that Braver Angels’ debate model is admirable for its attempts to foster civility and empathy. Still, it discourages rebuttal and active persuasion in a way that, according to Harrington, actually reinforces polarization. Harrington proposes a concept he calls “satisficing,” which is “a term that bridges ‘satisfy’ with ‘suffice’,” to meet the demands of civil society. Harrington makes the point that differences are why we have politics in the first place; we need politics to manage the inevitable differences that emerge in a free and pluralistic society. Forgetting about the differences to focus on commonalities, though noble, is only part of the idea of persuasion, not the whole. To seek “a greater truth,” we must sometimes go beyond congeniality.

Neither incivility nor a focus on compassion—instead of persuasion in general—are inherently bad things, but focusing solely on one or the other is misguided. The persuasive potential of a variety of rhetorical modes should be taught.

My central argument is that rhetorical education should be holistic, not one-dimensional. Rhetoric, understood through Kairos, includes both civility (in both senses of the word) and incivility as potentially valid in certain contexts. For organizations like Debate University and Braver Angels, their common error is isolating one rhetorical mode—e.g., humiliation and compassion, respectively—and presenting it as intrinsically right and worthy of solitary focus. Rhetorical training should encompass a wide range of persuasive strategies, including both vitriol and empathy. Again, Kairos does not necessarily determine right or wrong, but appropriate and inappropriate. Thus, I promote a holistic and kairotic pedagogy of rhetoric for effective communication in civil—that is, public and participatory—society.

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