Political debate is conducted in mutual bad faith. It isn’t just the malicious intent, the goal of utterly destroying the reputation of the opponent. This is slander, and no honorable person can feel right about it. But beyond this obvious and surface malevolence, there is a deeper structural pattern in political speech that tags it as bad faith: while the honest debater seeks to show and discuss premises, the political activist – the bad faith debater – seeks energetically to conceal his premises. Because what he needs are the votes of those who would never consent if they saw clearly his assumption.

Honest debate, like you might have with a dear friend, is a mutual search for the logical point where the two views diverge. I f the friends can identify the node where their separate logical strings bifurcate, they can move upstream, as it were, to work directly the fork, instead of indirectly on their adversary’s downstream, and hidden, conclusions. This work on a clearly stated point of disagreement will yield agreement efficiently and quickly. Because, after all, what the honest debaters want is agreement. Neither has a conflict of interest. Each is eager to expose his own premise to critique.

So good faith arguments proceed in retrograde: from assertion “backwards” to premise, and this same movement repeatedly, to deeper premises. Soon, agreement gets easier. It’s a search for agreement, and it honors the opponent, and it tends toward less heat, more light as the evening wears on.
This is a handy rule of thumb. As you listen to a discussion or debate, shift your attention from the content and focus on the logical direction implied in the back and forth. This may be hard at first, especially if you agree warmly with one and detest the other points of view. Your natural reaction to the surface arguments might distract you. look at hich of the two voices is tracing prior assumptions in the direction o=f what we used to call “axioms” – truths that are so self-evident they aren’t debated. The speaker who is pressing toward axioms, or first principles, is the more honest. The opposite type speaker we also used to call a ‘sophist”, the ancient label for speaker for hire. We now call them lawyers, or “politician” – never a compliment.

Less heat, more light as the evening wears on. Bad faith argument drives in exactly the opposite logical direction. Each speaker seeks to insulate, rather than expose his premise, and he seeks to trap the opponent in his static assertion and prevent him from moving retrograde toward his own premise. Neither speaker, of course, actually wants agreement. What each wants is victory. So you have two minds at work, each with a severe conflict of interest.

It’s tempting to say that the audience insults its own intelligence by subjecting itself to this. But most of the audience is corrupted already. They entered the debate hall to cheer their candidate, thwart the other, and a search for truth has nothing to do with it. Since politics is a struggle over whose money will go to whom, the voters who turn out to debates are doubly dishonest: the goal is theft and the main rhetorical tactic is to lie.