By Justin Eckstein and William Keith
Having a debate is often difficult and uncomfortable—but also crucial. Debate is one of the modes of discourse that provides an alternative to violence, making an informed and engaged electorate possible. It is also exciting, unpredictable, and dangerous. Just about every version of liberalism makes a nod to John Stuart Mill and the marketplace of ideas, and yet, questions are being raised about the legitimacy and purpose of debate in that marketplace.
What is a debate, anyway? We all broadly call many multi-turn disagreements “debates,” whether they take place spontaneously in person or across decades in print. Here we are focusing on debating in the tradition of parliamentary debates, Oxford Union debates, or intercollegiate policy debates: A specific proposition being debated, two sides, taking turns with more or less spontaneous answers, some ground rules, the idea of winning vs. losing, and an audience for the performance of the debate.
Each of these characteristics, well implemented, can make for a compelling experience of disagreement that illuminates important issues and sometimes changes minds. Dialogue and discussion are also important components of public deliberation; dialogue focuses on sharing perspectives and enhancing understanding, while discussion allows people to bounce ideas around, exploring and refining them.
Debate has the virtue of testing ideas and policies: What are the best arguments for and against them? As Mill noted in On Liberty:
He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion…Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them…he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.
Debate at its best functions as democracy’s laboratory, a structured process for sorting out the strongest and weakest arguments for a position before committing public resources or restricting individual freedoms. Yes, debate at its worst devolves into angry fighting, just as discussion at its worst becomes a meandering series of disconnected perceptions and opinions. Critiques of debate aren’t new. In 1913, Teddy Roosevelt watched an intercollegiate debate and despaired at what he saw: “There is no effort to instill sincerity and intensity of conviction. On the contrary, the net result is to make the contestants feel that their convictions have nothing to do with their arguments.” Twenty years ago, Jon Stewart told CNN’s Crossfire hosts to “stop hurting America,” calling their debate show “theater” that masqueraded as democratic discourse. “To do a debate would be great,” he said, “but that’s like saying pro wrestling is a show about athletic competition.” Many people apparently agreed, and the show was canceled soon after. Most candidate debates have devolved into annoying recitations of talking points with little or no real engagement, while presidential debates have become circuses.
But the solution isn’t to abandon debate. It is to design better debates. Without this testing ground, citizens’ decisions come without a vetting of choices. Consider the recent debate across the curriculum initiatives taking place all over the country. Community colleges (e.g., Linn Benton Community College), small liberal arts colleges (Gustavus Adolphus), big state schools (the University of Utah), large liberal arts colleges (University of Denver), and elite institutions (Vanderbilt)—these different programs have shown the way that debate can be harnessed to improve the ability and desire of students to advocate for their own views.
Consider when first-year college students debated Tacoma’s Growing Resilience in Tacoma (GRIT), pre- and post-surveys of 185 participants showed significant gains in understanding complex policy questions (mean scores rising from 3.89 to 5.28), comfort expressing opinions (4.24 to 4.72), and openness to diverse perspectives (5.22 to 5.26). These results suggest that structured debate formats do more than practice argumentation; they cultivate confidence in disagreement and position universities as sites where democratic participation can be deliberately designed and renewed.
There seems to be a renewed hunger for engaged exploration of arguments and ideas. In the days following his death, op-ed pages erupted with competing visions of what Charlie Kirk’s (and others’) debates represented. Ezra Klein framed him as democracy’s foot soldier, someone who “showed up to campuses and talked with anyone who would talk to him.” Of course, while Kirk’s format wasn’t ideal and probably not even debate, he was talking.
Unfortunately, his “Prove Me Wrong” events distilled the worst version of debate and weren’t about winning arguments or exploring ideas, but about forcing them to happen at all. And, unfortunately, a whole generation may think this is what debate is. Kirk (over one billion views on YouTube) was hardly alone. For at least a decade, this style of content has flooded the media ecosystem: Ben Shapiro “crushing” college students and Jubilee/Surrounded debate videos have garnered millions of views. An entire economy is being built on the spectacle of verbal domination.
Debate at its best appeals to American ideals of fair play (especially granting the assumption that most issues have two sides) and the importance of winning. From a distance, it appears to be an irresistible component of public discourse, but not everything advertised as debate is helpful, and so liberals and progressives just run the other way. Our point here is that we should have more, and better debates, and people should not be afraid to occasionally debate things that seem repugnant to them. If the only arguments circulating are the current defenses of Nazism, then some people might not realize how easily they can be dispatched. It’s easy to assert that women shouldn’t have the vote, but much harder to defend that claim in a public forum when women are arguing back.
This is a good time to remember that the civil rights era featured leaders who did step up for debates, and their powerful voices helped effect change across many movements for equality. In 1926, Lucy Sutherland was one of the first women to debate in the Oxford Union. We shouldn’t forget that James Baldwin debated William F. Buckley, or that Martin Luther King debated James J. Kirkpatrick in 1960. Harvey Milk debated John Briggs in 1978 and Dan Savage had a “kitchen table” debate with Brian Brown in 2012. The Great Debaters film was inspired by the triumph of Wiley College’s (an HBCU) win over the national champion University of Southern California team in 1935.
A growing body of research looks for ways to redesign debate. There is, of course, work in forensics around competitive debate. Scholarship on candidate debates advances the Citizen Questions Model, arguing that public trust and fairness can be restored by redesigning debates around citizen-generated questions and transparent moderation procedures that visibly tie candidate claims to voter concerns. Research on debate across the curriculum examines college classrooms as sites for democratic training, showing how embedding structured, non-competitive debate across courses builds comfort with disagreement and durable habits of public reasoning, an approach developed in partnership with organizations such as Braver Angels. A third line of research on public debates over large civic issues demonstrates how design features like audience polling, mediated participation, and feedback loops can foster dynamic updating, enabling audiences to revise views without eliminating conflict. Taken together, this work suggests that the future of debate lies in intentionally designed formats that make disagreement fair, intelligible, and a vital part of public deliberation.
Citizens can watch well-designed debates through organizations such as Open to Debate, the Oxford Union debates, or the Munk Debates, all of which produce publicly accessible debates governed by clear rules, defined propositions, and audience judgment. These debates circulate online, modeling what structured public disagreement looks like in practice. Citizens who want to participate directly can visit organizations such as Braver Angels; some universities host public debates, as does the League of Women Voters (though mainly candidate debates). Together, these venues show how debate functions as a civic practice that can play a vital role in our public deliberations.
Justin Eckstein is an Associate Professor of Communication, Media, and Design Arts at Pacific Lutheran University and affiliated faculty in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. He wrote Sound Tactics (Penn State Press), co-edited a collection, Cookery (University of Alabama Press), and penned numerous peer-reviewed articles.
William Keith is emeritus faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and writes about the history and practices that tie communication education to civic education and democracy. His book, Democracy as Discussion: The American Forum Movement and Adult Civic Education (2007), focuses on the ways in which people are taught the speech and argument skills and habits that undergird a shared democratic life and public deliberation, in all their complexity and contradictions. His recent work, in the book Radically Civil: Saving Democracy One Conversation at a Time (2023), reframes the role of civility in private and public discourse as an antidote to polarization.
