Politics, Elections 2020

We Aren’t Debating about Values Anymore; We Are Debating about Reality, and that Is a Huge Problem

The Lincoln-Douglas Debates — seven engagements that occurred in different Illinois cities between two candidates for the US Senate in 1858— remain the gold standard for political debates in our nation. Partly this is because of the format. A one-hour opening speech, a 90-minute rebuttal, and a 30-minute response from the first speaker. But part of it too was the content. Lincoln and Douglas actually disagreed about how to value a certain set of agreed-upon facts.

If Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas had not debated the morality of slavery — and brought two different moral propositions to the table to be examined and dissected as moral propositions — the history of the United States would have turned out very differently.

There were not multiple topics in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. There was one topic. The debates were about slavery and nothing else, because, in 1858, no other issue was really up for discussion. But this does not mean that the debate was between abolition and universal approval of slavery…