Totally Rad!
Sorry to be replying late. (Yesterday took me away from TPM.) What a clear and insightful description of debating and teaching, and the differences between them. And of the way Vance and Walz each performed. (I wish these quadrennial performances were not called “debates.”)
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Thank you for the kind words!
I don’t like calling them debates either – currently these are just weak simulacra of a forensics championship. The end result is to overemphasize adversarial aspects and performative aspects at the expense of articulating actual policies and reasons for supporting a given policy.
You could see that on Tuesday, Vance, trained to debate, was almost always thinking about how he could “perform” a “win,” rather thinking about how he could explain his political positions or the GOP’s policies. Walz, who isn’t trained to debate but to discuss and teach, naturally tried to do that even though the format isn’t designed to facilitate true discussion.
These exercises really need to be rethought because right now they just seem to a muddled mess. But I doubt that will happen.
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