In defense of intelligent debate

Ta-Nehisi Coates on the value of discourse with intelligent interlocutors you disagree with (or rather, the counter-productivity of engaging idiot interlocutors you disagree with; my emphasis):

As a liberal, I can see the point. Kristol was, indeed, a useful idiot. But we need to tease out a couple things. Kristol wasn’t merely a conservative who was bad on the issues, he was a columnist who was bad at his job. He was not so much a conservative columnist, as he was  a GOP shill, a political operator who ran an advance office for the Palin 2012 campaign, out of the Times’ edit pages. Paul Krugman may be a liberal, and a lefty, but he most certainly isn’t schilling for the Democratic Party.

More than that, Kristol failed at the non-ideological essentials. Getting your facts right is a basic standard of the profession. There’s no left/right to it–either Obama was in pews to hear Jeremiah Wright, or he wasn’t. Either Michelle Malkin said it, or she didn’t. These are basic rules that you can teach a 14-year old. And Kristol got them wrong. Often. He was, in sum, an incompetent foe, the sort of boxer who think road-work is for sissies. In the midst of writing a review of one of Ann Coulter’s silly tomes, Christopher Hitchens once told a reporter,  “If I can’t fuck up Ann Coulter before lunch then I shouldn’t be in this business.” Indeed. And to even the most simple-minded liberal I’d say, If you can’t fuck up Bill Kristol before breakfast, you shouldn’t be blogging.

The dude was good for that first Monday morning entry, no doubt. But here is the thing–in the war of ideas you don’t gain much by measuring yourself against the worst that your opponents have to offer. The thing about competing against jokers, is that it eventually makes a joker of you. Your ideas lose their complexity, their volume and heft, mostly because you don’t need them to take down Kristol. You just need to read the corrections on the Times website. I don’t see how that helps me become a better writer.

Frederick Douglass once said that “A man is worked on, by what he works on.” We have direct evidence of what comes to those who spend their days sparring with Kristol. Is that really where we’re trying to go?

Since I tend to fancy myself as a social liberal and fiscal moderate (and a bunch of other things, but these tend to be the only two axes by which we judge where one lands politically), which is an orientation that frequently has me at odds with conservatives. As such, intelligent conservatives are definitely my favorite people to discuss politics with–they help me refine and sharpen my own views, and keep me honest. If all goes well, I can do the same for them.

While the back-patting of talking politics with other liberals can be comforting and can recharge-the-batteries, so to speak, it can also be intellectually stunting if that’s the only source of conversation on the subject (sometimes as stunting as consistently sparing with stupid people who disagree with you).

On that note, liberals who are dunces* are my least favorite people to acknowledge in political discourse. Do you see why?

*Here I’m operating under the assumption that I am not included in this category. Of course, there’s the distinct possibility that I am wrong in making this assumption. But if that’s the case, I’m inclined to ask: “W.T.Fuck are you doing reading this?”