After the World Wars American public discourse looks to me like it declined very clearly.
Presidential debates shouldn’t suffer from e.g. improvements in access creating the false impression of reduced elite quality. Compare the Nixon-Kennedy debate, the Ford-Carter debate, and the Trump-Biden debate. N-K were dishonest but trying to fool voters who were trying to track arguments and figure out what was going on. I recently watched Nixon’s Checkers speech too; it’s famous as an innovative subject-changing appeal to emotion but to my contemporary ears the main thing that stood out was that most of the speech was an appeal to reason that would be tedious to someone who wasn’t thinking explicitly in terms of argument and evidential value.
Back to debates. F-C was sound bites designed to give the superficial impression of argument. T-B was just trading personal insults. I watched the unofficial version on Rumble where RFK Jr inserted himself and there was a strong contrast between the officially included debaters and RFK Jr, who just … answered the questions, like it was still the ’90s.
I do not understand this reference. Which war are we talking about here?
After the World Wars American public discourse looks to me like it declined very clearly.
Presidential debates shouldn’t suffer from e.g. improvements in access creating the false impression of reduced elite quality. Compare the Nixon-Kennedy debate, the Ford-Carter debate, and the Trump-Biden debate. N-K were dishonest but trying to fool voters who were trying to track arguments and figure out what was going on. I recently watched Nixon’s Checkers speech too; it’s famous as an innovative subject-changing appeal to emotion but to my contemporary ears the main thing that stood out was that most of the speech was an appeal to reason that would be tedious to someone who wasn’t thinking explicitly in terms of argument and evidential value.
Back to debates. F-C was sound bites designed to give the superficial impression of argument. T-B was just trading personal insults. I watched the unofficial version on Rumble where RFK Jr inserted himself and there was a strong contrast between the officially included debaters and RFK Jr, who just … answered the questions, like it was still the ’90s.
Usually the war would be WW2 but I don’t know if that’s the relevant context here.