How Walz approached Vance during the debate.

What happens when a teacher debates a lawyer

Walz is a teacher. Vance and Harris are both lawyers. Lawyers never try to change the minds of the lawyers they argue with in the courtroom. No lawyer has ever stood up in court and said "I guess you're right. My client is guilty”. (Except in a few movies.) A lawyer’s goal is to change the mind(s) of the judge and/or jury who is listening to the debate. If the other lawyer hates you at the end of the debate, that is not a problem. In most cases, that means you've won. Your goal is to show that no sensible person should believe what the other lawyer is saying, which is usually going to be humiliating for said lawyer.

In the the Harris/Trump debate, Harris used her skills as a prosecuting attorney to humiliate Trump. She knew from experience how to make a con artist reveal his guilt on the witness stand, and he fell into every trap she set for him. She also showed that she had the skills to deal with international con artists like Kim Jong Un and Putin, unlike Trump, who fawned at their feet, and conceding almost everything to them while getting essentially nothing in return. Watching her at work was a satisfying experience for those of us who wanted public demonstrations of both Trump’s incompetence and Harris’ excellence. We were looking forward to a similar performance from Walz, and these expectations often led to a disappointment which I will argue was unjustified. Walz's performance was in its own way every bit as skillful as Harris’, if seen for what it was.

Many of us who teach critical thinking make a distinction between Aristotelian and Rogerian argument techniques. The Aristotelian techniques are the ones used by lawyers and philosophers. This is why a philosophy major is rightly considered the best pre-law. (I once represented myself in court and beat a professional lawyer in a civil case, using only the techniques I learned as a philosopher.) It’s why philosopher David Hills said “Philosophy is the ungainly attempt to tackle questions that come naturally to children, using methods that come naturally to lawyers.” And it’s why lawyers have to know Aristotelian logic to pass the Bar exam.

The Rogerian technique was first described in a brief article by therapist Carl Rogers. I won’t go into the distinct steps followed by Rogerian argument,(you can find those at the previous link) but will focus on the differing goals of the two styles. Instead of convincing an audience that the other side is wrong, the Rogerian debater tries to change the mind of the person she is arguing with. Instead of attacking and humiliating the other side, the Rogerian debater empathizes with and tries to understand the other side. Instead of trying to defeat her “opponent”, The Rogerian debater leaves herself open to the possibility that with regard to at least some issues, she is wrong and the other side is right. This means that a successful Rogerian “debate” is really a negotiation, with each side open to the possibilities of changing their mind about the issues under discussion. This is why an essential part of the Rogerian process is stating your areas of agreement before you bring up your areas of disagreement.

Most good teachers use something like the Rogerian technique, either consciously or unconsciously. The cruel teacher who ridicules his students is a common subject for comedy, but any good teacher knows that college and high school students are very emotionally vulnerable. If a student gets something wrong, the teacher needs to point out how and why the student is wrong. But subjecting a student to the kind of reductio ad absurdum arguments that Harris used on Trump would cause the student to freeze up mentally, unless you restored their confidence by pointing out whatever they got right. Consequently, a supportive teacher keeps their criticisms short, and always makes sure to moderate them with a few words expressing agreement.

Tim Walz kept and refined that skill as he went from teacher to congressman to governor. It enabled him to find common ground with his Republican constituents, and thus become a six term Democratic congressman in a district that had been Republican for decades. When he became governor, it enabled him to create both a business-friendly economic climate and an extensive infrastructure of social programs. And when he debated Vance, he kept his rebuttals short, and almost always tempered those rebuttals by mentioning areas of agreement.

Walz was criticized for saying that he was in China during the Tiananmen square massacre, although he arrived a few months later. A trained lawyer would have said something like “When I arrived in Hong Kong, the Tiananmen massacre was in the air and on everyone’s minds. I was there during the political ferment caused by the massacre, and that’s what I meant to say when I said I was there at the time of the massacre. I didn’t remember the exact time of the massacre itself, and so I misspoke.” Instead he said something like “sometimes I behave like a knucklehead. I’m really sorry.” One of the principles of Rogerian argument is “Choose which hills to die on. If you’re proven wrong, admit it.” Following that principle can sometimes lead you to not defending yourself, even when you are being unfairly attacked.

Throughout the rest of the debate, Walz tempered all his statements and rebuttals with expressions of shared agreement. Eventually Vance started doing the same thing, which resulted in a level of amicability that hadn’t been seen for decades in American Politics. I felt a tremendous emotional relief in that new found atmosphere, and I know many other people felt the same way. However, after a while I felt like I was being drugged. This atmosphere ended up inadvertently enabling Vance to come across as legitimate and sensible, even though he was lying every time he opened his mouth. He was attributing positions to Trump that sounded sensible, but which Trump had never expressed and almost certainly disagreed with. He made statements about Trump’s previous term which were factually false — not false in the sense of getting a couple of dates wrong, but statements which were the exact polar opposite of the truth.

Once Walz realized that this was what was going on, he began to respond competently to Vance’s attacks on Harris and defense of Trump. But his responses were single thrusts, decisive to anyone who listened carefully, but not the sort of sustained attack needed to change the mind of an undecided voter. When Vance claimed that Trump had helped improve the Affordable Care Act, Walz correctly pointed out that only John McCain’s vote had stopped Trump from completely repealing it. But he could have said far more about Trumps numerous other attempts to destroy the ACA. When Vance claimed that “the Democrats” were curtailing free speech online, Walz made a single reference to the principle that Free speech does not include yelling fire in a crowded theater. But he could have pointed out that libel laws have always acknowledged that no one has a legal right to spread malicious and destructive lies, and that these curtailments were performed by private corporations who wanted to avoid libel prosecutions, not by Democratic government officials.

Walz did however make one decisive thrust when he cornered Vance about the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and Vance made the non-reply “I’m focused on the future”. This exchange has been streamed and broadcast by countless comedians, bloggers, News Shows, etc. and for many people this was the moment where Vance lost the debate. It was the only time in the whole evening where Walz behaved like a prosecutor, and he got the result he was aiming for. In this day and age, when anyone can stream on demand both the debate and numerous debunkings of Vance’s lies, this long term judgment may have more impact than the night after.

No one could deny that Vance was slicker and smoother in this debate than Walz. As a result, Vance became more popular than before (or rather less unpopular, as his rating is still one of the most unfavorable VP ratings in current history.) But most polls were almost evenly divided as to who won. Those who said Walz won felt that he came across as more genuine, and many of those who said Vance won the debate still preferred Harris/Walz as candidates. (Kerry 2004 and HRC 2016 are usually considered to have won their presidential debates, but still lost their elections.) And most importantly, the skills Walz showed in the debate will make him an effective member of Harris’ team once actual governing needs to be done. That atmosphere of amicability will be a refreshing change from the combative paralysis that infects Washington today.