How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them: 11 Rules for Winning the Argument

by Ben Shapiro

How The Left Wins Arguments All that matters is victory. That’s a message that seems to have been lost among conservatives, who are constantly focused on the virtue of their message, the intellectual honesty of their cause, and the frustration of having nobody care about either. But it’s because conservatives don’t think about how to win that they constantly lose.

No wonder the left seeks to avoid political debate at all costs. Why bother? Members of the left are not interested in having a debate about policy. They are not interested in debating what is right or wrong for the country. They are interested in debating you personally. They are interested in castigating you as a nasty human being because you happen to disagree. This is what makes leftists leftists: an unearned sense of moral superiority over you. And if they can instill that sense of moral superiority in others by making you the bad guy, they will. People on the left are taught from childhood that they are better than conservatives – it makes them feel good to hate conservatives. And that hatred is justified because, after all, conservatives are bigots.

This is why it’s so comfortable to be on the left: that unearned sense of moral superiority. Unearned, because folks on the left haven’t done anything positive for decades.

Calling you a racist and sexist, a bigot and a homophobe, gives them a sense of satisfaction with their status in the universe, even if they never help a single individual human being.

They don’t want to debate those issues. What they want to teach instead is that is you are personally ignorant, bigoted, corrupt, and mean if you disagree with them. Their opinions are not opinions; they are fact.

They used to call this Pauline Kael syndrome. Pauline Kael used to be a columnist for The New Yorker. Back in 1972, writing about the George McGovern/Richard Nixon landslide election, she famously observed, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.” She could feel the evil rolling off those people.

For the media, all arguments are character arguments. If you disagree with the members of the media about something, you are a fundamentally bad human being. The same is eminently true in Hollywood, where moral narrative is the heart of the business.

This is the Hollywood argument same-sex marriage: you like certain characters, so if you don’t like their behavior, it’s because you’re mean and nasty.

If you think that when Murphy Brown has a child out of wedlock, it’s wrong to paint her as a saint, as Dan Quayle pointed out – if you say that Murphy Brown pushed the lie that there are no real negative life consequences for having a baby without a husband -- , you are castigated as being a thickheaded bigot, as Quayle was. Now, twenty years later, Candice Bergen, who played Murphy Brown, admitted Quayle was right – but at the time, Quayle was running for re-election, and so he had to be wrong. The left no longer makes arguments about policies’ effectiveness. Their only argument is character assassination.

There are truly only three situations in which debating someone on the left is worthwhile. First, you must: your grade depends on it, or your waiter threatens to spit in your food unless you tell him why same-sex marriage is a detriment to Western civilization. Second, you found an honest leftist actually willing to be convinced by solid argumentation. Congratulations! You found him. He actually wants to sit down and have an evidence-based conversation with you; you want to have an evidenced based conversation with him. Everything is just hunky dory! Then you ride off on your separate unicorns.

Third, you should debate a leftist if there is an audience. The goal of the debate will not be to win over the leftist, or to convince him or her, or to be friends with him or her. That person already disagrees with you, and they’re not going to be convinced by your words of wisdom and your sparkling rhetorical flourishes. The goal will be to destroy the leftist in as public a way as is humanly possible.

Rule #1: Walk Toward the Fire.

You can try to hide from the attacks of the left; you can run away from them, attempt to ignore them, pretend that the left has reached some sort of quasi-consensus in which they live and let live. That will last until the protesters are outside your business, the government regulators are outside your house, or the administrators are inside your child’s classroom. Then you’ll realize that while you were willing to let live, the left simply wasn’t.

The left knows this is war. And they know you are the enemy. You will be castigated. You will get punched. That’s the way it will go because that’s how the left wins: through intimidation and cruelty. You have to take the punch, you have to brush it off. You have to be willing to take the punch.