A call to debaters: There is a right way to argue
USAFacts President Lauren Woodman shares her perspective on how to ground our nation's political discourse in facts.
Turn on a political debate and you might hear a heated exchange about how far someone can hit a golf ball or what a social media post said twenty years ago. Somewhere along the way, debates in America became a goat rodeo: built for the snippet, squirms, and commotion with not much progress toward anything that matters.
Outrage is easy to produce and easy to share, but discussions about the future of the country need to be based in facts if we’re going to solve the challenges we all face. In the latest State of the Facts poll that USAFacts conducted with AP-NORC, more than one-third of adults said they struggle to tell whether information is accurate. When the biggest public conversations after a debate are centered around what is the most clickable, we’re missing the point. At USAFacts, we spend our days looking at what government data tells us about our country, and I've come away with a conviction: disagreement is not the problem. A healthy democracy runs on it. Americans see the role of government in their lives differently and we prioritize different solutions. We should be free to argue about these issues. What we've lost is a common understanding of all facts that a constructive argument can be built on.
That's what we set out to rebuild with The American Dream at 250: Data doesn't argue. They do. This week, USAFacts is releasing, on YouTube, a 75-minute debate between conservative commentator and Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro and progressive NYU Stern professor and author Scott Galloway, moderated by Geoff Bennett, co-anchor and managing editor of PBS NewsHour. Politically, they come from different sides of the spectrum and are unlikely to agree on much. That is the point.
What we've lost is a common understanding of all facts that a constructive argument can be built on.
We focus on the American Dream. It’s timely – affordability is front and center in the public discourse today – and it sits at the intersection of facts and values. The debate poses three questions. Is government or capitalism better serving the American Dream? Is the government doing too little or too much? Is owning a home still part of that dream, and should the government do more to make it attainable?
Our ground rules, though, are a little different. Our debaters are working from a shared set of facts, supplied by USAFacts, based on publicly available government data. Our founder, Steve Ballmer, runs a Fact Desk to set up each topic, showing how income, government benefits, federal spending and housing costs have changed over time. Both debaters work from the same set of numbers. Each can argue that those numbers point toward markets or toward government, but neither has to wonder whether the other is playing with a different deck.
Watch the debate, explore the data, and form your own opinion.
What happened surprised us. Shapiro and Galloway disagreed, as expected, about the role of government and the best ways to expand economic opportunity. But they also found areas of common ground. And perhaps most strikingly, they managed to have a serious, substantive conversation about some of the country's most contentious economic questions without turning the discussion into a contest of insults or sound bites.
Facts can’t settle every argument. They can't tell you what the American Dream should mean. They can’t decide whether government should do more or less, or what trade-offs each of us might be willing to make. Those are questions of values and priorities. But facts can give us a common starting point, help us distinguish what we agree on from what we don't, and allow us to focus on the choices that matter. That is an enormous step forward.
As we mark our 250th anniversary, we’re still debating many of the same fundamental questions that we have since our founding: what do we owe one another? What should government do? What does opportunity really mean? We shouldn't expect those debates to end. Nor should we want them to. But we should expect them to be grounded in facts.
We shouldn't expect [political] debates to end. Nor should we want them to. But we should expect them to be grounded in facts.
Neither Ben Shapiro nor Scott Galloway left the debate with a different worldview. We didn't expect them to. But they demonstrated that even people with profoundly different perspectives can have a serious, respectful discussion about the future of our country.
We need more of this. Not fewer arguments, but better ones.
As president of USAFacts, Lauren Woodman leads our work to build the data infrastructure that empowers Americans to take an active role in our democracy.
