Debating Strategies and Tactics

I always thought it was easy to be on the right wing of politics; you just repeat the dogmatic mantras, ad nauseam, and rubbish anyone who thinks there are logical inconsistencies in the dogma or voices that the ideology is lacking in evidence or nuance and is next to useless in a crisis. 

OK, occasionally you have to use manipulative psychology and tell the lazy thinkers in the electorate that the other tribe has taken something away from them, as nothing motivates people more than a perceived loss - even if it's patent rubbish - such as sovereignty, freedom, fish or whatever. Telling them they stand to gain something useful is much less effective and a well tested psychological phenomenon.

However, hats off to the right wingers; I now realise it's actually very difficult to simultaneously maintain two diametrically opposed views, reconcile them and argue that both are logically consistent without appearing to be a prat.

I listened to a right winger on the radio on Friday morning maintaining that isolating the people in the UK with pre-existing conditions is less damaging to the economy than a total lockdown. It may well be true, but it's physically impossible, as 24.4% of the UK population has pre-existing conditions that put them at severe risk if they catch Covid - well in excess of 16m people. It's even higher in the USA, where nearly half the population has pre-existing conditions. We've seen already that isolating a single care home is impossible, as contact with potential virus carriers cannot be avoided for support.  

The prime directive of the political right is to ensure wealth is retained within the ranks of the wealthy, while simultaneously maintaining a facade of concern for the less well off. That's incredibly hard to do, especially when policy is enacted, and is demonstrably designed to benefit the wealthy with lower taxes at the expense of public services, which are used, primarily, by the less well off. If Covid has proven anything, it's that crises demand well funded public services.

Similarly, other two-faced policies that require a high degree of subterfuge to negotiate include; 

• To express support for the NHS while simultaneously keeping staff wages low and stripping it of resources. 
• To revere British history while systematically attacking those who merely demand the full, unexpurgated history to be recognised, including the more embarrassing episodes. 
• To believe in free trade while exiting the largest, bar none, free trade area in the world and actually erecting bureaucratic barriers to free trade. 
• To believe in dropping all tariffs, while simultaneously committing to protecting British jobs from cheap imports. 
• To risk people's lives in order to save the economy, while simultaneously ignoring experts and risking trashing the economy with Brexit. 
• To mouth that they're following the experts, while blatantly ignoring them until left with no choice.
• To uphold respect for the law, while illegally prorogueing Parliament and placing lucrative contracts with totally unsuitable suppliers linked to their party. 
• To castigate Cancel Culture, when the right actually invented it and has used it to marginalise people for centuries. 
• To maintain that a Labour policy of free, basic broadband for the poor is unaffordable and then introduce an internet voucher scheme so kids from poorer families can learn at home during the pandemic. 
• To portray your party as the party of family values, while electing a leader as sexually incontinent as a rutting stag.
• To claim to care for the environment while planning to reintroduce neonicotinoid, bee-killing pesticides banned by the EU (just announced).

See how difficult it is for them? 

Their favoured debating tactics include the straw man, extrapolating from the unrepresentative specific to the universal (a favoured ploy of a certain Mr Rees-Mogg) and simple lying, repeatedly, before the fact checkers and truth can catch up, by which time another slew of lies are out in the Twittersphere for the dullards to consume and propagate.

Their favoured strategy, when logical and practical inconsistencies are pointed out, is to go off at a tangent to avoid the issue, or employ logical fallacies, which takes some considerable skill in the face of a determined and intelligent interlocutor who insists of dragging them back to the point, not to mention reality. The logical fallacies to learn to employ as a right wing debater include:

1. The burden of disproof, 
2. Assuming a false conclusion, 
3. A faulty premise to draw the desired conclusion. 
4. Appeal to hypocrisy, and
5. Appeal to the majority.

That's not to say the left isn't completely free of ideology and dogma, and the further left one goes, the greater the dogma, but the left was born of an intellectualism that's non-existent in the right's dogma of simply keeping the wealthy rich.

Just a quick note on the right's Culture War in the UK. “We are proud of this country’s culture and history and traditions,” Boris Johnson told the Conservative conference this year as he attacked amorphous political enemies. “They literally want to pull statues down; to rewrite the history of our country; to edit our national CV to make it look more politically correct.” 

No, they merely want a more truthful CV that doesn't gloss over the embarrassing incidents. He can't agree to this, because he self-identifies with the national CV and wraps himself up in it as part of his persona; he cannot allow any bloody stains to show; he therefore has to maintain a mythical fiction about it. 

History is fact, not a PR exercise; and the statue of Colston was pulled down in a rage after 10 years of argument where the right would not budge on the question of a plaque that acknowledged Colston's slaving links. The pulling down was a consequence of intransigence, not an original intention.

The classic, right wing deflection on slavery is to bring other countries into the debate, but what other countries do is down to those countries - we're talking about British history. Africans selling Africans to British slave traders doesn't dilute the stain; it tarnishes both equally. There again, I'm not aware of any statues to African slavers in Africa.