If You Want to Win Political Arguments, Stop Being an Asshole

Roughly speaking, there are three reasons we might engage in political discussion. The first is intellectual interest. Playing with ideas, including political ideas, is fun, and banging them against each other to see which comes out on top is fun. So just as some people find it enjoyable to hash out who’s the best quarterback of all time, some people find it enjoyable to hash out which political institutions or rules are most just or most likely to create a flourishing society.

The second is domination. Politics is, ultimately, about the exercise of power. It’s about controlling others, and who gets to do that controlling, and to what ends. So you might engage in political talk to point out to the people you intend to control that you’ll be the one doing the controlling (or, at least, people like you), and they’ll be the ones getting controlled. This is politics as verbal bullying.

The third, and the one that motivates most of us when we engage in political talk, is persuasion. I want to bring you around to my political view, because my political view wins out when enough people have come around to it. So I offer arguments, and debate your arguments, and if all goes well, one of us will move the other closer to his position.

Let’s set aside the first, intellectual interest, for now. If you’re reading this, you’re probably the sort of person who finds political talk at least somewhat intellectually interesting even outside the context of the other two reasons. But let’s focus instead on why most people talk politics, which (they think) is to persuade, but is, more often than they’d like to admit, to instead dominate.

You get this a lot on social media. It’s what pile-ons are all about. I express an opinion the prevailing culture on the platform disagrees with, and the response is threats, or insults, or quote posts of “can you believe this guy?” The goal is to make me feel stupid or small, and so to make the pile-on-ers feel smart or big. It’s pretty prosaic stuff: Make yourself feel good by making someone else feel bad. And that feeling-bad-ness is a form of domination, especially when it arises out of political talk. The people doing the dominating know that. The person getting dominated knows that. There’s an implied threat in the pile-on itself: there are more of us doing the pile-on against the one of you that we’re in a position of power. Or, at least, appear to be, because a pile-on isn’t actually indicative of the pile-on-ers’ opinion being more widespread than that expressed by the piled-on. (I’m reminded of the line from The Mr. T Experience song “Two of Us” about how the “two of us outnumber every single one of them.”)

But there are cases when the people engaged in a game of domination believe they’re engaged in a game of persuasion, and it’s actually pretty common in a lot of political discourse. It happens when the person arguing is an asshole.

I wrote here a while back about how people who think their strong commitment to principle justifies their being an asshole are mistaken both about the content of their principles and the nature of principle itself. It’s basically, “I believe in this so strongly, and my cause is so moral and just, that nothing else matters, and that includes being courteous and respectful to those around me.” The trouble with this line of thinking is that morality and justice are about our relationship to other people. You can’t be just while treating others unjustly—even in the cause of “justice.” You can’t be moral while treating others immorally—even in the cause of “morality.”

But that’s a claim about ethics: being an asshole demonstrates that your professed ethical character isn’t an ethical character, but instead an unethical one draped in some degree of ethical talk. Adding on the above context about persuasion and domination helps us to additionally see that being an asshole (a form of domination) is unproductive, too.

If you want to persuade someone of your political position, you need to convince them that your position is better. And that means better for them. Or better for everyone. Or better for most people. It doesn’t mean just better for you. Or just better for people like you, but not like them, and not like most other people. Persuasion in politics means convincing others that your way is the best way for them to achieve their aims. Or it means convincing them that their aims weren’t the right ones. In other words, it’s fundamentally not about domination.

But to be an asshole is to position yourself as a dominator to those around you, because to be an asshole is, simply, to tell everyone around you that your interests are always more important than theirs, and that one of your interests is making them feel small or stupid in order to make yourself feel big and smart.

Thus “I can be an asshole and persuade” is, in almost every instance, a mistake. You can’t. Because coming off as an asshole to your interlocutor, or to people who hear your arguments, is telling them up front that your motivation is domination, and so they will view your political arguments in that context. What you want, they’ll reasonably assume, is to use politics to dominate, just as you are using your asshole-ness to dominate. You’re signaling, from the opening gate, that the politics you want to persuade them of are, whether explicitly stated or not, about political domination instead of political cooperation. You’re telling them your worldview is zero-sum instead of positive-sum.

Being an asshole makes people justifiably suspicious of whatever politics you advocate, and they will assume that, even if you talk about freedom and liberty and openness and exchange, what you’re really all about is power and control and, well, domination. Maybe you can talk your way out of that hole (there are assholes who advocate genuinely emancipatory politics, after all), but you are starting in a hole, and the more of an asshole you are, the deeper it is, and the more likely your arguments will come across, to your listeners, as digging it even deeper still.

If you care about your politics, just as if you care about your principles, you should fight every urge that might arise to be an asshole about it. It’s not just more ethical. It’s more persuasive, too.