'Prove me wrong ... win every argument'

The path of pugnacious debate and argument will not save democracy, nor will it win the next election for the good guys. The calm jujitsu of dialogue might.

Some are pushing Charlie Kirk for sainthood, but the halo does not fit.

Charlie Kirk had a signature format called "Prove Me Wrong." He was in the middle of a Prove Me Wrong session at a Utah university when an assassin's bullet ended his life last week.

Here was the set up for Prove Me Wrong: Kirk would sit on a stage, mic in hand, as students lined up in front of the podium. One by one, they'd edge up to their mic and offer Kirk a question, a comment or a challenge.

He would respond with a waterfall of smooth rhetoric, peppered with assertions of fact that were often dubious, sometimes flat-out false. Man, the guy was good at political messaging, quick on his feet, never losing his cool, almost always maintaining a tone of mild reasonability even while saying outrageous things.

As the Right's canonization of Kirk now proceeds at a frenzied pace, some laud him for his willingness to engage with "the other side," to give a mic to people who don't agree with him.

Well, OK. Kirk surely did do more of that than many podcasters and online influencers on both sides of the political spectrum. Good on him.

But allow me a couple of skeptical points about Kirk's "Prove Me Wrong" shtick.

· He was usually "debating" nervous 19- or 20-year-olds, who showed the naivete and slim grasp of history that goes with that age. He wasn't going up against Pete Buttigieg, Jamie Raskin, Charlie Sykes or Heather Cox Richardson, or anyone with the experience, the mastery of facts and policy, the rhetorical gifts to counter his glib, loose-with-facts chatter. Often, he didn't really engage with the human being in front of him, merely asking them how they'd label their politics, then going off on his practiced riffs about socialists or woke liberals or "Commies."

· And these weren't "debates." After their opening statement, the students rarely could sneak in a new point as the Kirk waterfall flowed on. There was no moderator fact-checking his patter or interrupting to say, "I'd like to give Mr. Buttigieg a chance to respond." It was always his show, with him as the star - and his many fans lapping it all up.

If you doubt me on this, just Google his name and Prove Me Wrong. A wealth of examples of how the shtick worked await you.

To be fair, I have a similar, if not identical, critique of Kirk's fast-rising counterpart on the left, Mehdi Hasan. (Hasan's grasp of facts and fair argument are better than Kirk's was.) Around the time he left MSNBC, Hasan launched a best-selling book titled Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking. Parts of it are quite smart.

Still, so much of what's gone wrong in our nation's political culture - the nastiness, the polarization, the sneering at compromise and common ground - are captured in those two trademark phrases:

Prove me wrong.

Win every argument.

If those are how you define the goals of political conversation, the effort is doomed before you've even begun.

For us to heal our toxic discourse, Americans have to learn to view political conversation not as a war, not as a contest, not as an argument, not as a debate, but as a dialogue, a rolling conversation, one that our Constitution very much counted on us becoming good at.

For years, whenever someone has intoned piously: Let's have a good debate about [insert controversial issue here], my response always has been: Let's not. I've annoyed more than one well-meaning educator by telling them that, sadly, I think their debate clubs or mock trials arethe wrong way to teach students how to engage with difficult political issues.

Wars, contests, arguments, trials and debates have something in common. Embedded deeply and immutably in each term is the notion of a binary result: Someone has to win, which means someone else has to lose. Beyond that, the pro-con idea of debates or arguments usually limits the possible viewpoints to two, usually the most familiar, intractably opposed, partisan ones, with no room left for centrist common sense or out-of-the-box innovation.

And what if neither side triumphs in this war-contest-argument-debate? Well, to the binary (AKA partisan) mindset, that's a deficient, unsatisfactory, pointless result - a hung jury, a dull debate, like kissing your kid sister. It's not seen as an invitation to ponder whether a better way might exist than either of the ones on offer.

A set-up that's binary, win or lose, also raises the stakes for each side, invites each to conclude that any trick, any weapon is justified, because the consequences of losing are inconceivable and beyond remedy.

This urgent need to treat any tactic, no matter how unfair or belligerent, as justified leads to a corollary imperative: To feel OK about what you're planning to do, you must depict the other side as evil, other and outside any circle of humane concern - and dismiss any evidence to the contrary.

Dialogue, by contrast, is not tinged with finality. It's a process, not an event. It is not binary or win-lose. It is - yes, wait for it - win-win.

How is it win-win? If I stick with a dialogue long enough to truly understand why someone holds a different view, then I've learned something valuable. And if they do the same about me, then they win - and so do I, because they become much less likely to view me as equipped with cloven hooves and horns on my head.

If a first dialogue leaves us willing to have a second or even a third, that may actually lead to the discovery of a slice of common ground, a new opening to glimpse a fresh solution to a tired problem. If so, then civil society and democracy also win.

What makes dialogue different from debate?

You enter it with the understanding that you are entering a "brave space" - quite different from a "safe space" - where you should expect and even welcome hearing views quite different from your own.

If disagreement arises - oh and it will - you don't paper it over. Nor do you run from the room screaming harm! and trauma! and words that end in -ist.

You sit with it and stick with it. You explore it with good will and patience to learn more about the other person - and yourself. You trust that other person will try to do the same with you.

People, hearing me ramble thusly about dialogue, often scoff: What's the point? You'll never change their mind.

First off, I know quite well that this approach will not work with everyone. I've been doing civil dialogue work for three decades; I know the theories, the research, the techniques. I'm quite sure, if you gave me five years to try my theories of dialogue on Marjorie Taylor Greene, at the end she'd probably still be the MTG of sad legend.

Second, though, please consider: How often has just a single conversation ever changed your mind about a cherished political belief? I'll wait while you tote up the examples. If you have more than one or two, you are an extraordinarily malleable person.

Any bid to use dialogue to create fresh understandings and opportunities will take time, patience and effort. But the polarized alternative facing us is to endure more and more of what's been filling the headlines in 2025 - and probably much worse. So, the effort is worth it.

Third, how can you change someone's mind if you never bother to learn how it works, how the furniture is arranged in someone's head? Not every person who voted for the other side did so for the awful reasons that you might imagine or that partisan name-callers on your team like to pretend. Maybe these swing voters harbor seeds of doubt which you can nurture.

What won't work to nurture those seeds is simply marshaling the facts that are most persuasive to you and flinging them at the other person in lecture mode. (Or calling the person names; that for sure will not work.) You need to find out which values and experiences make that person tick, and to frame any persuasion in term of their most cherished values, not yours.

Jonathan Haidt, the famous social psychologist, says research indicates that, to get anyone to hear what you have to say, you must first truly listen to what they have to say and play it back to them so that they feel heard. This forges a kernel of trust.

Next, and this is the really surprising tip from Haidt, you must show them that you are not 100 percent positive about your own position. You would do well to let them know if something they said spoke to one of your points of doubt.

In the dialogue trainings my colleagues and I do, we call this "admitting the pebble in your shoe." In practice, we've found it to be an incredibly powerful, productive and persuasive thing to do.

But it's something never done by people who see persuasion as a lecture - or as argument/debate to be won by being adamant, by falling back on every rhetorical trick, every factual evasion in the book.

Gee, might that be why they never "change anyone's mind"?

When I propose all this, people often object, shaking their heads in exasperation: No, no, you idealistic fool, don't you realize the stakes? Your way will never work. Don't you realize how ignorant, unethical and violent our opponents are? You can't bring a pillow to a knife fight.

Actually, I do realize, vividly, how ignorant, unethical and violent many in our current presidential administration are. I've spilled thousands of words in this Substack documenting and decrying their deeds.

I also realize they have gained power twice through the deciding votes of millions of people who are really not like that, who in fact are appalled by some or much of what is now going on. But their votes were driven by their sense of not being heard, or being disdained and dismissed, by people like you and me. Or by their having been turned off by clumsy, tone-deaf, smug bids to "change their minds."

Yes, I do realize the stakes of the next election could not be higher. I could not wish more fervently for new majorities and new leaders in legislatures everywhere from D.C. to Phoenix.

That's why I'm here arguing against calls for my side to emulate the very worst habits of the current majority: the vitriol, the snark, the twisting or inventing of facts, the demeaning narratives, the lust for retribution.

I'm pleading: Let's not bring a flamethrower to this watershed electoral fight, but instead the jujitsu-like power of dialogue.

Could it be that learning how to listen, to meet people with good will and patience, to seek out their stories, to readily admit the pebble in your own shoe, might actually prove in this moment to be the most pragmatic, winning political gambit of all - the move that makes the key votes swing back the other way?

Could it be that humility and patriotic outreach might just be more powerful than cocksure bravado and belligerence?

I, for one, would like to find out.