How to Debate (and defeat) Conservatives
Part 3: “common sense” and the escalating narrative.
This is the second part of an ongoing series on defeating conservative arguments. Read the introduction and Part 2: Argument ad Hypocrisy.
A key part of modern conservatism’s success is the creation and weaponization of “common sense.”
Used by Antonio Gramsci to describe a set of political and ethical values which have become so widespread that they are accepted as fact, “common sense” allows the most powerful ideology to dismiss facts outright if they oppose a widely accepted belief.
Police and prison abolition, for example, are seen by America’s political mainstream as absurd and dangerous ideas with no basis in reality. It is just “common sense” that police should be called to resolve every issue from domestic violence to an elementary school mental health crisis. Even though the overwhelming majority of studies show there are far better alternatives to policing for solving social ills, adopting those policies instead of building more prisons is seen as radical and absurd. This “common sense” not only ignores the facts, it was created specifically to obscure them.
From lowering taxes, to the “evils” of public education, and especially when it comes to racism, conservatives have been willfully creating counter-factual narratives for decades. Their goal is to transform “common sense” so that leftist ideas are rejected instinctually and out of hand rather than considered on their merits.
As a whole, the damage which conservative narratives and their war on common sense have wrought on American political thought is incalculable, and it must be stopped.
So, how do we stop it? Very simply: by providing alternative narratives and by changing common sense.
Before we get into our examples, I would encourage you to review the introduction of this series to refresh your memory on the possible goals (listed below), and I would like to remind you that this is a guide on defeating conservatives, not having civil discussions with them. If you find some of these tactics too disingenuous, unkind, or childish, I am afraid this guide is not for you.
Convince
“It’s easier to fool people than it is to convince them that they have been fooled.”
— Mark Twain
Attempting to convince a conservative that their worldview is fundamentally wrong is an incredibly difficult and onerous task, to the point that it may well be better to reach them indirectly by humiliating or frustrating other conservatives in their presence (see below). This is because conservative narratives are designed to draw out strong emotional responses and instinctual rejections of anything that contradicts them.
Take the Q-Anon conspiracy, for example. One of the many threads of this conspiracy is the idea that a cabal of rich (often Jewish) elites are trafficking children for use in Satanic sex rituals and drug creation. This is not a conspiracy with much factual backing, but the thought of powerful people abusing children in secret understandably elicits such a strong and immediate emotional response that it renders people nearly immune to logic. To make matters worse, such absurd narratives often take on sane seeming hashtags in order to gain mainstream support. “#saveourchildren” and “#whitelivesmatter” are two such examples .
Because these are such obvious slogans, refuting, rejecting, or even cautioning about them makes you seem like a bigot or pedophile; it makes you seem like you’re rejecting common sense.
With all that said, if you still wish to approach a conservative head-on and convince them that these narratives are bunk, it is critical that you do not allow the conversation to stray into the world of the academic and factual and instead provide your own emotional-appealing narratives — narratives which incorporate some part of theirs wherever possible.
This feels counter-intuitive and may even be difficult for those with academic backgrounds, but the reality is conservative minds are driven by emotion and fear at the exclusion of all else. If you want to convince them, you have to play their game.
Eg: “You’re right, there is a cabal of rich and powerful people who abuse us and our children. They’re called capitalists. Why are you fighting so hard against only half of the people abusing you? Trump was friends with Epstein too, and even bragged about creeping on underage girls at Beauty Pageants he ran! Why don’t you fight for your own family and your own honor instead of defending his? Trump would kill you in a second if it could make him a buck. Stand up for yourself!”
Humiliate
Conservatives narratives are ripe for humiliation, not only because of their absurd foundations, but also because of what they leave out.
Fear over immigration, for example, can be mocked as cruel, uninformed, and pathetic, simply because the vast, vast majority of Americans are hurt more by their bosses and landlords every month than they are by immigration. This can be applied to nearly any conservative narrative or construction of common sense — if you can point out that a conservative has been duped into helping other people at the expense of themselves and their families, you can attack the core conservative fear of nonconsensual subjugation.
(read more about the conservative obsession with hierarchy here)
Beyond rejecting conservative narratives, it is important to also create and reinforce your own. Because American “common sense” is so saturated with conservative beliefs, simply claiming their opposites confidently and in public is a powerful strategy.
Take the conservative position that raising taxes for schools is an unfair imposition because “other people’s kids are not my responsibility.” Such a claim is not factual — It is a statement of belief which is supported by popular conservative narratives.
Liberals are frequently defeated by conservatives precisely because they take these narratives for granted and try to argue within or in spite of them — ie: the popular liberal retort “your kids will be better off if their peers are educated too!” dodges the thrust of the conservative argument (that individualism is the best ideology) while simultaneously reinforcing it as true.
Instead, you must reject conservative narratives outright and present your own. Ideally, you reject the conservative argument with the one you’re creating.
Eg: “Are you really trying to argue that illegal immigrants and taxes are a bigger threat to your kids than capitalist deregulators, pedophiles, and thieves? How embarrassing that you would hurt your own friends/family/community just so that you can hurt another community worse. Does that make you feel strong? Hurting poor kids? We’re human beings and we have an obligation to each other. Only a pathetically cruel person would disagree.”
Frustrate
Conservative narratives often try to build their “common sense” either by escalating the stakes to the point of absurdism, or appealing to lazy and uncritically absorbed ideology.
Conspiracies like q-anon, or the story of the supposedly dangerous “migrant caravan” begin with some grain of truth until they are escalated and villainized into eliciting a strong emotional response. The panic over “SJWs” “cancel culture” “cultural marxism” or “liberal professors” is a prime example of this. Conservatives take one or two cool marxist professors, a handful of 18-year-old feminists, and an effort to make colleges less racist and convert it into a massive Jewish plot to brainwash unwitting children into making illogical touchy-feely arguments.
This is intentionally almost impossible to argue against because conservatives can either escalate the narratives (with dubious or nonexistent factual basis) or reel them back to “common sense” or factual bases at will.
If you point out the “culture war” isn’t happening, they reel it back to the “common sense” idea that not all white people are racist. If you offer facts which disprove their narratives, they escalate to a massive conspiracy wherein a cabal of marxist professors are rewriting history.
In essence, it’s a bait-and-switch.
Fortunately, conservatives are so rarely countered on their basic premises (“common sense”) that they have almost no answer to genuinely opposite worldviews. So, to beat them, provide those opposite views.
If they say “Ilhan Omar is a communist!,” reject the idea that communism is bad and respond simply “I really wish she were that would be cool.” If they shout that illegal immigrants are ruining the country, retort that those immigrants have more right to change America than they do, and that borders are bad anyways.
Even if you don’t believe all of the above, arguing them in the moment stops the conservative avalanche of narrative escalation in its tracks. They can’t fearmonger over illegal immigrants if you aren’t afraid of them. They can’t draw you into semantic debates over who is a communist if you deny the suggestion that communism is bad.
They can’t beat you if you won’t play by their rules.
