More recently, the format has met something of a reappraisal. In 2015, Begala reflected that, with hindsight, America could have used more noisy dissent in the buildup to the war in Iraq. Outsiders to the show have also defended it, or, at least, expressed bafflement at its punching-bag status; Ian Crouch, for instance, wrote, in this magazine, that Stewart’s takedown had come to seem “less nuanced and insightful,” and was ignorant of the reality that “true debate requires passion and theatrics as much as intellect.” By 2023, Politico’s Michael Schaffer was calling for the show’s comeback, arguing that, in a world of siloed echo chambers, the relative absence of content involving an exchange of views “might even be, um, hurting America.”
“Crossfire” has not come back. (An attempted revival in the mid-twenty-tens, featuring Gingrich and Van Jones, among others, seemed to lack bite, and scarcely lasted a year.) But the underlying idea does seem to be enjoying a resurgence. Since last year, “NewsNight,” Abby Phillip’s prime-time CNN show—which, as one media reporter put it, is often “more ‘Crossfire’ than ‘Crossfire’ ever was”—has pitted brawlers from both sides against one another, with results that are occasionally riveting (see: the journalist Catherine Rampell daring the Trump ally Scott Jennings, who had defended Elon Musk against allegations that he gave a Sieg heil, to replicate the gesture if it was so innocuous), occasionally appalling (see: the right-wing commentator Ryan Girdusky smearing the Muslim journalist Mehdi Hasan as a terrorist sympathizer, ostensibly as a joke), and usually somewhere in between. Either way, people seem to be watching it.
On social media, too, angry-debate formats are very much in the Zeitgeist—an outgrowth, to no small extent, of the cocksure “Debate me!” culture of right-wing bros who rose to online prominence during Trump’s first term. Charlie Kirk perfected that form by touring college campuses, where he sparred with “woke” adversaries; this past summer, a liberal streamer known as Destiny snuck into a gathering of Kirk’s group, Turning Point USA, and debated a manosphere influencer in what one attendee likened to “a cockfight.” Last year, a company called Jubilee Media launched “Surrounded,” a web show on which some flavor of provocateur (Kirk went first) is, well, surrounded by intellectual adversaries, who take turns arguing back until they are voted out by their peers. Here, too, the results can be hard to watch: when Hasan, who was born in the U.K. but is a U.S. citizen, appeared, one of his interlocutors said that he should be deported; another proudly self-identified as a fascist. But, again, people are watching. Hasan and others have said that they did “Surrounded” at the urging of their kids.
If this is a moment of heightened disputatiousness, both Phillip’s show and “Surrounded” have nonetheless been condemned, in distinctly Stewartian fashion, for handing a platform to dishonest partisan hacks more interested in wrestling than in enlightenment. (Perhaps tellingly, both shows have pitched themselves in softer terms that seem aimed at preëmpting such criticism; Jubilee’s founder has said that he is trying to build the “Disney of empathy.”) Following Hasan’s appearance on “Surrounded,” Brady Brickner-Wood wrote, in this magazine, that the show serves up “brain-eroding slop” that “offers little more to the viewer than lobotomization.” Another critique is that such content doesn’t represent the “real” country, much of which sits in some imagined moderate center, or even the work of politics, which is friendlier in the smoke-filled rooms where decisions actually get made than it is in public. “Ceasefire” is premised on shining a light into those rooms, and on modelling respectful dialogue aimed at reaching consensus on big problems.
These are noble goals. But what politicians say publicly shapes the world at least as much as behind-the-scenes chummery does. And any bipartisan ceasefire must take effect at a set of political coördinates that are not value-neutral. (Begala’s Iraq example comes to mind.) As I see it, shows like “Ceasefire” risk conflating civility with unity, or at least blur the boundaries between these two very different concepts. Disagreement doesn’t require rancor, and there are shows out there that are civil without seeking compromise; Ezra Klein’s Times podcast, on which he patiently unspools ideas with articulate opponents of his liberal world view, is one example. This type of exchange can fulfill what I consider to be the primary function of debate, which is not to represent some majority viewpoint but to stretch and stress-test ideas, including ones perceived as outlandish. As Crouch observed, though, that process is often passionate—especially when the stakes are so high.
When I started thinking about this article, the distinction between “Crossfire” and “Ceasefire” styles of debate felt metaphorical. In September, after Kirk was tragically assassinated while debating with students at Utah Valley University, that changed. Among mainstream politicians and commentators, there came urgent calls to turn down the temperature and, in the words of Utah’s governor, Spencer Cox, “disagree better.” Meanwhile, Trump and his allies started to use the killing as a pretext to silence voices that they don’t like. ABC briefly suspended the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel for remarks that he made about Kirk’s death, following threats from the head of the Federal Communications Commission that even some Republicans later likened to the language of a Mob boss. The State Department revoked the visas of at least six people who “celebrated” Kirk’s death. A Tennessee man posted a meme highlighting Trump’s more dismissive response to a prior school shooting, and then was arrested on the spurious ground that he was threatening violence. The man was jailed for more than a month.
A debate soon emerged as to whether debate was really what Kirk had been doing. Many observers portrayed him, in the words of Katherine Kelaidis in Salon, as “a modern-day Socrates, wandering the agora of America’s universities seeking to find truth by means of rhetorical contest”; Klein wrote in the Times that Kirk had been “practicing politics in exactly the right way,” and was one of his era’s “most effective practitioners of persuasion.” This characterization, especially as posited by Klein, drew howls of outrage from many commentators on the left, who argued that Kirk wasn’t interested in changing anyone’s mind, and instead practiced a form of performance art in which he would lure less experienced debaters into rhetorical traps that he could then post online under domineering titles such as “Charlie Kirk SHUTS DOWN 3 Arrogant College Students 👀🔥”—all while dehumanizing various marginalized communities and sowing hate. Kirk’s style was “to civil discourse what porn is to sex,” Kelaidis wrote. “An intentionally titillating, vaguely degrading, commodified reproduction of something that is normally good, or at least neutral.”
Jon Allsop
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