Don't Fight Criticism with Criticism or You'll Get Berned

Finding logical fallacies in a political debate is probably the easiest task possible. It would also be extremely easy to go on YouTube, search for the video of a republican debate, scroll to any random moment, and find a fallacy. Of course, this is an exaggeration. However, as a liberal that would be incredibly biased. So, for this post I chose to watch the most recent democratic debate and try to find fallacies there. There weren’t that many at first that were inherently apparent and most of the conversation was quite civil. Then, the nominees became a lot more "passionate" and the most common fallacy, that I could spot, was the tu quoque fallacy.

The example fallacy mentioned here happened at the thirty-minute mark.

The tu quoque fallacy is basically when someone tries to evade answering any criticism directed at them by turning the conversation around, and criticizing person who accused them instead of backing up their actions or beliefs. Unfortunately, this type of fallacy is very prevalent in a lot of debates or arguments in the media and people seem to see it as an easy way out instead of having to actually explain themselves. They may not be incorrect in redirecting the criticism towards their opponent, maybe bringing to light a more important issue, but it is still a childish way to conduct official debates. The media also doesn’t seem to pay much attention to this sort of inappropriate conduct amongst nominees because this behavior, sadly, garners more views from the public and makes for a more entertaining debate while simultaneously allowing the channels covering them to capitalize on those comments. However, news outlets need to be reminded that the purpose of these debates is to inform the masses and to not entertain them.

In the debate Senator Sanders and Secretary Clinton both argued, for the most part, on the offensive. A lot of questions were answered by responses along the lines of “Yes, I know I did (fill in the blank), but what he/she did was worse!”

One example is thirty minutes into the debate, after a series of back and forth attacks, Clinton while trying to defend herself makes a very direct attack on Sanders stating:

“But while we’re talking about votes, you’re the one who voted to deregulate swaps and derivatives in 2000, which contributed to the overleveraging of Lehman Brothers, which was one of the culprits that brought down the economy… People make mistakes. And I am certainly not saying you [Sanders] did it for any kind of financial advantage.”

This statement essentially takes away from the main topic and the initial question asked, and turns into a criticism towards Sanders and his voting record.

As a supporter of these candidates it was very disappointing to see them act this way. The problem with tu quoque is that it gives the impression that the receiver of the criticism, when they respond with a counter-attack, knows what she/he is talking about when that might not be the case. It creates very childish dialogue. I can almost imagine this taking place in a playground with two kids arguing over who started a fight. “She pulled my hair!” “But, he pushed me first”, I can imagine them saying. This sort of behavior does not indicate any level of sophistication from either party and therefore should be regulated more closely by moderators. Moreover, media might like to consider not advertising this conduct, however, that is highly unlikely because unfortunately we live on a society that enjoys the entertaining aspect of spewing out fallacies instead of the content they are supposed to provide.