An event that sounds mundane, and yet was pretty significant, occurred earlier this week: Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed debated Jesse Watters on his Fox News show. Other outlets generally framed it as a “contentious” interview, where the two men “clashed” or “tangled.” It was certainly that, but it was also something much more remarkable — and worthwhile: It was actually good for democracy.
These sorts of high-stakes, cross-ideological TV conversations are much less frequent than they should be because the risks for both sides are so significant. El-Sayed is not a former or future candidate with little or nothing to lose. Nor is he getting paid to be a liberal punching bag on a conservative network. Instead, he’s in the midst of a highly competitive and vital race for the U.S. Senate. And to the degree El-Sayed has made an implicit deal with Democratic voters, it’s that he’s enough of a fighter to make up for his other deficiencies (for example, his decision to have controversial streamer Hasan Piker campaign for him).
Watters faced his own perils. He can’t afford to have someone come onto his show — into his house! — and make him look weak. That wouldn’t exactly shore up his reputation in the conservative world of hypermasculinity where owning the libs is what passes for erudition.
But to their credit, both put aside the risks and went for it. And they didn’t give the event short shrift, either. Most TV hits last about five minutes, with each guest getting 30 seconds to make a point: This conversation lasted for 25 minutes, a lifetime in cable news these days.
Now, I’m not suggesting that El-Sayed vs. Watters was the Lincoln-Douglas debate, exactly. Both sides dodged questions, made cheap shots and parried the other guy’s questions. There were crude moments: When Watters injected some colorful imagery to criticize transition surgery for minors (“It’s OK for a parent to slash his kid’s ding-a-ling off?”), El-Sayed shot back asking him if he’d been circumcised.
It’s probably true that if you’re a Democrat talking about child castration you’ve already lost that part of the debate. Still, you’ve got to admire El-Sayed’s creativity and his ability to go on offense — even if the two things (gender-reassignment surgery and circumcision) are hardly analogous.
But put aside those viral lines. Underneath the spin, there were some real questions being debated.
For example, El-Sayed, who has a background in medicine, advanced a libertarian argument about gender transitions for minors: “It’s a problem,” he told Watters, “that you think that you get to decide what happens between a parent, a doctor and a patient.”
Is it wrong for communities to set standards and come to conclusions about big things (like abortion or transitions)? Or does that, as El-Sayed suggested, come between the sacrosanct relationship between a doctor and a patient? If this debate didn’t answer that question, it at least provoked the thought.
Or take the issue of taxation. “Do you want to drive on good roads, or would you rather have a billionaire make a second billion?” El-Sayed asked. “I just think I have the right to the fruits of my own labor,” Watters responded. In this instance, each debater made his side’s best point.
A more contentious part of the conversation involved religion. Watters asked El-Sayed about a comment he had previously made comparing an Oklahoma law preemptively banning Sharia to white supremacy. El-Sayed responded with a pointed perspective — one that right-wing cable news viewers aren’t likely to hear all that often. “I don’t begrudge you your right to practice your faith as you choose,” El-Sayyed told Watters. “I don’t know why the idea that I could practice my faith as I choose is a problem. Nobody is trying to push Sharia law on anyone else, just like I hope nobody is trying to push canon law on anybody else, because we live in an America where you should have the freedom of your religion.”
Watters himself seemed to acknowledge the success of the pairing. “I actually like Abdul. I probably shouldn’t like him, but I do,” he said on Tuesday. “I think he’d be a terrible senator and he’s a little bit of a lunatic. But at least he’s not your typical stiff.”
I’m not the only one who thought this confrontation was a good thing. “There was some great sparring there that I thought was healthy, and needed more for Democrats to step up, go on Fox News, for Fox News to have Democrats on,” “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski said on Tuesday. “I thought this was really actually constructive.”
It’s not that these kinds of cable-news arguments never happen, but they seemed to fall into disrepute starting in 2004, when Jon Stewart went on CNN’s “Crossfire” and shamed Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala for “hurting” the country with their style of debate. In retrospect, though, that was a better time for the health of our democracy. Today, MSNBC and CNN are a constant stream of information about how bad Trump is, and Fox News often ignores whatever Trump is doing and talks about culture war stuff instead — you know, the migrant caravan steaming toward the border.
Earlier this week, in contrast to that tired approach, America got to see two competent pugilists with very different worldviews sparring for nearly a half hour — in a conversation that could have real consequences for our politics. It was good and refreshing TV. And both sides came out looking smart for having agreed to it. Here’s hoping that means more of these debates going forward.
Matt K. Lewis is a NOTUS Perspectives columnist.
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