So much of our public debate now focuses, not on our opponents' arguments, but on the noxious motives that allegedly underpin them. It's a comforting fiction (why engage with ideas held in bad faith?) but it's lazy, narcissistic & is destroying our capacity for argument. [THREAD]
2. The problem infects the very language of public debate. The grim rhetoric of "bigots", "phobes", "terfs", "gammons", "boomers", "Remoaners" & "elites" classes arguments by the kind of people who make them, not by the content of what they are saying - which is largely ignored.
3. Trashing people's motives becomes a substitute for engaging with their arguments: whether on anti-Semitism ("a Tory smear"); the UCU strike ("they don't care about their students/colleagues"), or Brexit ("they don't believe in democracy"/"they just want the empire back").
4. It's not enough, it seems, for our opponents to be wrong. They must also be despicable - which spares us the bother of engaging with what they are saying. Asking "are they righteous?" means we don't have to ask the more important and troubling question: "are they right?"
5. Sometimes, of course, people really *do* have bad motives. But as any historian could testify, other people's intentions are notoriously difficult to recover. Few of us are clairvoyant, & we are rarely good at analysing the motives of people who think differently to ourselves.
6. All this infantilises our politics. It shuts us off from useful criticism, which is part of the immune system of a healthy politics. If we switch that off - if we treat criticism as not just wrong but morally depraved - we shouldn't be surprised if our politics becomes sick.
7. It's no coincidence that one of the best Brexit debates I ever attended was on Black & Asian perspectives, because the usual smears had to be left in the cupboard. BAME Remainers are not, by and large, "the establishment". BAME Leavers do not, as a rule, want the empire back.
8. Stripped of the usual insults, what we got was a serious and substantial discussion. The result was a manifestly higher quality of debate, which was genuinely constructive and gave all sides much to think about. It should trouble us that this has happened so rarely since 2016.
9. It's hard to think of a single aspect of our politics in recent years that wouldn't have benefited from listening to critical voices. Somehow we have to relearn how to engage with the substance of our opponents' claims, not with the cartoonish motivations we project onto them.
10. We might even learn something - even from our opponents. For as John Stuart Mill once put it, "from points of view different from ours, different things are perceptible; and none are more likely to have seen what he does not see, than those who do not see what he sees".[ENDS] 
