Bridges or Barricades? Debates in the Time of Elections
What did I learn (indirectly) from John Bolton? That listening to people across borders is the key to winning debates.
This week I did a debate at the International Affairs Symposium at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. To be honest, I agreed to the debate with some trepidation. My last debate, a little more than a year ago at Yale, was in many ways an act of humiliation. At both debates—this year and last—I was to argue against the continued fortification of the U.S.-Mexico border.
Maybe the trepidation came from feeling that doing another debate would be (at least) mildly masochistic. One memory I have from last year at Yale is of the Party of the Right, whose members sat in the front rows. This group of about 12 students was very good at hissing, which—as I learned a few days before the event—is part of debate decorum at this Ivy League school; that is, if people disagree with what you are saying, they hiss. This particular group was all dressed in bow ties, they were all male, and they seemed to be from countries throughout Latin America and Africa. As I spoke, I tried to peer out above this group so they weren’t in my field of vision and didn’t exist, which was futile because they created such a racket with their hissing. Also, despite my best efforts, I would catch them in the periphery of my vision exaggeratedly using their phones to fact-check something I said.
One particularly fantastic memory I have from this event is one of these fact-checkers from Mexico—who took the podium with a rebuttal—ranting with increasing intensity (I remember watching the veins in his neck bulge as he looked down into his phone at his research from five minutes earlier) about fentanyl and how—by saying that the United States should demilitarize its border—I was espousing a narrative of murder.
Another memory I have is that I told a story about a Honduran woman who fled her country; she had received death threats after protesting a mining company’s plans to dig up the cemetery where her grandparents were buried. One of the Yalies dismissed this as a “sob story.” My debate proposition, “Tear Down the Wall,” was written on the chalkboard behind me. In hindsight, this was regrettable, because it was way too provocative for this crowd, who, to top it off, swiftly voted down my proposal. It wasn’t until later that I began to think of those hissing rows of bow-tied debaters in another light—were these not the neoliberal technocrats in training who would return to their countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, around the world, to make sure that their economies remain subservient to U.S. power and corporate power? Wouldn’t these eventually be the in-country engineers of U.S. policy?
At Lewis and Clark, the debate was totally different. There was no hissing, no “sob stories,” no vote tallying, no winner, no loser. Instead of “Tear Down the Wall,” the question posed to me and my opponent, Christopher Rudolph, a political scientist from American University, was “Bridges or Barricades?” This was the 62nd symposium—a student-driven event—and our debate was one of six or so that would run over the next three days. I enjoyed my time with the students and professors and sensed genuine engagement and curiosity about the issues, including the ever-polemic border. I was tasked with arguing that bridges are the better idea.
I definitely did not feel flushed down the toilet as I did at Yale, with a #TearDownTheWall hashtag. Rudolph was friendly and knowledgeable, and he knew the history of U.S. immigration policy. I came equipped with John Washington’s new book, The Case for Open Borders (podcast coming soon), but Rudolph was not a hard-liner by any means. He, in fact, argued for what he called “soft borders”—not completely open, not completely closed. There was a flexibility to his argument, and he seemed more concerned with the optics—such as people breaking through the razor wire in Texas or migrant caravans from Central America and how that would be perceived by the general public and create anti-immigrant sentiment.
I do, however, want to mention one similarity with Yale, one common denominator: a feeling of disorientation after the debate was finished. And how this time I came to peace with that.
When the Yale debate ended, I left the room after the losing votes were tallied, into the hallway where members of the debate society—including the bow-tie crew—were having loud conversations under bright lights. I felt that special kind of loneliness that one might feel in big, crowded rooms, and then I burst out of the door, into the cold New Haven night, where I immediately began walking the wrong way.
At Lewis and Clark, I also had a momentary feeling of disorientation; it was personal and had nothing to do with the symposium, and much more to do with feeling my own limitations and inadequacy. I mean, what is a soft border? I wasn’t sure how to rebut the idea. But given the monumental fortification of the border over the last two decades, could a soft border even be possible? Was that not just an argument that sounds reasonable but ultimately maintains a brutal status quo (like, say, the almost three-decade deterrence strategy) and is just as pernicious? Perhaps my end-of-debate discombobulation also resulted from the weight of the election year, those hyperbolic narratives abounding around the border that seem unstoppable. For a while after the debate, a subtle gloom followed me. I thought I could have done a much better job. But then sometimes epiphanies come in unexpected ways. I eventually came to peace with my post debate disorientation. Little did I know that my epiphany would be sparked by John Bolton.
Yes, that John Bolton. The John Bolton who worked for Ronald Reagan, the George H. W. Bush administration, the John Bolton who was UN ambassador (even though he detests the UN) during the George W. Bush administration, and who was a national security advisor to Donald Trump. That John Bolton, with the gigantic mustache. If you wanted the Yale-like color at the Lewis and Clark event, it would be Bolton and his oversized security detail that followed him around wherever he went, giving a Hollywood thriller feel to the evening. This included a large Secret Service presence at the dinner that I attended before Bolton’s debate with Nicaraguan exile Juan Chamorro (a precandidate for the 2021 Nicaraguan elections who was arrested and imprisoned) about rights and humanitarian intervention. The Secret Service was all over the place, standing in place, straight as statues, ear pieces and all. Bolton had his own personal border. During his debate with Chamorro, it became clear that Bolton, as put by Lewis and Clark historian Elliot Young, had no problem at all expressing his “unvarnished imperialist perspective.”
Indeed, it was oddly refreshing to hear this prominent U.S. official talk about supporting dictators and how the U.S. acts in the world according to its political, economic, and military interests. While students heckled Bolton from the crowd, he laid out what the United States has been and is about in stark terms. Humanitarian intervention is of no concern for the United States, Bolton argued to Chamorro, unless undertaking it is in its national interest. U.S. national interests, of course, could also include supporting dictators, such as Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza. Bolton quoted Franklin D. Roosevelt, who said of Somoza that “he may be an SOB, but he’s our SOB.” He talked about a U.S.-instigated coup attempt in Venezuela, espousing the “domino effect” that he thought would topple governments in Nicaragua and Cuba as well. (In 2021, Bolton admitted to helping plan foreign coups.) He talked about his full support (and U.S. support) of the state of Israel and its military slaughter in Gaza, since it was going after Hamas, which, he said, is a terrorist organization.
What Bolton was straightforwardly laying out was U.S. foreign policy—its aggression, ruthlessness, and how it crosses borders into other countries at will. What Bolton—who was a huge advocate for the Iraq War—promoted without a hint of remorse was the selfish policies of a superpower, whose tentacles extend all over the world with more than 800 military bases, a superpower that has facilitated the economic wrecking ball of corporate power, policies that have displaced people and caused migration around the world. He was a 75-year-old version of those bow-tied Yale students—all about barricades, not bridges.
Bolton spoke with this blunt conviction until the very end of the debate, when the Secret Service ushered him out of the chapel (where the debate was held), as if some heckling student were on his tail. It was at this moment that I realized maybe my own post debate feeling of disorientation was OK. Maybe, I realized, that was where I needed to be. This confusion ultimately made me think of my last book, Build Bridges, Not Walls, and not so much how it began, though it is worth mentioning that I started the book with a scene where I helped orient a man from Guatemala named Juan Carlos who had been walking in the desert for three days. There was, however, nothing I could do in that moment to entirely alleviate his dire situation. He was in distress, he was thirsty, he was hungry, he was lost. The response to the whole situation, as with the debate, was and would be entirely inadequate.
But I was really thinking about the end of the book—sorry for the spoiler—when I realized that it was really I who needed orientation and guidance from Juan Carlos. That if I wanted to understand the border, and what to do about the border, it was Juan Carlos, or anyone who was coming across for that matter, who knew the answers. He knew why he had to leave his land. He knew the specific injustices of Guatemala, which for more than a century has been a target for “unvarnished” U.S. imperialism.
Bolton could have probably talked glowingly about Guatemala and the United Fruit Company, the 1954 CIA-instigated coup, a 36-year military dictatorship—supported and trained by the United States—that was behind the mass killing of civilians. Maybe being discombobulated was OK, that kind of knowing that there isn’t a clear-cut sheet of bullet-pointed answers to evolving situations around the world that uproot people, but rather an ability to courageously look across borders and actually be curious and engaged, and to listen to what people are saying. That was my indirect lesson from Bolton: maybe it is by listening, rather than talking, that debates are actually won.
So glad to hear that you had a good experience at Lewis and Clark. Thanks for sharing your honest and heartfelt post debate thoughts. Wish we could have seen you while you were in Oregon! Peggy and Dennis
Mr. Miller! Thanks so much again for coming to our event. You spoke with conviction and poise, and I greatly enjoyed your remarks. Your take-aways from the Chamorro-Bolton debate are exactly why I’ve felt so fulfilled taking part in the steering committee this year. Keep up the great work!