In Politics, Don’t Aim to “Win,” but Rather “Win Over”

We like to win arguments and don’t particularly care for losing them. But the point of arguments isn’t the mere fact of “winning” or “losing.” They’re not games where winning is the whole point. Rather, the reason to have an argument, or to otherwise seek to persuade, is to change your interlocutor’s mind about something, and the reason to change their mind about something is because there’s value—at least as you see it—in that revised belief compared to the prior one.

This is certainly the case in politics. Political beliefs matter because they’re what people act on when they engage in the political process, through voting, advocacy, policy-making, or however else. If we think our own political views are correct—in that they’ll lead to a better world if acted upon more widely—then our goal ought to be something more than “defeating” the other side’s case. It should be convincing others to shift their thinking to look more like ours. Unfortunately, our political environment, and especially the rhetoric of political debate online, focuses far too much on the former, and far too little on the latter.

Some time ago, I half-drafted an essay about how I’d lost much of my interest in arguing. Or, at least, lost my interest in arguing for argument’s sake. But I gave up when I couldn’t find a clear way to express the distinction I was aiming at. Everything I write at ReImagining Liberty is, after all, an argument of some sort. So it can’t be that I don’t want to argue.

Fortunately, I spent the tail end of September in New Delhi, speaking at a seminar for young Indian liberals, and there I met someone who put into words, with great clarity, the precise distinction I’d been trying, and failing, to articulate. Barun Mitra, a thoughtful and insightful scholar interested in the political theory of Mahatma Gandhi, told me that our goal should be to “win” but instead to “win over.”

And that’s precisely it. The difference between “winning” and “winning over” is that “winning” emphasizes defeating those interlocutors by destroying their arguments. (And by destroying them, in, for example, an “own the libs” sense.) “Winning” is about combat and victory. The goal is to leave your opponent vanquished. Perhaps they then come to your side, but against their will, the victim of successful conquest. 

“Winning” as the primary goal of political argument is lamentably common. Every time someone shares a clip of Ben Shapiro or Charlie Kirk “destroying” a progressive college student, it’s shared in the spirit of vanquishing, not persuading. “Winning” aims at least as much at puffing up your status with your in-group as it does having any positive effect on the out-group. (And that’s setting aside the fact that, in most cases, those clips of Shapiro or Kirk “destroying” someone don’t actually contain an argument won, in any objective sense, but rather a poor argument made faster and louder than the target can respond to in the staged environment.)

But politics isn’t a game. Or, at least, that’s now how we should approach it if our goal is to actually improve the state of the world. The point, again, isn’t winning arguments. It’s changing minds. That’s why we should instead seek to “win over” those who disagree with us. “Winning over” persuades people to want to take your side. This isn’t grudging change, but willing.

Succeeding at winning people over takes more than good arguments, however. Your political ideas don’t exist independently in the world. Rather, someone always gives them a voice. Namely, you. That means people hearing your ideas aren’t hearing them as free floating concepts, but instead as expressions by you, and so judged, in part, by how they judge you. If you’re a jerk, you might “win” an argument, but you’re unlikely to win anyone over. (Except, perhaps, other jerks.) If you come across as unethical, your values corrupt, then your ideas will be associated, in the minds of those who hear you express them, with a lack of ethics and with values not to be emulated. That not only makes you less persuasive, but it taints the ideas themselves, making it harder for others to persuade based on those ideas, as well.

In practice, this means each of us has yet another reason to strive to be admirable. And it means that those of us who care about advancing a political cause should demand our fellow advocates be admirable, as well. A shift to “winning over,” with the personal ethics that entails, will help us win, in the sense of changing minds, and do so in a more humane, and far more productive, way.