Article content

Let us suppose you and I were to run into each other in a bar. We might strike up a conversation, perhaps start to argue some point. We’ve never met, probably won’t see each other again. Even so, we would each be likely to take care, even in a bar-room argument with a stranger, to stay within the bounds of civilized debate.

I don’t mean only that we would try to avoid ad hominems and other deliberate offenses. I mean that there would be some inner alarm bell that would prevent us from making a plainly asinine argument — one that was too obviously selective in its use of facts, or too clearly directed at a straw man, or just flat silly.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Andrew Coyne: Sad state of political discourse in Canada is an all-party affair Back to video

We would avoid, that is, insulting the other’s intelligence. We would do so, not just because we each hoped to persuade the other, but because we would not want to look like a jerk.

As with so many rules of everyday life, this restraint has largely been cast off by people in politics. The rule in politics, rather, seems to be: throw every argument you can think of at the public, no matter how shallow, stupid or illogical, and see if any of it sticks.