Having wasted countless hours in online debate with conservatives, and having zero confirmed successes in changing any of their minds, I’m more pessimistic about that.
That said: If a truly advanced, informed, and respectful liberal vs. conservative argument is proceeding here, then it can go ahead. There is value to intelligent discussion, apart from any goal of political “conversion.” For one, as Winston Churchill would put it, jaw-jaw is always better than war-war.
But the opposite of intelligent discussion — cheap, coarse, disrespectful “debates,” with “debate” in scare quotes because such arguments throw the goal of any meaningful debate (the genuine, good-faith exchange of information and viewpoints) out the window — are much more typical online, Imgflip being no exception to that rule. Such “debates” actually have the opposite effect: they cause both participants in the “debate” to *harden* their initial positions.
I think you’ll see this pernicious effect even if you stay “above the fray,” so to speak, and stick to defensible and well-sourced points regardless of how rude the other side is being. Because it’s extremely demoralizing to put in the effort to stay respectful and treat the other participant as a human being when you’re getting none of it in return.
And perhaps that is one reason why partisan polarization has increased drastically, even as social media usage has also exploded: millions of little annoying interactions between average people of opposing political views that have folks on both sides of the aisle walking away thinking “man, I really don’t like those guys.”
Social media is cancer, as it’s often said. But it doesn’t have to be cancer. It’s just a very new tool that we’re still figuring out as a species and have so far been rather bad at it. And when you consider how much political thought is shaped and molded online, the fate of our species may actually depend on it, which is horrifying to consider.
So I’ve concluded that, paradoxically, sometimes, keeping both sides apart if they’re just going to screech at each other is actually the better thing to do.
