A barrier wall stands between our nation’s two strains of politics. The people on either side are largely persuaded they have good reasons for keeping this wall up to full strength. Too few see any need to send or receive information and ideas back and forth through the wall. Such exclusion neglects the past … and the future.

The nation’s founders did not set out to design the world’s first faultless nation. Nor did they pretend they had. They knew the importance of making changes over time and laid out various sets of channels for doing so. Their design has shown its greater value with the passing centuries. The founders conceived, and then built in, effective systems for dealing with human impulses that commonly impair nations. We hear faint echoes of this American trait in a quote attributed to Winston Churchill: “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.”

Fundamental in founding our nation were portions of free speech, peaceable assembly, and protest. In short, the founders knew the high value of searching through ideas from all quarters. Searching more widely does not bring perfection. Yet, earnest debate adds a breadth and depth of useful knowledge and ideas that are otherwise lacking.

“Debate,” including “earnest debate,” has been an important link between politics (striving to lead) and governance (leading) since before Christ. Debate flourished in ancient Greece and Rome, where debate evolved to spur ideas and sort out their strong points and weak points. Socrates and Julius Caesar are names tied to early uses of debate in the public square. Shakespeare plays brought public debate to the theater. A specially notable case began, “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.”

Centuries went by. Debate worked its way in the forming of our nation. The debates that founded our nation did not end in perfection. Indeed, civil war struck within less than 100 years. War between states is not the way founders conceived free speech, peaceable assembly, or the right to petition. Yet, earnest debate still played an absolutely crucial role in bringing to the fore the right leader at that pivotal time.

I refer, of course, to the Lincoln-Douglas debates, otherwise known as The Great Debates of 1858. Each debate, at a different site, gave hours to digging deeply into slavery. The debates were a series of seven debates over two months between Abraham Lincoln, the Republican Party candidate for the United States Senate from Illinois, and incumbent Senator Stephen Douglas, the Democratic Party candidate. Douglas retained his seat in the U.S. Senate, but the debates led to Lincoln’s becoming the U.S. president in 1861, as the Civil War began.

For choosing thoughtful leaders, as much as for probing ideas, America badly needs a return to earnest debating. This column aims to revitalize earnest debate. The special means proposed to start the change might surprise enough voters to stir something worthy.

Imagine diverse sponsors. Imagine a program at the new high school auditorium in town that features the Los Alamos High School debate team debating the pros and cons of some stubborn issue in America. One such issue is the pros and cons that go with voter IDs of various forms.

Political parties pursue the subject with competing slogans—“Rampant Voter Fraud” vs. “Sparse Voter Fraud,” respectively. Regardless of whose slogan better fits reality, any good voting system needs some effective way to identify each voter. So begin with the need. We all want the process to be convenient to voters, reliable, secure, and low cost.

High school debaters could clarify and weigh the key factors in the issue, which remain blurred when the public focus stays glued to “voter fraud.” Students simply itemizing the factors and summarizing the pros and cons of various options for identification would be a giant step forward for democracy.

We have such handy ways of honing our nation’s most valuable tools.