Debate Fever
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have debated. Everything about that last sentence is absurd. Kamala Harris is an ill-informed fool and tool of the Democratic Party establishment. Donald Trump is a full-blown ignoramus about political matters whose only area of legitimate knowledge, if one may call it that, is salesmanship, albeit mainly in the snake oil sense of the word. A debate, in the modern context of electoral politics, is nothing but an optics contest, in which each contestant tries to score the kind of points against his opponent that are calibrated to impress the lowest common denominator of the audience, i.e., those who have no attention span for complicated issues and no capacity to digest thoughtful argumentation. Hence, an election debate has nothing to do with truth or right, and everything to do with making the viewers feel sophisticated, by allowing each of them to imagine that he is judging how well the candidates did, not on the standard of policy intelligence or sincere statesmanship, but on the standard of who was more effective in doing the kind of things one has to do to sway the masses — of which, of course, each viewer pretends he is not a member.
The mainstream media, which is striving to portray Kamala Harris as the second coming of Barack Obama, is falling all over itself in insisting, as though hoping to persuade God to make an announcement, that the Trump candidacy is dead and gone in the aftermath of this debate. Meanwhile, Fox News, which has spent the past eight years portraying Donald Trump as, well, the actual Second Coming, is crying “unfair” over the bias of the ABC debate moderators, although this sort of bias hasn’t stopped Trump from winning a few of these things in the past — this last fact, granting Trump’s utter dearth of political thought, being further evidence that American political debates in this era have nothing to do with policy and principle, and everything to do with scoring optics points.
I have seen, on YouTube, a public debate from the late 1960s between Ronald Reagan and Robert Kennedy. Since this debate was held before an audience of British university students from various nations, rather than as part of an American election campaign, the two intelligent and civilized men spoke respectfully, developed their thoughts at length, and more importantly actually had thoughts — genuine ideas — to express. When challenged by members of the audience with questions of an anti-American bent (this debate took place during the Vietnam War), both men spoke patiently but clearly in favor of America’s moral dignity. Nothing remotely like this sort of principled but polite debate between men of national stature has been seen in America since the Reagan presidency, and nothing remotely like it is ever likely to be seen again.
