Democratic debates as theatre and teen drama

Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris
on the second night of the debates

Honestly, my first thought after watching the Democratic debates was, ‘boy, am I glad I’m not a Democrat anymore’. A sentiment a bit too pharisaical, perhaps, but these debates really are just theatre, and bad theatre at that. For one example: the hosts put forward a ‘question from the audience’ (some poor woman from Oregon) who asked a question about Trump’s negative impact on institutions and norms that was couched in some of the most inane and banal pseudo-centrist language imaginable. That may indeed have been a genuine and authentic question – Lord knows, sadly, there are probably more than a few such well-meaning individuals out there whose language and views have been severely stunted by the intellectual-yet-idiotic patois of the Washington Post and the New York Times – but the fact that the hosts subtly placed that question in the mouths of the ‘audience’, of the ‘common people’, was a deft and deliberate bit of misleading and manipulative framing. In such venues, what questions get asked, how they are framed, and to whom they are addressed are in fact considerations as important as the questions themselves.

The reason Socrates and Plato were precisely so distrustful of statesmen and sophists was that they learned precisely how to make propositions or attitudes about the world sound or look true and genuine without them actually being so. And sadly, our politics – which is in the middle of a transition between two or perhaps all three modes of the politics of the belly – is rife with these sorts of distortions. This is one of the reasons why I tend to respect Senator Sanders and Representative Gabbard more than practically all of the other people on the stage. They have to play-act a little bit because of the artificial venue in which they find themselves; they have to engage in some redirection and manipulation (and there certainly were one or two instances where I found that disappointing and frustrating); but at their best they are trying to turn our heads away from the shadows on the wall.

All the foregoing isn’t to say that the theatrics don’t have a certain value for those who recognise what they are. A candidate’s answer might be rehearsed or it might be an off-the-cuff bit of improv, but it will still reveal certain things about that candidate’s policy priorities and preoccupations and temperament that can be helpful in evaluating them. We got to see twenty different candidates the past two nights. And their performances added a couple of new analytical insights to what we already knew going into the debate.

1. Law of the Blob. The clear divide between the hawkish and the dovish wings of the party, which had been evident going into the debates, was thrown into sharp relief with the exchange between Tulsi Gabbard and Tim Ryan the first night. Gabbard waited for her moment and took it as soon as it presented itself. The effect was (at least to my eyes) devastating. It came off (as I’m sure the Major intended it) as an exchange between a seasoned Smedley Butler and a chickenhawk with no skin in the game. Questions on both nights revealed which candidates were most active in serving a militarist Blob agenda in addition to Tim Ryan: John Delaney, Amy Klobuchar, Julián Castro and Bill de Blasio on the first night; John Hickenlooper, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Michael Bennet and Eric Swalwell on the second night. Unfortunately, it still looks like the only candidates who are solidly against intervention and in favour of a drawdown are Tulsi Gabbard, Bernie Sanders and Kirsten Gillibrand.
   
   
2. The generational jihâd. During the second night of the debates in particular, the tactics of Eric Swalwell (and, to a lesser extent, Pete Buttigieg) in going after Joe Biden in particular on climate change and gun control were ageist. To be fair, Biden himself did not enter these debates as an innocent target in the slightest, what with his comments against millennials, and he set himself up perfectly for Swalwell’s ‘pass the torch’ thrust with his demands that younger people get more politically involved. We also saw a couple of candidates who rejected the Swalwellian-Buttigiegian tactic of attacking their elders, and those were Bernie Sanders and Marianne Williamson. The former said the elderly are not the enemy, big corporations and special interests are; the latter argued, entirely reasonably, that youth is no guarantee of having good character, ideas or actions.
   
   
3. Race and civil rights. Issues of police violence and continued issues facing the black community in the United States came up particularly strongly the second night with all three of Buttigieg, Biden and Harris on the stage. Pete Buttigieg had a moment of well-rehearsed vulnerability when he apologised for his failures as mayor of South Bend to effectively integrate the city’s police force or to effectively prevent police violence against a black man, Eric Logan. The effect back home was apparently unconvincing. The city under Buttigieg has had a long litany of unaddressed racial issues which make his apology ring a trifle hollow there.
   
   Another interesting moment in the debate was when Kamala Harris savaged Joe Biden’s record on civil rights, particularly with regard to his cosy relationship with segregationist colleagues and his personal stance on bussing and school integration. It was expertly done, pulling in a degree of personal pathos and directing it with insistent focus upon the crux of the question: the failure of states and municipalities to act according to the high court’s ruling to integrate. Harris certainly knows how to work a crowd (and, presumably, a jury), and the justice of her appeals against Biden’s record cannot really be denied.
   
   
4. Nerds, jocks, preps and burnouts. It was a little surprising and unnerving to me to see how easily a number of the candidates fit into the Breakfast Club schema of stereotypical high school cliques. Warren, Yang and Buttigieg clearly belong in the ‘nerd’ category; Gabbard, Inslee, Ryan, Booker and Biden are ‘jocks’; Gillibrand, Harris and Swalwell are a little too obviously ‘preps’; and O’Rourke and Williamson, of course, are the ‘burnouts’. This is not a particularly revealing schema with regard to the candidates’ policy positions, but it did seem to come out in terms of how they interacted with each other and how they respond to questions.
   
   I’ve already remarked above about the Gabbard-Ryan exchange over foreign policy in the first night which occasionally resembled a locker-room tussle, and the Harris-Biden argument over race relations in the second which consisted of Harris bringing down her debate-team prowess to take down a bewildered and relatively-inarticulate opponent. Warren got ample opportunity to show off how smart she was to the moderator, and Yang tried to but was severely limited for time. And Williamson’s answers to questions from the moderator were just plain fun to watch – and I don’t mean that in a bad way. Again, this is not a particularly useful schema to use when evaluating any kind of policy. But it would be naïve to think that the personalities of the candidates will not be an issue in the general election.
   
   
5. ‘Hispandering’ is actually a thing. I was not expecting three candidates (Booker, O’Rourke and Castro) to bust out into Spanish on the first night of the debate, without any prompting whatsoever, and Buttigieg on the second. In the case of all of them but Castro, it was a painful exercise in seeing how much or little they remembered from their high school Spanish classes. (The Breakfast Club again seems to be relevant here; the distinctions between a jock like Booker, a burnout like Beto and a nerd like Buttigieg are doubly apparent along this dimension.) I can only imagine how embarrassed and confused my Hispanic and Latino / Latina brothers and sisters must have felt seeing that particularly-gringo display of supposed solidarity. (Actually, I take that back. On Facebook, most of them that I saw were laughing at it.)
   
   
6. Science fiction, not science fact. In addition to his surprisingly hawkish foreign policy stance, Julián Castro’s woker-than-thou anti-biology rant in response to a question on health care was enough to disqualify him, in my view. Castro came off not only as pandering but as entirely unhinged from reality.
   
   
7. Bernie needs to wise up fast to spin and framing. I knew going into this debate precisely where Bernie Sanders and I differ on the subject of abortion. I also knew, however, that Sanders has made a point of supporting pro-life Democrats like Heath Mello in red states and not making abortion an ideological ‘litmus test’ for candidates and political figures he supports. This endears him to me greatly, but not so much to the party-line fundamentalists and zealots. That being the case, of course I should have expected a sophistic hack like Rachel Maddow to direct a question about the repeal of Roe v. Wade at him and frame it in just such a way as to put him on the defensive.
   
   Bernie needs to understand that this question is meant to divide and distance him from at least one part of his voting base. It’s an unfortunate reality that among the élite class in this country, œconomic progressivism correlates strongly with social libertinism and individual liberationism on questions of drugs, sex and religion. But in rural and poorer areas of the country, as well as (to a diminishing but still significant extent) among blacks and Hispanics, the same œconomic views are held alongside a deep-rooted socio-sexual conservatism. The correct response to this question is that Roe v. Wade is not going to be overturned by this court: the Republicans have a vested interest in keeping abortion an issue; Cavanaugh himself is pro-Roe; and Maddow’s entire premiss is, to use the industry term, bullshit. Instead, Sanders bumbled into the trap of answering the question on its own terms.
   
   
8. Movement and shadow movement. One other thought struck me as I was watching Sanders share a stage with Gillibrand, and that was informed by the Lawrence Goodwyn book on American populism. In that book, he draws a distinction between the genuine movement populists who focussed intensely on the œconomic issues of debt, infrastructure and currency reform; and the ‘shadow-movement’ populists who turned the conversation away from these structural issues and toward a shallower politics of anti-corruption and electing the ‘best people for the job’. Shadow movement populism unfortunately won out in the broader national conversation in the late 1890s, and the results were the failed presidential campaigns of William Jennings Bryan – who went soft on the big bankers and made his campaign about personality. Despite her strong stances on health care and wealth inequality, Gillibrand outed herself as a Bryan-style shadow movement populist in this debate: firstly, by saying that capitalism is not the problem, greed is; and secondly, by making anti-corruption a key feature of her campaign. Of course corruption is generally not a good thing, but the problem with anti-corruption politics is that it is easily coöpted by any and every political tendency and is not married in the slightest to fair or humane œconomic conditions.

Again, for the most part, the debates don’t actually tell us more about the candidates’ policy positions than we already know. They are slightly – but only slightly – more helpful in ascertaining character, personality and decision-making processes. The divisions among the field – by age, by race, by sex, by education and social clique – tended to be highlighted more than the divisions by policy. The most useful and relevant take-away from the debates is the artificiality of the venue. It is a very carefully-curated ruse, a façade of politics, rather than politics itself. Andrew Yang pointed out that his presence on the stage at the insistence of his small donors was a triumph of democratic will; but the degree to which he was deliberately ignored by the moderators should be equally instructive.