Post-Debate Reactions to Trump and Harris's Showdown in Philadelphia

Some quick thoughts from our contributors...

[Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore]

Why has American politics failed?  That American politics has failed would appear to be the unifying thread connecting the following short assessments of the ‘debate’ between former U.S. President Donald Trump and Kamala Harris that transpired this Tuesday.

Now, Trump is, of course, the presidential candidate of the Republican Party, and Kamala Harris the presidential candidate for the Democrat Party.  Could it be the very fact of political parties that led to this ‘failure’ (assuming that the reader is willing to grant, even if only provisionally, that U.S. politics has in fact failed)?  

Simone Weil held that political parties should be abolished. Weil granted, to be sure, that parties can be unproblematic when, as sometimes happens, they are little more than the sub-political equivalent of sporting teams.  It is when they start policing ideas, Weil considered, that political parties become fatal to a Republic. Parties of this type come to exhibit precisely that quality which has become so obvious and troubling in the United States of late: they become unthinking machines.  “[T]he intelligence is defeated,” wrote Weil, “as soon as the expression of one’s thought is preceded, explicitly or implicitly, by the little word ‘we’.”    

Landmarks is extremely grateful to the following contributors to this hastily organized forum: James Carden, Michael Martin, Daniel DeCarlo and Scott Beauchamp.  As a side note, we wish to emphasize that it is not our intent to become all about ‘quick takes’ reacting to the latest political news. If and as we receive additional responses to the debate, or, for that matter, to the ongoing crisis of politics, we will, of course, gladly continue to publish them.   -- The Editors

His Own Worst Enemy

Lincoln-Douglas it was not.

Prior to the debate my colleague at the American Conservative Jude Russo wrote that “Perhaps the main question is whether [Harris] will face the downbeat, irritable Trump of the 2020 debates or the disciplined Trump of the June 27 debate.”

The answer to that emerged quickly. To call Mr. Trump’s performance unhinged would be a grave understatement. The following sentences were actually uttered by the former President on Tuesday night, recycling a rumor circulating on social media about migrants in Springfield, Ohio:

…They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what's happening in our country, and it's a shame.”

This came not long after what may one day become known as Trump's “Execute the Baby” soliloquy.

The idea that Mr. Trump is capable of growth is a fool’s errand, a triumph of hope over experience. Writing shortly before the RNC and Trump’s near-assassination in July, I expressed the hope that perhaps…

…Having been, by luck or some otherworldly power, spared his life after the nearest of misses, there are signs that the former President Trump might take a more measured, mature approach going forward.

Well, that didn’t age well.

Perhaps the most depressing aspect of the whole affair was the refusal by either candidate to tell the truth when it comes to the Biden administration’s facilitation of the mass slaughter in Gaza. No can do: On matters pertaining to the Middle East, we Americans are not masters of our own destiny.

In the end, there are no great lessons, no useful historical analogies to be drawn from Tuesday night.

The sooner this sorry chapter in our country’s history ends, the better.

-James Carden

Trump Self Immolates Against a Second Rate Opponent

If nothing else, Tuesday night’s presidential debate was entertaining. It consisted of two opponents, both unafraid of trading verbal blows or engaging in nasty exchanges with one another. Trump, for his part, is always fun to watch, especially in a debate setting.

However, it was also painfully obvious that he was completely overmatched in this particular context. A fact that will likely be surprising to many, as his opponent, Kamala Harris, is a second-string Democratic candidate who he should have been able to handle easily.

Instead, we saw Harris masterfully bait Trump, again and again, into chasing every single ball she threw his way. Forcing him to spend an inordinate amount of his precious speaking time defending a rogue’s gallery of his most unpopular positions and actions while she looked on dismissively.

While the moderators were transparently working to undermine Trump, this has been the case in essentially every debate he’s ever participated in, and so it doesn’t actually explain his horrendous performance.

The most disappointing part of the night was easily the foreign policy section, an area Trump should have been dominant in. Instead, Harris was somehow able to sound downright presidential, declaring her intent to stand athwart Vladimir Putin’s alleged plot to dominate all of Europe!

Of course, her comments were entirely absurd and not based in any kind of reality (Poland? Really?). And yet Trump seemed completely unable to call her on any of it, instead digressing into a mystifying series of frequently confusing and incoherent talking points.

One of Trump’s most inadvertently interesting lines of the night was his comment about Putin endorsing Harris, something he claimed was likely unironic on the Russian leader’s part. He’s probably right about this, but likely not for the reasons he thinks.

At this point, Harris is probably the preferred candidate of the Kremlin if for no other reason than that she would ensure continuity with the Biden administration’s current policies. Policies that have effectively worked to assure the slow and steady defeat of the Ukrainian military. Whereas a potential second Trump administration would likely introduce a number of new complications and headaches into the Ukrainian situation, not the least of which being the almost inevitable attempt at some kind of a ‘Minsk 3’ deal. No doubt one that would be cooked up by Richard Grenell or Mike Pompeo in what would in practice amount to an underhanded attempt to somehow get the remains of the Ukrainian state into the NATO alliance without Putin really noticing, or, at the very least, buy it more time so that it can once again be rearmed by its western sponsors.

Overall, it was easily the worst debate performance of his career. A fact which, when heaped atop an already troubled, uninspiring, and dysfunctional campaign, will likely add up to yet another Republican defeat come November.

-Daniel DeCarlo

Can a Civilization Long Exist When Leaders Ignore Higher-Order Communication?

Tuesday night’s Presidential debate was difficult to watch. At least there’s the hope that it might possibly be the only one held. 

The obvious lies (Harris’ claim that America had the worst unemployment since the Great Depression when Trump left office, Trump on how tariffs work, for instance) and complex issues dumbed down beyond all recognition aside, it was the form as much as the substance of the debates that was disturbing. The purpose of the spectacle wasn’t to clarify. It certainly wasn’t to educate. The entire point of the Presidential debate was to create memes. Moral reasoning done right is difficult and not initially rewarding. It doesn’t hold a candle to the kind of dopamine hit you get from self-righteousness distilled into a single shareable image. Without even needing to get down into the muck of who presented a more palatable personality to likely voters, we can tell who “won” by which side has the most viral joke. 

As things stand, the image of ET in wig and dress with the text “Illegal immigrant aliens getting trans surgery in prison” wins the night. It doesn’t matter that progressive Harris supporters likely WOULD want undocumented migrants to receive government-funded gender confirmation surgery while incarcerated. It doesn’t matter that a year from now there very well could be protests in favor of such a position. It won’t change a thing if evidence surfaces indisputably proving that migrants in Ohio actually have eaten ducks from public ponds. That isn’t the point. The point is to confirm membership to a team in such a way that avoids asking voters to wrestle with difficult and possibly intractable questions about prudence, justice, and resource allocation. The point is to like and share. 

It's probably not comforting to know that this isn’t a new phenomenon, that things were ever so. In the Gorgias, Plato complains about rhetoricians not necessarily needing knowledge about the truth of things, but instead relying on an ability to persuade ignorant people that they seem to know more than the experts. This ability, Plato has Socrates argue, is less a skill than a kind of “knack”, one weird trick, to produce “a certain gratification and pleasure” (462c). It’s the ability, Plato tells us, to give the people what they think they want without regard for “what’s best” (465a). The problem as such isn’t an ignorant populace (something Plato generally takes for granted) or the ability of a ruling class to persuade the populace (necessary in a deliberative polis). The problem is that the ones doing the persuading don’t know what they’re talking about. They don’t know the truth of things, and they don’t care. 

I don’t think all our problems can be solved by changing modes or registers of mass communication, even specifically among people who have the cognitive ability to understand more complex discourse. But can a civilization long exist when leaders ignore an organic tradition of higher-order communication? Michael Oakeshott warned in Rationality in Politics that "The civilization of Europe has been sustained by a conversation—largely incomprehensible to many—that is the product of centuries of accumulated wisdom. Rationalist attempts to flatten this conversation result in the destruction of political and cultural continuity." What would this flattening look like in concrete terms? Perhaps a meme, such as a still image of a cross-dressing ET.

-Scott Beauchamp

Americans Will Need Some Red Ink if They Want to See Through the Propaganda

Well, the much touted “debate” between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris finally happened, though calling it a “debate” is being very generous. That’s because the big takeaway from this production is that the legacy media, ABC in this case, is in no way interested in presenting the views of the candidates to the American voter, but only in furthering the aims of a regime of which the forces governing the United States of America are but a small but significant part. Indeed, the production had the trappings of a debate, but, because of “moderators” David Muir and Linsey Davis, it really functioned as a kind of distillation of the anti-Trump propaganda with which the US—and by extension the World—has been inundated for over eight years now. 

Edward Bernays, in his seminal text Propaganda (1928), essentially a textbook for the engineering of consent to which subsequent generations in the West (and East) have been subjugated, describes the trappings of this “debate” in absolutely relevant terms:

Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government…. Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control the environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought.

This was clear, for instance, in the shameless propagation of propaganda long debunked about Trump—the “good people on both sides” misinformation and the omission of Trump’s often misrepresented statement that January 6 protestors proceed to the Capital “peacefully and patriotically” to name only two—the “peacefully and patriotically” tag universally dropped by all legacy media reporting on the event since that fateful day. Not only did the moderators not “fact-check” Harris when she resurrected these canards, but the moderators reified them by their lack of follow-up. Add to this the inability of the moderators to call out Harris’s very obvious flip-flopping on key issues such as the border and immigration, the Second Amendment (that “Tim Walz and I are both gun owners” was a howler), and fracking.

But none of this should have been a surprise. Indeed, it is what one has come to expect from a news media that long ago abandoned even the most basic principles of journalistic integrity and instead have functioned as a Ministry of Truth on behalf of the invisible government. Neither is it surprising that other legacy news outlets—The New York Times, CNN, and NPR among them—lauded Harris’s performance, despite the lies and misrepresentations, as a victory even as many polls give the victory to Trump. This was a production, ladies and gentlemen; it was by no means a political debate. 

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek tells a joke that accurately describes our current political moment here in the West:

“A German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: ‘Let’s establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false.’ After a month, his friends get the first letter, written in blue ink: ‘Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theaters show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair — the only thing unavailable is red ink.’

“And is this not our situation till now? We have all the freedoms one wants — the only thing missing is the ‘red ink’: We ‘feel free’ because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. What this lack of red ink means is that, today, all the main terms we use to designate the present conflict — ‘war on terror,’ ‘democracy and freedom,’ ‘human rights,’ etc. — are false terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it. The task today is to give the protesters red ink.”

We here in the West, by design, lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom, so we are fed a diet of lies and propaganda. Somebody get me some red ink. 

-Michael Martin