As 2020 careened toward its end, the first presidential debate matched the energy of the cities that had burned over the summer. The chaotic shouting match was a shocking display to those clinging to the notion that some genteel political machinery guided the American state. And it did seem to mark the end of something. A clamped down third debate still came along after the second one was cancelled. But there did arise a belief that the era of the televised presidential debate had ended. It had reach its natural death, just as the traditional television model was on its way to the trash heap under the weight of streaming.
This belief endured up until this 2024 rematch between Biden and Trump, when the Biden camp thought a debate was their card to play. The consensus was that the 2020 debates were a negative for Trump — that they reinforced an unstable barnstorming persona from which a COVID-wary public just wanted to crawl away. And so the Biden camp, behind in the spring polls but happy with the successful NYC judicial attack on Trump, pressed for debates. They tacked on a list of conditions — no live audience, mute buttons, no involvement by the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates — and figured that worst case Trump would decline and look scared. Best case, Trump would participate under conditions that would clip his claws, and the hemmed in format would make it easier for Biden to deliver his canned remarks and shuffle off with a “contrast win.”
What happened instead was that Trump walked away with the biggest “contrast win” since a tanned and smiling Kennedy took down a sweaty and pasty Nixon in 1960. Biden was nonfunctional, even with the cutting edge drug cocktail he was surely given prior to going onstage. He was every bit as senile and feeble as anyone actually paying attention these past few years knew him to be. And Trump, for the first time ever in these things, showed something resembling restraint. He hardly ever interrupted, kept his composure, and let the visceral disaster of Biden’s appearance do the work for him.
How did the Left get it so wrong?
The Democratic establishment seemed genuinely shocked by it all, which in itself is proof positive that this liberal regime has fully entered its late-Soviet era of delusion. Having all the levers of media power on your side can be a powerful thing, but it can blind you to the obvious. It’s been clear for years that Biden’s cognitive decline was steep, but the media ecosystem insisted on the opposite. From CNN to the New York Times to the Atlantic and on and on, they insisted that the emperor still wore clothes.
Eventually some believed it themselves, but I suspect it involved a lot more looking around to suss out the party line. What took root was likely what philosopher Jens Ulrick Hansen called “pluralistic ignorance” — where no one really believes, but everyone believes that everyone else believes. Throw is a large helping off old-fashioned hubris, and you have the rather startling situation we have now, where Trump can really win this thing, and the Democratic establishment may rend itself apart around the question of dumping Biden from the ticket.
Biden can certainly still win. The liberal regime has many tools in the toolbox — mail-in voting, narrative formation, and the deluge of demographic change they’ve unleashed on the country. The flood of nonwhite immigration will soon turn Texas blue, and that will be the end of the Republicans at the presidential level. But they don’t quite have the numbers yet, and their competence as administrators of the American Empire is in its own steep decline, along with the empire itself.
If Trump does win, this debate will go down as a legendary political disaster. And if it is indeed the last debate this time, it will be a proper end of an era of American discourse where such things mattered — when this was to some extent about policy issues and which of two DC creatures could look better on television.
The time for arguments within the American political system is over. After 2024, the important factions will take that to heart.
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