Jeff’s take on the debate last night is touch too dismissive for my taste, but one line jumped out at me nevertheless. Lamenting correctly that, whatever happens, the Republican primary electorate seems to remain fixated on Donald Trump, Jeff characterizes his report as “essentially dispatches from what would have been an incredibly hard-hitting and substantive debate in 1996.”
I comprehend the point that Jeff is making here, but, if anything, I’d underscore it a little more by pointing out that it’s not 1996. Elections always matter, and they mattered in 1996, too. But they mattered less then than they do at the moment, because, broadly speaking, things were on the up. There’s a reason that Clinton won re-election easily in that year — and why turnout was so low — and that reason is that it was difficult to convince the public that the United States was in peril, because it was not. In 1996, the economy was exploding, federal spending was on the way down, the deficit was shrinking, crime was dropping fast, and, with the Soviet Union having been vanquished, the world seemed safe. Had the Republican party behaved in 1996 as it is behaving now — treating all serious debate as a sideshow and subordinating its entire political agenda to an indifferent, narcissistic fool — it would have represented a dereliction of duty. But it would have represented a dereliction of duty born of a much more understandable complacency than we are seeing in 2023. Bluntly put: If one were going to choose a year in which to prioritize “hard-hitting and substantive” and a year in which to prioritize servility and fecklessness, one wouldn’t configure them this way around.
The frivolousness and arrogance of the Republican Party is unforgivable. The economy is a mess. Our fiscal situation is a disaster. The debt is spiraling out of control, with no plan to fix it. Entitlement spending has not been fixed — or even addressed. The border is open. The world is on fire. Antisemitism is on the rise. The Democratic Party, the media, academia, and much of corporate America are all in thrall to a terribly divisive ideology that threatens the country’s foundational ideas. And the GOP is still indulging Donald Trump, an unhinged perennial loser who is crowding out all of the political figures who actually want to do something to fix it. I am told that cometh the hour, cometh the man. In American history, this has often been true. But, in a republic, there is a precondition for that happening: cometh the hour, cometh the demand for the man. The man doesn’t get parachuted into power independently of the people. They have to want him, ask for him, beseech him. Jeff suggests that “every person up there on that stage was already dead, long ago, and seemingly everyone in the audience understood it except for them.” We’ll see if that’s true. If it is, then the audience is jejune, and what happens next will land firmly on its shoulders.