The Debate Disaster: American voters were the biggest losers, but now what do we do?

Well that sucked. And the biggest loser was not Trump or Biden, but the American people. 

This wasn’t a normal Presidential debate (for a lot of reasons) but most salient to me is that the vast majority of people who watched it were already calcified on their opinion of Trump. The reason that the Biden campaign pushed for this debate early, the threshold question, was about Biden’s virility (conflated often with mental capacity which I have a quibble with). There was also an argument that the goal was to remind America that Trump is absolutely bonkers - though I don’t think we needed a debate to do that. 

Right now I  am doing everything I can to get my new book Democracy in Retrograde in as many hands as possible. My goal is to inspire everyone to get involved in civic engagement again. So if you order the book now through launch day (July 9) I will give you a free subscription for life to this newsletter. Just email your book receipt to emily.democracyinretrograde@gmail.com

The intended audience for the debate was not the general public - my politically disengaged family members had no idea it was happening and didn’t watch. It was people who wanted to be motivated to fight for Biden for the next 6 months. No Democrat left the debate inspired - that’s for sure. So many people I know were already teetering on the edge of fully checking out of politics and, according to the text messages flooding my inbox, this pushed them off.  

I’m so fucking mad at the gerontocracy who hold on to power, and I think that Joe Biden should have made the decision last fall to step down so we could have had contested primaries. It's not because of his record - Joe Biden has a tremendous record as president and has done more than any of his predecessors on important initiatives like gun violence, climate, and women's health. But the dude is old. However, he didn’t step aside, and unless the gods intervene, we are undoubtedly going to face a Trump v. Biden election come November. Maybe not! But if my lifetime of working for powerful men in politics has taught me anything, it’s that power is not given up, it is taken.

Early in my book, Democracy in Retrograde, we have a quiz on determining one’s hope outlook. Optimist and pessimist but also other things like realist and pragmatist. I’m a CLASSIC pragmatist. For me, politics is an optimization exercise; I am never seeking perfection or inspiration from a candidate, what I’m looking for is the candidate who will best move the ball forward on the issues I care about. (And to be crystal clear, the Biden Administration is better than a Trump Admin 2.0 on allI the issues that matter to me. See some other substacks I’ve written on gun violence, the environment, and abortion.) 

On the right you often hear them say, “we’re electing a President not a Pastor.” There’s an infrastructural ethos of accepting Trump’s faults because he’s the best chance at moving the issues they care about forward.  What’s wild is that Trump was able to go on stage and claim he wants abortion to go back to being a states decision while all of his most-fervent evangelical supporters like him because he will (and he has!) installed Supreme Court justices who will usher in a national abortion ban. 

Last night, Trump only did a good job insofar as his voice was clear, but if you look at the conservative punditry it's as if that man just gave the Gettysburg Address. The content itself was the unhinged ramblings of a narcissistic cult leader. If you look at the actual transcript of the debate, ie: divorce substance from delivery, it’s a much different experience. 

BASH: President Trump. Will you take any action as President to slow the climate crisis?

TRUMP: So, I want absolutely immaculate clean water and I want absolutely clean air, and we had it. We had H2O. We had the best numbers ever. And we did – we were using all forms of energy, all forms, everything. And yet, during my four years, I had the best environmental numbers ever. And my top environmental people gave me that statistic just before I walked on the stage, actually.

BIDEN: …We’re in a situation where the idea that he kind of is claiming to have done something that had the cleanest water, the cleanest water? He had not done a damn thing with the environment. He – out of the Paris Peace Accord – Climate Accord, I immediately joined it, because if we reach for 1.5 degrees Celsius at any one point, well, there is no way back. The only existential threat to humanity is climate change. And he didn’t do a damn thing about it. He wants to undo all that I’ve done.

I think it’s a good thing that Democrats are losing their ever-loving minds right now: they WANT our top of the ticket to succeed. They care about the Democratic experiment and all of the policy issues that this election entails. 

My question is - how do we direct people’s frustration and anger towards checking in, not checking out? 

A central premise of Democracy in Retrograde is that it is people’s very exhaustion with politics and their coordinating silence that has contributed to handing over the keys to the kingdom to politicians who don't represent our interests. Democracy is not a spectator sport and it’s also not a project that ends this November (prayer hands emoji). There are local elections and - before you know it - there will be midterms and then another presidential (god willing, we have a democracy in 2028).   

I think people deserve political candidates they truly believe in. For me, it’s about believing in what that candidate will do - for me, my family and my friends. It’s about who will make it so my friends won’t need to be bleeding out on emergency room floors to get care.

We have the power to be the architects of this journey. And I hope that people’s takeaway from this hellscape of a presidential election is that we can’t sit back and let other people decide for us.