In their own minds, if in few others, American politicians used to like to see themselves as characters in a Frank Capra movie. Even as falsehoods, scandal and self-aggrandisement came to define so many careers, they were still the good guys in a moral fable, standing up for ordinary folk, battling powerful forces, winning in the end. Whenever they looked in the mirror it was a James Stewart all-American hero they saw gazing back.
It’s a symptom of the nation’s changing mores and priorities that its political dialogue now reads more like it’s been scripted by Quentin Tarantino than by Capra.
Here’s some of the transcript from the impromptu performance of Reservoir Dogs that took place on stage in Cleveland on Tuesday night:
“Would you shut up, man?”
“Don’t ever use the word smart with me. There’s nothing smart about you.”
“It’s hard to get any word in with this clown.”
“Your son was thrown out of the military for cocaine use.”
“Everyone knows he’s a liar.”
Donald Trump and Joe Biden managed to avoid expletives for 90 minutes in their first presidential debate but in every other respect the clash was as elevating as watching grown men punching each other in the face.
Much of the blame has attached to Mr Trump, and it’s true that the President managed to pull off the improbable feat of lowering his own bar for presidential behaviour several notches. By turns hectoring, boorish and cruel, all delivered in his signature, unsmiling, orange-lit sneer, Mr Trump’s impression of a loud-mouthed lout sounding off at the bar was uncannily accurate. But Mr Biden’s performance, softer-voiced, a little slower to the microphone, repeatedly flinging epithets at his opponent, was hardly edifying.
The airwaves buzzed with hand-wringing lamentations about the end of American civilisation and Mr Trump’s culpability. But perhaps it’s not too jaundiced an observation to note that the political culture is merely at last catching up with the wider one. Tarantino wins Oscars, after all, and Capra is relegated to the schmaltzy mythology of families gathered around unwatched televisions at Thanksgiving.
Whatever the pathology behind it, it seems that Mr Trump’s performance did him no favours. In Zoom meetings and conference calls around the country on Wednesday, the alarm among Republican leaders and supporters about an election now just a month away was palpable. “To put it charitably, Trump’s performance needs improvement,” began one emailed summary of a miserable electronic gathering of party activists.
Republican frustration was as much with the practical effect of Mr Trump’s truculent behaviour as with the sheer unappetising quality of it. By repeatedly interrupting Mr Biden, the president deprived his diminishing prospects of perhaps their greatest remaining hope: the unsettling implications of Mr Biden’s own words. It wasn’t just that Mr Trump’s interruptions short-circuited Mr Biden’s familiar and often baffling ramblings. It was that the attention the president’s truculence inevitably drew from a nationwide audience distracted from the frequently false, evasive and misleading utterances of the Democratic nominee.
With all the inevitable focus on the president’s form, the substance of what Mr Biden said, and what it represents, was predictably ignored. As a result, a chance for proper scrutiny of his party’s ambition to impose nothing less than a reinvention of the republic should they gain power was passed over.
Mr Biden was allowed, once again, to decline to say whether he supports the plan proposed by many leaders of his party to “pack the Supreme Court”. The nation’s highest judicial body has had nine justices for 150 years, but Democrats want to add more to ensure it rules in favour of the party’s programs, rendering the judicial branch of government, in effect, an adjunct of the legislative and executive branches.
He declined to say if he supported the plan his party’s congressional leaders have to abolish the Senate filibuster, that requires a supermajority for the passage of legislation, a rule in place for more than a century that is designed to prevent the tyranny of a majority from exercising untrammelled power.
He seemed to disavow radical economic policies such as the Green New Deal, a massive expansion of federal spending, even though it’s in his party’s platform. And while the president was universally denounced for insufficient zeal in condemning far-right extremists, Mr Biden was allowed to get away with the mystifying statement that “Antifa”, the far-left group organising anarchic violence on the streets of cities for the past few months, was an “idea, not an organisation”. He might want to tell that to the business owners who have seen their buildings torched and looted, or the relatives of a man shot dead last month by an Antifa supporter.
In the familiar media narrative, it is Mr Trump who represents a calamitous “extinction-level” break with American democracy. But the avuncular Mr Biden leads a party that espouses more radical changes to the political settlement than anything tried in decades. Radicals on the streets, in statehouses and on campus want to rewrite American history, re-educate the people in a purer understanding of their patriarchal, white supremacist sinfulness. Radicals in Washington want to re-engineer the institutions of government to facilitate the faster and more comprehensive implementation of their agenda.
A compliant media plays its role of ignoring all this while putting on a fine display of outrage at the boorish antics of a crass president, eagerly producing their own shocking Pulp Fiction.
The Times
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