Update, October 30, 2024: I wrote this four years ago. Except for a few details, everything here is still sadly relevant.
Last night’s debate, the greatest shitshow among such we’ve ever seen in the history of American presidential elections, was remarkable for several reasons: the shouting, the moderator who appeared to give up at least a third of the way (I fully expected Chris Wallace to gather his papers and storm off the stage at some point), and so many more. But commentators who decry what happened as somehow disparaging the “American Presidency” are missing the point: the debate was stupid and pointless, yes, but, it simply exemplified a long, ugly, tortuous system that is in fact designed to produce such results. The surprise here is not that the debate was the way it was, but that it hasn’t been that way more often. The American presidential election is the longest-running farce on earth: no other sane country spends as much time drawing out what should be a matter of a few months into what is essentially a reality show.
There has been much made about the fact that Trump is a reality show celebrity, and much harrumphing that he has brought that sensibility to the American Presidency. Much of the professed distaste for his style has to do with the insistence that the office is somehow tainted by his presence. But Trump is only making the obvious obvious: that the American President is emboldened by an office to wreak chaos and havoc across the world and has been doing that with impunity for almost the entire length of its existence. Perhaps the best and most brilliant line to emerge from the debate came, early on, from Trump: “Elections have consequences.” You can laugh at him if you like, but that statement crystallises everything we should know, and he’s right. We hold on to our ridiculous belief that the Supreme Court is some all-knowing, apolitical entity when it is in fact the opposite: Nathan J. Robinson points to the “cognitive dissonance” possessed by the justices themselves about this. Similarly, we persist in believing that the American presidential election isn’t actually about politics, but about things like character, likeability, honesty, and a host of other illusory matters that are not about politics.
Recent attempts to resurrect the likes of George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan as Noble Conservatives who were, by golly, such well-mannered genteel tyrants erases the brutality and death-making consequences of their regimes: Iraq, you will recall even if you try to forget, has been eviscerated, as has Afghanistan. On the deathery of Obama, who joked about drones, we prefer to remain silent, clinging instead to his legacy of being the first Black president and ignoring that he helped make it possible for the presidency to wreak even more havoc, a gift to Trump, as The Intercept has pointed out. But liberals and progressives continue to beat their chests about Trump because that’s more comforting than confronting the reality that the American presidency is made to create chaos and disaster everywhere else in order to maintain its now-dwindling aura of power and authority (the pandemic and its disastrous effects have wiped out that illusion in most parts of the world).
The American presidential election has always been a reality show, with candidates legging it across states and cities and towns, refurbished past lives and present-day vacuous grins firmly in place as reporters clamour after them, hyping the most minute and inconsequential details in an effort to get readers’ eyeballs. Trump did not create celebrity culture, but he understands perfectly well how to use it. Trump is not an aberration of our times, he is a manifestation of them.
If we really want to change things, change the election system in its entirety. As it stands today, the presidential election bid begins on the night of Inauguration Day. That’s not entirely an accident and the forces that keep such a relentless focus on elections from the first official day including a dwindling and rapidly calcifying media landscape dominated by a very few wealthy entities. Chris Wallace’s presence on the stage last night was a literal acting out of the disastrous consequences of such concentration, and our collective inability to think outside the rubbish generated by most media outlets, left or right. Media forces have created this relentless, constant election cycle and Trump in particular has been a boon to a failing, miserably run, exploitative industry that persists in recasting itself as some kind of a voice of the people when the reality is that mainstream outlets, including and especially the New York Times, are about nothing more than gathering advertising dollars. Mainstream media outlets need this ridiculous farce we call an election year which actually lasts four years, and starts up again every four years (so, effectively, forever). Without that drama, there are no eyeballs, and without eyeballs, there’s no advertising revenue. The New York Times once salivated over Trump’s success; it now berates him for employing tax-avoidance tactics that its core wealthy readers and owners understand and use all the time, in perfectly legal ways (recall or understand: tax laws are made to shore up wealth for the wealthy). We need to understand that there’s no point in having a journalist, even an esteemed one, “moderating” the debate if they’re not given the power to push back at falsehoods or, frankly, mute the mikes of grown men who act like children (though, make no mistake: Trump’s badgering was entirely forethought and strategic, and we shouldn’t run the risk of ascribing everything he does only to his character).
If we really want American politics to change, we need to give up our childish, infantile delusion that politics is about electing the people you like and, instead, understand that power is, as Bill Dobbs once put it so brilliantly, about “getting people to say yes.” To extend that even further, power is about getting people to do what you want them to to do. Trump’s assertion that “elections have consequences” reminds us that what we should seek in politics are the consequences we want, not the people we like. We’ve forgotten that and, as a result, we now have not one but two men accused of sexual harassment and assault, (do you see how quickly we’ve been made to forget that?). We’re now persuaded that Biden is the granddaddy we like while Trump is the grabby ogre we hate, and we’ve forgotten how to get candidates who will give us what we want: recall that Biden on stage last night turned his back on everything the left has been arguing for, including the Green New Deal.
If we want better presidents, we need to start thinking about how the entire election system as it’s set up, ridiculous farcical debates and eternal cycles and all, has failed us. If we want better presidents, we have to think about what politics really means: making people do what we want them to do and getting them to say yes to our demands instead of turning their backs on us.
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