(This was written last week but not blogged prior to the latest Clinton-Trump exhibition that could hardly be called an edifying debate.)
Last Tuesday, (October 4) several friends asked if I had watched the Vice Presidential circus. I didn ‘t. Too many good things to read or good music to listen to waste time over the Veep candidates trying to elevate a sodden Presidential campaign. What could I have learned that I haven ‘t distilled from the most desultory Presidential campaign in our lifetime Subsequently, the revelations of Trump ‘s behavioral problems have nullified any gains his running mate might have made during the VEEP debate.
The VP debate exhibited the usual display of bad manners interspersed with painfully few occasions by which voters could differentiate between the candidates based on the issues. That shouldn ‘t have surprised. The long campaign and its repeated TV-Ops have surely thrown cold water on the idea that a rational debate on the issues can be conducted during either the primary season or subsequently in the actual Presidential campaign.
Is it the quality of the candidates that nullifies a thoughtful exposition of policy or their leadership We will have to wait until the 2020 campaign to be sure, but we have long ago moved away from the 19th century standard of a quality exposition of ideas such as the Lincoln Douglas debates of the 1858 Illinois Senatorial contest. Instead, we are inundated by the worst parody of a reasoned debate between men and women of high personal character. The 2016 burlesque is a tragedy for educating young voters on the merits of attentive citizenship.
The entire debate sequence has now been scrambled once again by the airing of a tape that seemingly has exposed some of Trump ‘s worst character traits. It would have been hard to imagine the Democrats inventing a tape of similar impact. It is far too awful, but it is revealing that we are dealing with a choice between someone of exceedingly dubious moral qualities and someone whose morality has allowed her to repeatedly cross the line between personal and public interest. Being excused by the head of the FBI for her email breaches only highlights the old maxim that justice is a class question. ‘ In this case, she was and is a part of the ‘ruling class.’
Perhaps the singular takeaway from the latest Trump imbroglio is that his core supporters are not swayed by his previous or current character revelations. This tells us that the anger with our current politics is deep-seeded and surely will not be dissipated by a Trump defeat, now all but assured. The latest ‘Trumptest’ has or will drive away most of the respectable Republicans, ‘ but Trump will still no doubt garner much of the blue collar working class that feels that the system is stacked against them and ignores their interests Young college educated voters will stay away, no doubt, because they are the most infused with political correctness. ‘ The number of potential women and minority voters not already repelled by prior Trump crudities must have shrunk dramatically with the latest revelation. It is not possible to imagine a remedy or an apology that will limit the damage to his campaign from this tape .
I am reminded of Marx ‘s curious line that history repeats, first as tragedy and second as farce. The tragedy is the choice America now faces between worn out solutions that have not worked well in the past, and a nihilistic rant that attributes our current problems to the unamericans who have come to dwell in our Promised Land. The current Republican candidate exudes a nativist chant that is a shocking contrast to the optimistic vision of morning in America of the first Reagan campaign. Making America great once again by raining personal or ethnic insults on any who disagree cannot be, under the best of circumstances, a winning political strategy. Its appeal is strictly limited to the Angry Mob. This is a profound tragedy.
The farce is the taped revelation that reveals Trump ‘s demeaning view of women and locker room self image. Sadly, however, this farce is also a play within the play. The larger drama is one of voters victimized by two low quality candidates that keep shoveling invective at one another while leaving unanswered the real issues facing America. Only the Trumpen Proletariat is left among the voters that will still be able to pull the Republican lever. ((Marx described the lower end of the working class that was largely made up of the most unskilled and the most depraved as the lumpen proletariat In his view, they were insufficiently engaged in the class struggle to even be part of the vanguard, the working class to which Marx screamed, you have nothing to lose but your chains. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (German: Der 18te Brumaire des Louis Napoleon), originally published in Die Revolution New York 1852))