On the VP Debate, October 6, 2020

One of the things that struck me last night was that Mike Pence is a neoliberal and a conservative Christian in that distinctly American style, but he is not a full Kool-Aid drinking Trump supporter, and that means that:

a) when he tries to resort to Trump-like manipulation, it has a conspicuous, slo-mo quality to it, and

b) he has some ability to talk actual policy the way we are used to politicians doing.

And when he talks policy it becomes particularly plain how empty GOP policy has become over the past twenty years. There really is hardly any anymore. Pretty much the only salient point I heard him make last night was that the American private sector has pushed the U.S. ahead of its allies’ Paris Accord goals.

That’s an important, compelling point. It’s weakened by the fact that Pence is allied with a party that denies the science of our relationship to the environment, and that he allies himself with a president who not only denies the science but is actively at war with the expression of the science in his own administration. But it is still a important, compelling point that belongs in the dialectic.

But one point in ninety minutes is far too few. Otherwise, Pence’s arguments were shallow, and his evidence either flimsy or nonexistent. It becomes clear that, while Kamala Harris definitely views issues through a particular lens and that that lens has a liberal bent (and that’s not necessarily bad), she also just understands the issues better. Pence’s understanding of many pressing American issues is just more rudimentary than Harris’s is.

That makes sense to me, because it seems to me that the central engine of conservative politics is not its policy-making anymore; it is its media and, to a lesser extent, voter suppression. And the central purpose of conservative media is not to explore policy, but to make the case that decent conservative America is under siege by an evil, and this evil lacks legitimacy, and it must be annihilated at all costs.

And, because that’s not actually true, conservative media then has to manipulate the facts to support the narrative. And because the narrative isn’t true, conservative ideology also cannot win in an open marketplace of ideas, and instead, of necessity, it becomes obsessed with power.

Again, the asymmetry of it is rarely more clear than it was last night. In a fair fight, Kamala Harris generally had substantive things to say, and Mike Pence, generally, didn’t.

America benefits from conservatism. In an ideal world, it’s possible to imagine that American conservatism could call out the bloat of government and the inadvertent enabling and abuses inherent in social programs, could defend the true merits of free markets, could advocate sensibly for defensive American foreign policy, and could argue for austere, character-building traditional American habits in ways that would add to liberal wisdom about social iniquities, the essential good that can be done by well-designed social programs, the value of diversity, the importance of peace, and the role government has in leveling playing fields and leading us into greater harmony with the rest of Earth’s living systems. But that’s not what’s leading the way in American conservatism. What’s leading the way on the left is more or less what one might want — whether or not you agree with the politics, it’s certainly being done in a preferable mindset. On the other hand, I think it’s really not an exaggeration at this point to say that what’s leading on the right is a mean-spirited cult beset by half-truths and lies.

So going forward, it seems clear that one of the most important sociopolitical things to do, together, is to try to figure out a way for conservative America to feel like it can participate in a national dialogue in healthy, substantive ways, without having to resort to a strategy that relies, increasingly, on something that I think can be pretty fairly described as black magic. Not to figure out how to get the leadership to do this necessarily, I mean, but the people.

And meanwhile, to vote. And vote Biden. For heaven’s sake.