The reason the debate felt like such an atavistic throwback is surely due most of all to the absence of the race's current frontrunner. Trump's decision to sit out the event and lob fusillades from a side conversation with Tucker Carlson gave those of us watching on TV a window into a Trumpless version of the GOP--the party that would still survive today, if the vast majority of its voters weren't already in the bag for a candidate who represents so little of what it once stood for. Left to its own devices, sans Trump, we realized the party still sounds a lot like it used to. It was momentarily reassuring, if only from the standpoint of sheer nostalgia.
But, like all escapes into the past, this one too was fleeting and illusory. The Trumpless GOP is a mirage. The orange beast still waits in his lair, ready to slouch toward the White House a second time.
Of course, there are many who still treat this as a presumptive impossibility. I remember after the 2020 election, I told people close to me: "we can't relax just yet. Remember Grover Cleveland? Trump can still run again." I usually got uncomprehending stares in response. Or else, people said: "That's never gonna happen. He lost! The party will want someone new."
A similar effect was on display in the media commentary following the first debate. The newspaper pundits were full of observations about who had the best "zingers" and who seemed to project "confidence" on stage. On the basis of these outmoded criteria, many gave the victory to Nikki Haley. Nearly everyone failed to notice that there was only one obvious stand-out on that stage: the true hit of the night was Vivek Ramaswamy.
Why do I say that? Did he have better ideas; a more convincing delivery? Of course not. But he was the only one there who was willing to weave an entirely false reality around himself: to simply assert that what's right is wrong, and that two and two makes five. In so doing, he proved that he, alone among all the candidates on stage, was actually a creature of 2023, not of 2015. He understands the new world of Republican politics. He is the only one willing to say things that he knows to be lies, that he never in a million years would believe inwardly, and not give a damn.
He took us back into the inverted world that we had to endure for the four years of Trump's term. He told us that up is down; bad is good; Putin is righteous; Ukraine deserves to be hammered into oblivion for existing; the planet is not warming; and he himself is trustworthy and believes what he says. Whatever fact inconveniences him, he simply asserts the opposite. "Not I am a fake,but America's phoney!" as a character says, performing the same type of switcheroo in a satirical poem by E.E. Cummings--one about a fraudulent pseudo-intellectual who gives off major proto-Ramaswamean vibes.
It's no coincidence, then, that Ramaswamy has gotten the biggest bounce out of a Trump-happy GOP viewership, and has the best odds of any of them to land a VP or cabinet spot in a second Trump administration. He understood how to do MAGA politics. All the rest did not.
As a character in Hermann Broch's modernist epic The Sleepwalkers observes: "our feelings always lag half a century or a full century behind our actual lives." (Muir translation throughout). What he means is that people are constantly using an outmoded set of values and reference points in order to interpret the events around them; and as a consequence, they are constantly caught flat-footed when events outpace them. Broch's own characters are chiefly mired in mid-nineteenth century outlooks, even as they are thrust remorselessly into modernity and the brutality of the first World War. A Prussian officer, Von Pasenow, for instance, finds that his old-fashioned notions of honor had never foreseen the use of such an "unchivalrous weapon" as poison gas, yet there it is--being deployed by his own and the opposing side in the trenches.
Most of us today are similarly lagging behind the relentless pace of events. We could point to the GOP candidates on stage, for instance, who were still protesting that Putin is a glorified mobster and authoritarian--a man, as Haley was willing to point out, who just most likely committed a gangland-style execution of his rival, by blasting a plane full of ten people out of the sky over his own country's soil--and that the United States has an obligation to oppose such men; the GOP candidates who say all of this, but don't mention--or perhaps can't even see-- that their own party previously elected and is about to reelect a man who openly admires brutal strongmen like Putin, a man for whom comparisons to mobsters are perhaps a point in their favor, a man who tried to subvert the election in his own home democracy just three years ago, in order to cling to power past the expiration of his term.
The same could be said of the journalists and pundits talking over the impact of the debates on the polls, as if what is at stake in this primary and election were not the very fate of a world where polls and elections matter--the very question of whether or not the United States remains a liberal democracy that has functional and meaningful elections; the very question of whether or not the democratic West continues to present a more-or-less unified front to the encroachment of the resurgent "New Right" (which might as well be dubbed the "Old Fascism") and its allies--authoritarians like Viktor Orban and Vladmir Putin who have made it their avowed purpose to dismantle small-l liberal institutions the world over.
The same is audible too among my friends and family members who said: "No way will Trump run again." Or, once he did: "No way will people support him a second time." All seem to be saying: It can't happen here! All such attitudes are just another version of the phenomenon Broch described. They are living a half-century behind the times. They are applying a set of analytical tools that made sense in elections past, decades ago now, when it could be taken for granted that a losing candidate would step aside and respect the transfer of power; and that people would not want to put them a second time at the head of their ticket. But we don't live in that world anymore.
Only Trump and Ramaswamy are at the bleeding edge of our times. They alone, among the GOP candidates, have embraced fully what Broch called "the disintegration of values." They'll say anything; they can say anything, because no part of them has an ethical core. Their statements are therefore free to embrace the same kind of postmodern mush-- a sprinkling of irony, a jot of nationalism-- that the Putin regime has used to hold power in Russia. If the only point ultimately is to stay in command, then it doesn't really matter if you believe what you say, or whether it is true, or whether it even makes sense.
In short, Trump and Ramaswamy alone have embraced the Putin principle that the journalist Peter Pomerantsev famously summarized as: "Nothing is true, and everything is possible." That is our brave new world.
To resist such a world, and create another, a mere retreat into the past is no option. Broch takes his "romantic" characters to task more than any, in his novel, for their efforts to simply assert that nothing has changed, and that the old values work just as well as they always did. We might characterize this as the Mike Pence solution (Pence being highly reminiscent, in his way, of the lost Prussian officer in Broch's trilogy, Joachim von Pasenow-- the one trying to assert that the military still stands for the same code of honor in which he was raised, the other trying to say that the GOP is still the same party it always was, the party who holds the United States to be the "arsenal of democracy").
This "romantic" path is illusory, however tempting, because it denies reality and asserts untruth just as much as the dissolute cynicism of modernity does. In the face of change, it says: "what change?" In the face of disintegrating values, it says: "nothing has disintegrated; everything is just as we left it." This will not do, and it is in its own way just as dishonest as the Trump/Ramaswamy approach of opportunistically telling people whatever they want to hear.
The difference may be that the Ramaswamys and Trumps know themselves to be lying-- whereas the Pence-style "romantic" still believes in the old code in his heart. Pence and Von Pasenow may therefore be more admirable than Ramaswamy or Huguenau (the modern "realist" and cynical practitioner of pragmatic realpolitik of Broch's novel). But neither offers a true solution. The romantic, Broch writes, covers himself in a protective layer of "an alien value system," wearing his backward-looking conservatism as a "cloak," telling himself the while that he is comforted by it and is no longer a victim of existential loneliness. Meanwhile, the con artist, the "aesthete," in Broch's terminology, tells himself "I am still lonely, but this is a lovely cloak." This "aesthete," writes Broch "is the serpent in the romantic Garden of Eden."
Ramaswamy was the serpent in our romantic garden of nostalgia, when we were watching that debate. Among a host of candidates (most polling in single digits among their own party) who were still up there asserting like Von Pasenow: the old ways are not dead! --in the midst of these romantics who stood for the proposition that the past can be revived, that the old GOP still lives, and is still--whatever one thinks of its policies--a mainstream center-right party, pledged to uphold the minimal standards and norms of a multiparty liberal democracy, committed to the defense of liberty and demoracy abroad--Ramaswamy there reared his scaly head to remind us of the truth that was left off the stage: the horrible reality that the absent Trump still holds a double-digit lead over every other contender for the GOP nomination, and that the candidates who will succeed best in his party will be those who become every bit as much of a con artist as he is.
Ramaswamy was there to say: your nostalgia is based on a lie; the old GOP is dead; and that--if he and Trump cloak themselves in its mantle, it is only out of a sense of gratuitous irony. He is one of the first postmodern candidates to truly embrace and accept the disintegration of values. He is smart enough and well-educated enough to know exactly what he is doing, not to believe in a word of it himself, and to do it anyway, to say it anyway. He wraps himself in the carcass of the dead party of Lincoln, and stands admiring himself in the mirror. "Oh," he says, "but this is a lovely cloak!"
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