Take Defeat

 Look, we're all nervous about this upcoming presidential debate. Not so much because we fear Harris would do a bad job. But just because: we all remember what happened the last time around. We are all still traumatized from Biden's performance in July. That debate, as we all recall, was so abysmal that it utterly reshaped the election. It forced Biden to end his candidacy. In short, it marked his defeat. And so, it was a day that reminded us all that very bad things can happen to good people. Sometimes, that is, the bad guys win the round. 

I was thinking yesterday in this regard about the triumph of evil and mediocrity in the world: how the J.D. Vances of the world succeed where better people fail. I was reminded of a line from Yeats, in which he advises the noble failure to simply accept obscurity as the price of having kept their honor. "Be secret and exult," he bids them. And when I went back to look up the poem in full, I was struck by how perfectly it described the entire experience of that first July debate. Indeed, it could have been written to console Biden in the failure of his election hopes.

[...] take defeat

From any brazen throat, the poet advises a "friend whose work has come to nothing." And whose throat could be more brazen than Trump's? Yeats goes on: 

For how can you compete,

Being honor bred, with one

Who were it proved he lies

Were neither shamed in his own

Nor in his neighbors' eyes;

Indeed. That's what Biden kept saying after the debate. He admitted that at times he had been at a loss for words. He acknowledged he had struggled to come up with rejoinders in the moment. But how could he, he asked, when every other word out of Trump's mouth was a lie? When the lies came so fast, who, who had been honor-bred, could compete against them? Especially when Trump's lies were so shameless? When, no matter how many times they are disproved, he simply keeps repeating them? Even when his lies are refuted, he is never shamed in his own or his fans' eyes. 

That's what Pelosi said too. She of course privately urged Biden to step aside from his candidacy. But she pointed out that Trump had done nothing but lie during the whole debate. And so, in a way, she stood in the role of the poet, speaking to his friend. She urged Biden to take defeat—not because he deserved to lose, but simply because he could not compete. In a contest between truth and falsehood, the latter is not always stronger. Indeed, as George Eliot once wrote: "in all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of its dullness."

And so, Pelosi said to Biden: drop out of the race. Retire to obscurity. Be secret and exult. 

It may be, then, that Democrats should abandon honor in the fight. Perhaps they should fight the "brazen throats" with their own weapons, if the alternative is simply to "take defeat." But no, I can't endorse this option. It is precisely because Democrats are the more honest party, the more honorable party, in this election, that I want to see them prevail. If they become Trump in order to defeat him, then they will lose the very feature that makes them worthy to defeat Trump in the first place. And so, like Biden, they will simply have to take what comes. 

They will have to say, with Richard Lovelace (as I have urged them to do many times before): "I could not love thee (Dear) so much/ Loved I not honour more."