We must all be thinking it this morning. This, surely, is the worst. The low point. The pits. Finita la commedia. Last night's first presidential debate of the 2024 campaign was an unmitigated disaster. Biden failed to convey his key talking points, even as he seemed to formulate them in his head. Those who follow political messaging closely might be able to tease out what he meant to say in each case—but ordinary people watching at home, especially those who do not greatly care about politics, were probably unable to follow him.
Meanwhile, Trump delivered his usual pack of lies with confidence and bravado. He repeated his standard falsehood about the 2020 election being stolen. He tried to scapegoat immigrants for every problem facing the country. Biden sought to refute some of these claims, to his credit; but he left many of Trump's worst slanders uncontested: such as Trump's statement that immigrants are depleting social security (when in fact, they pay far more into the system than they will ever receive—and indeed are the only people keeping the system solvent at this point!)
Trump's pattern, as always, is to pick on people who have made sacrifices that he cannot imagine making himself. Since all of Trump's actions are self-interested and craven, he cannot understand it or recognize it for what it is when other people show courage and act out of altruistic intent. Thus, Trump attacks immigrants as criminals and cheats, when in fact Trump is the convicted felon, and immigrants are working hard to support the country. He accused Ukraine's president of being a "salesman," even as Zelenskyy fights to defend his country—something Trump cannot imagine doing himself.
Zelenskyy is fighting to save a democracy. Immigrants are working to keep a democracy solvent by paying the tax bills of an aging U.S. public. Trump, meanwhile, is doing everything he can to subvert one of the world's oldest and most successful democracies. Who is the true patriot here? It is certainly not Trump. To the contrary, the undocumented immigrants he despises are far better patriots who have done far more for this country than Trump ever will.
Biden could have made all of these points. But instead, he seemed to struggle to stay on message. I don't blame him. I felt sorry for him. We have all had moments in which we know precisely what we want to and need to say in that moment, but somehow cannot find the words. The debate did not make me think any less of Biden as a human being.
But it did show that he flubbed in one of the core tasks of any presidential candidate: he was not able to clearly and succinctly convey his message to the voters. As a result, multiple opportunities to call out Trump's lies and hypocrisies were squandered.
I therefore awoke this morning with a dark overhang of despair in my brain. Perhaps, I thought, last night will go down in the history books as the night that a cough, a stutter, a head cold, and the ordinary process of aging cost the American people—and thus, the globe—the future of democracy.
After all, if Biden loses this election, the rest of the dominoes are already set to fall. France is poised on Sunday for the first round of voting that may bring the extreme right to power. Both they and Trump have made clear that they will empower Putin in his quest to reconquer large parts of Eastern Europe. Trump has indicated he will pull the U.S. out of NATO and kiss the ring of our authoritarian adversaries. So, perhaps it is not unreasonable to suspect that last night may not only have killed the future of U.S. representative institutions, but laid the groundwork for World War III as well.
But even as my thoughts were spiraling in this ever more disastrous direction, some words of an old poem were elbowing their way into my head. "If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars," went one. "Say not the struggle nought availeth," went another. Say not "the enemy faints not, nor faileth," A.H. Clough wrote. For "it may be, in yon smoke concealed, your comrades chase e'en now the fliers..." The fact that last night's debate went badly does not mean that Sunday's elections in France will be just as terrible, that is to say, or that better news may not be on the way in the U.S. presidential campaign.
As much as our brains are inclined to over-interpret each disaster as evidence of an overall downward trajectory, after all, the truth is that we do not actually know the future. No man may foresee his doom, to paraphrase Byron. This is because the progress of history is never linear. Clough wrote shortly after the defeat of liberal revolutions in the 19th century, for instance. From the vantage point of the 21st century, we can say that Clough was right not to despair. Reaction may have triumphed for a time: but it did not ultimately prevail.
The same could still be true for us. The "struggle" may live to triumph yet.
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
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