I didn’t watch last night’s presidential debate. Reviewing the lowlights this morning led me to believe it was the right decision. I thought I was joking on Facebook when I called it Grumpy Old Men: Presidential Debate, but it turns out that was accurate. Talking down to, talking over, interruptions, and an overwhelmed carnival barker moderator made for a political sideshow extreme by our own stretched standards. At one point Democratic candidate Joe Biden made a statement probably aimed toward President Trump but appropriate to the entire thing: “This is so unpresidential.”
Sociologist Neil Postman warned years ago:
“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”
from Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Or, as theologian David Wells observed:
In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant.
from No Place for Truth: or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology
Political debates have long been the source of half-truths, distortions, exaggerations, and outright lies, mixed in with truth, but now are affairs of who can interrupt the most, talk over one’s opponent, and leave little time for fact-checking. It’s preschoolers arguing over who gets the crayons. There is no respect for ideas, each other, or the viewers who might now be wondering if the American experiment’s hopes lie in the hands of men most qualified for a subway argument about the Mets pitching staff.
In modern America, truth itself, on the occasions when it is spoken, is obscured by the denigrated medium we now call debates. The League of Women Voters gave way to the Presidential Debate Commission which seems to be giving way to the WWE. The series of seven debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas followed a format unrecognizable today. Each debate lasted three hours. One candidate spoke for 60 minutes, then the other candidate spoke for 90 minutes, and then the first candidate was allowed a 30-minute rejoinder. Between five- and ten-thousand listeners attended one of them and we might assume they did not bring camp chairs.
Today’s unpresidential debates are, as others have noted, a reflection on a culture saturated with “reality” TV, suited to our dwindling attention spans; rallying points for peak tribalism. We care less for truth than for performance, more for watching the shouting match than hearing real, problem-solving ideas, and would rather blame a moderator for letting two uncontrollable politicians do what they were intent on doing anyway. Instead, it is the politicians who have lowered the bar to where an earthworm would not trip over it. And we have only ourselves to blame.
fides quaerens intellectum
