Seven thoughts on the first presidential debate
The "debate" was a sideshow to Trump's authoritarian posturing.
Hello friends,
This newsletter has a 3 to 4 minute read time:
(1) Seven thoughts on the debate. Spoiler alert: the last point is the most important one.
(2) An excerpt to my last newsletter about the controversy surrounding the French film Cuties, since I was told by many people that it went to their promotions folders on Gmail (most likely because of the unusual subject line?).
Pro tip: Add this address to your contacts, and in future weeks if you can’t find the newsletter, check your spam folder (and mark it as “not spam” if it’s in there) and Promotions tab (and drag it into your primary inbox, and hit “yes” if asked to do this for future messages).
7 thoughts on the first presidential debate of 2020
1. The debate was bleak and vacuous affair, mostly defined by Trump channeling the trolling energies he’s built up after nearly four years of spending his presidency primarily on Twitter. He violated the terms of the debate with an unending stream of interruptions that resembled a disgruntled child interfering with their calmer sibling’s account of a fight to a parent. He spit venom at Biden even as he spoke of his deceased son. He lied, he lied, he lied.
I’m inclined to agree with New York Magazine’s Jon Chait that it was a tactical success and a strategic failure: Trump really did fluster Biden, but he also failed to drive home any messages that might revive the interest of Republicans who have soured on him in no small part because of his personal conduct and an inability to even feign empathy. While Biden was overwhelmed, he stuck to substantive messages like explaining the stakes of Trump’s Supreme Court nomination and bragging about his climate policy proposals.
2. Early focus group anecdata and initial rapid polling suggests that Biden came across more favorably to viewers by a significant margin. (Even pundits on Fox and Friends said that Biden ultimately defied Trump’s strategy.) Historically, presidential debates have small and often ephemeral effects on elections, but in a close race they can matter. Keep in mind that most polling data so far indicates that this isn’t a close race by historical standards.
3. The fact that neither Trump nor Biden could string more than a few sentences together before losing their train of thought was a stark reminder that we live in a full-fledged gerontocracy. There is no doubt that Biden’s presidency would be far better than Trump’s, but it is impossible to shake off the anger over how unequipped both of them — and most of our political class — are to deal with the enormous problems we face on the pandemic, the economy, civil society and a warming planet. We need energy and creativity, and if Biden wins the presidency a young left will be desperately needed to make it capable of meeting the challenges ahead.
4. Biden went all in on the pitch he crystallized at the DNC: that Trump’s temperament and personal character is even more of an affront to the republic than his politics. Biden said of Trump’s pandemic response, “It is what it is because you are who you are,” which was riff off of Trump’s famously cold dismissal of casualty numbers under his watch.
As I’ve said before, I find this line of messaging to be largely devoid of meaningful political content, but Biden’s message should have resonated with anyone watching Trump manically interrupt him and issue one ad hominem attack after another. Biden also repeatedly tried to draw attention to the experience of voters in personal terms, sometimes referring to them in the second person, and speaking evocatively about empty chairs at dinner tables in homes hit by Covid. Meditating on grief is probably Biden’s most powerful rhetorical asset, and made for an effective contrast to Trump’s obsession with ratings.
5. Going into this debate, Biden had one major vulnerability — Trump’s campaign to portray him as soft on crime and rioting. This is an absurd line of argument, both because Trump is the only one of the two in office, and Biden is an architect of the 1994 crime bill. And this is an issue that has been handled poorly by the media. But all that being said, the polling data has suggested concern about the Democrats’ position on law enforcement is real.
Trump failed to advance any sophisticated arguments on this front. When he taunted Biden and repeatedly dared him to say he supports law and order, Biden replied, “Law and order with justice, where people get treated fairly.” It was probably the smartest retort of the night, neither pandering to Trump’s frame nor exposing himself to false claims about his position on law enforcement, and sticking to his commitment to reform. Biden’s record on criminal justice and his current position on it are not ones I agree with, but his position is the safest and most consistent one for him to take at this juncture.
6. I am opposed to pundits naming winners and losers of presidential debates. These tweets capture some of my thoughts on the issue:
7. The most important takeaway of this debate was that Trump said on primetime television, unchallenged in a serious way by either the moderator or his opponent, that he would not agree to a peaceful and orderly election and transition of power.
If you combine that with his calls for his supporters to “go in to the polls and watch very carefully” — a thinly veiled call for voter intimidation, something with an ugly history in this nation — and for the white supremacist Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” this is an alarming situation indeed. Trump is an agent of chaos and is plainly broadcasting his authoritarian intentions. That doesn’t mean he’ll succeed, but it does mean he’ll try to do what he can to cling to power if the results are unfavorable for him. As we saw throughout every moment of the debate, he is incapable of agreeing to rules and operating in good faith.
Should Cuties be canceled?
Screenshot from Cuties.
My gut instinct is to avoid watching a film that millions are condemning as a paean to pedophilia, but the intensity of the controversy surrounding the new French Netflix film Cuties eventually compelled me to watch it. If powerful senators are calling for an intervention into Netflix’s film roster and a Justice Department investigation of child exploitation over its scenes, I needed to know what the hell was actually happening in this movie.
Cuties is a film that seeks to provoke, and the debate around it raises some legitimately thorny questions. But the argument for the film to be removed from circulation — often advanced by people who haven’t even seen it — is not persuasive given its clear object of critique and the way that the movie was made. Ultimately the film has more useful things to say about the hyper-sexualization of Western youth than a conservative movement increasingly consumed by fantasies of pedophiles lurking around every corner and pulling the strings of society from deep state bunkers.
Cuties, originally titled Mignonnes, is written and directed by Senegalese-French writer-director Maïmouna Doucouré. It’s a coming-of-age film set in a Parisian housing project, and portrays the struggles of Amy, the 11-year old daughter of a Senegalese immigrant family, to choose between sharply differing models of womanhood presented to her by her traditionalist Muslim family and a set of new friends at school, a clique of girls whose bravado, age-inappropriate attire and dancing prowess instantly dazzle her.
The film, which won a directing award at Sundance this year, has many beautiful shots. In one scene, Amy is hiding under her mother’s bed when she learns by eavesdropping that her father will be returning from a trip to Senegal with a second wife. The camera takes Amy’s point of view, and the viewer bears witness to her mother’s simultaneous distress and her social obligation to share the news in good spirits with family members over the phone by watching her mother’s feet nervously tap and shake, by listening to her mother alternate between secretly weeping and theatrically laughing. It’s a brilliant story-telling technique that captures the repressive nature of the arrangement, and documents the sly and solitary modes of news-gathering that children in strict Muslim families often deploy to investigate questions of love and sex. The development helps set in motion Amy’s skepticism of her family’s model of femininity as a promising one.
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