Democratic Debates in Miami Florida Open Up the 2020 Election

MIAMI, Fla.—After two nights of DNC SummerSlam, here is my overriding opinion.

If you think Marianne Williamson is nutty bananas, please remember who got nominated to be president* by one of our two major parties, and subsequently elected to be president*, in 2016. Let us compare and contrast, as Sister Marie dePaul used to say.

So, as an informed electorate, we've lost the right to mock any candidate for anything they say.

The two-night exercise in Miami was not a waste of time. The field, at least at its upper levels, shook itself out into a fairly conventional primary campaign in a very unconventional time. In fact, there are several candidates—Jay Inslee being the most obvious example—who would have been serious contenders in any normal electoral context. Inslee is the governor of a very successful state. He's all over the critical issue of the day—the climate crisis—that needs to be hammered into the national consciousness over and over again. He's energetic and forceful. And he has approximately the same chance of becoming the nominee, let alone the president, than Williamson does. Because the context of this election exists in a place that American democracy never has been before—a kind of other-world, where facts are malleable, and truth is a labyrinth of dark corners and blind alleys.

Until that is broken down, none of the Democratic candidates can truly be called a front-runner. They must disenthrall themselves from the notion that there necessarily is a winning constituency out there that can be relied upon to vote in its own self-interest. They must unlearn what they have learned about what appeals to the voting public in this country, and develop a healthy respect for the political salience of unreason and weaponized ignorance. The idea that politics necessarily is the art of persuasion will not easily adapt to this context, and the fact that the idea goes back to Aristotle means little or nothing. Aristotle didn't count on social media or hack-farms from across the sea. Realities are created with a click of a keystroke and abandoned just as easily.

So, when Kamala Harris put that shot below the waterline on Joe Biden Thursday night, and when she reopened busing as a way in to the compromises that the Democratic Party has made over the past 40 years in the largely vain attempt to chase the voters who represent Biden's primary reason for running, she opened another new context for this election just as Elizabeth Warren has opened a new context with her attacks on the compromises the Democratic Party has made over the past 40 years to chase that Wall Street coin. The only way to campaign against Change And Die is to respond with Change or Die. To paraphrase a famous Republican of the past, the campaign is new and so must the candidates run anew. They must disenthrall themselves, and then they can save the country.

Source: Esquire.com

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