Patrick Semansky/AP Photo
On a night when it was hard to be heard, Senator Elizabeth Warren cast herself as the more effective candidate, at the Democratic primary debate in Charleston, South Carolina.
Much of Tuesday night’s Democratic debate didn’t really provide material for political writers like me, much less for viewers interested in the opinions and presentations of the candidates. To get a good assessment of the first hour in particular, we really need an essay by a critic of 20th-century music, like The New Yorker’s Alex Ross. Because much of that hour resembled a famous 1951 John Cage composition, “Imaginary Landscape No. 4,” which consists of whatever noises are coming forth from 12 radios playing simultaneously. Can’t make out a particular melody, or answer? Can’t hear it for the noise? Wonder how the director can figure out which camera should be on which candidate, since three of them are talking through the other four?
Then welcome to the CBS debate, where candidates, quite reasonably, attack other candidates, who then can’t respond since the moderators are already asking other questions to other candidates, so the attacked candidates shout their rebuttals over the other candidates’ answers, which their attackers also rebut at necessarily high volume, and pretty soon, it’s “Imaginary Landscape No. 2020,” which, for all I know, might send even John Cage screaming from the room.
Nonetheless, some substance did seep through the cracks. Elizabeth Warren made the case that the positions both she and Bernie Sanders hold are generally quite popular with the Democratic rank and file (which is true), that she and Bernie effectively hold the same positions on most issues (also largely true), but that she might be more effective in pushing them to enactment (which is contestable). The reason she gave for her greater effectiveness—that she’s more of a detail person than Bernie—is certainly contestable: She surely is more of a detail person, but that in itself doesn’t make someone more effective. Had she argued that she can work the system better than Bernie, she might have been on sounder ground. Still, Warren had a good night, and was generally able to talk without someone shouting her down.
Bernie had a perplexing night, one that reflects his ongoing loyalty to the politics of his youth. As Paul Krugman, among others, has argued, Bernie is nowhere near as radical as not just his critics think, but as Bernie himself seems to think. Most of the time, Bernie actually strives to normalize his politics, pointing out that most of his proposals are common sense in virtually every other industrial or postindustrial democracy: Indeed, that was the substance of his closing statement in Tuesday’s debate. For that matter, when Bernie defines his brand of socialism, he says it’s the lineal descendent of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. He makes no reference to previous American socialist leaders Gene Debs (who’s Bernie’s hero), Norman Thomas, or Michael Harrington. He does make reference to such black freedom fighters as A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King Jr., who were indeed democratic socialists, but whose leadership of the civil rights movements puts them within the pale of acceptable American forebears.
And crucially, Bernie is a voluble and solid opponent of every authoritarian regime currently on the map, whether left (Maduro’s Venezuela) or right (Orban’s Hungary) or indeterminate (Xi’s China). He criticizes Trump for his infatuation with such dictatorial thugs as these guys, and as North Korea’s Kim, Saudi Arabia’s MBS, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. He criticized Michael Bloomberg last night for his insistence that China’s Xi Jinping is not a dictator.
And yet, he veered recklessly last night from attacking Bloomberg’s China illusions to insisting that he was right to commend the Cuban regime for its literacy rate while condemning its authoritarianism. Ever since Communists claimed the mantle of socialism, it’s been incumbent on democratic socialists to make clear that they’re not communists—at least, it’s been incumbent on them when they’ve sought office in democratic nations. Bernie knows that, and yet he seems unable to break with some of the formulas popular among ’60s socialists, who, confronted with the horrors the United States was inflicting on Vietnam, tended to hold far rosier views of authoritarian regimes in developing nations than any dispassionate assessment would merit.
In a sense, Bernie is being truer to a memory of a historic moment than he is to who he actually is today—and, as Pete Buttigieg suggested, he thereby makes it gratuitously harder for him to refute the redbaiting attacks that Trump will hurl at him should he become the nominee.
In a sense, Bernie is being truer to a memory of a historic moment than he is to who he actually is today.
Indeed, in matters of foreign policy, Jackson Diehl, The Washington Post’s deputy editorial page editor and leading foreign-affairs columnist—and no friend of Bernie’s politics—recently wrote that Bernie may be the most principled defender of democracy and opponent of autocracy of any of the Democratic candidates. Why Bernie insists on muddling this distinction is a good question. If he wants to advance the cause of American socialism, most particularly by having a socialist in the White House, he’d do well to stop calling into question his identity as a small-d democrat—because that’s how the Trumpians will deliberately misconstrue his Cuban answer, and because, dammit, he is a small-d democrat.
As to the rest of the field: By any standard save that he set in his first debate outing, Michael Bloomberg was stiff (which, I suppose, is better than supine); Tom Steyer was actually attacked for the first time (for investing in private prisons, by Joe Biden, who clearly feared Steyer was eating into his South Carolina African American support); Amy Klobuchar cited her superior record at getting bills through even today’s Senate, which is almost entirely due to her authorship of countless bills affirming motherhood and apple pie; Joe Biden basked in the most supportive audience he’s yet encountered during a debate—indeed, the hall seemed packed by Biden and Bloomberg cheering sections; and Pete Buttigieg proved that no one can outshout Bernie Sanders.
Bloomberg did say something disquieting. He cited his success in helping persuade Republican state legislators in New York to support legalizing gay marriage as a basis for his belief that he could work across the aisle in Congress if he were president. This suggests a complete misunderstanding of what the Republican Party has become over the past four decades; also, that Bloomberg never reads Bloomberg Businessweek, which is a fine publication that reports accurately on American life and politics. Bloomberg should give it a gander; he might find out what’s been going on in plain sight for years.
