Even when the presidential candidates are more normal and sane than the current pair, the televised debates between them tend to veer in a nerve-wracking fashion between “gotcha” attack lines, evasive self-defense, and vague platitudes about a vision for the future the details of which will have to be discussed later. Given how skeptical and exhausted by it all American audiences purportedly are, though, maybe a confessional tone would better serve most candidates.
Admit that things are bad, that politics makes them worse, and that there are no entirely pleasant or easy solutions. Voters might eat that up. I suspect a lot of them, though they might not phrase it this way, get very nervous when Trump sounds too aggressive, Vance too confident, Harris too dismissive, or Walz too bouncy. Shouldn’t these figures all be issuing abject apologies, after all? They’re politicians.
Conventional thinkers will say that if humility or a frank confession of anxiety worked, more politicians would’ve tried it by now. But as when dealing with an advice-giving marketing guru who only commands about one percent of the marketplace, keep in mind that neither Trump nor Harris can claim to be sweeping more than about half the electorate, no matter how strenuously pundits try to make each uptick in the polls from, say, 47 percent to 51 percent sound like a revolution.
It’s still just a near coin toss and probably will be even when one of them wins. Maybe humility, properly formulated, would turn out to be a bold move that rallied a real majority.
I concede that a “leader” takes a risk by admitting that anything in which he or she had a hand might be going wrong. Trump has recently talked about having lost the election in 2020, talk which I think could be interpreted as mere caving to practical and legal reality regardless of how many illicit votes he thinks there were, but he’s already being excoriated for this concession to popular discourse by farther-right figures like the young racist Nick Fuentes. There may be Churchill-bashing on the right lately, but public figures across the political spectrum, as well as most nitwit online trolls, live by Churchill’s “Never surrender” dictum and its even dumber corollary, “Never admit error.”
Even in the Trump era, one in which political discourse really has been shaped in part by the rhythms of professional wrestling bravado, there’s some price to be paid for looking cocky. I’m more sympathetic to boisterous protests and even outright rebellion than most people, but even Trump seems to have realized that throwing a gala for the imprisoned J6 participants might look bad. Might he pick up a huge swath of moderate voters if he more frequently said something like, “The election was rigged, but, man, that protest thing got a bit out of hand, didn’t it?” Give nervous observers some hint he weighs both pros and cons, so to speak.
One of his de facto foes is at least capable of admitting error, with the Department of Justice chief of public affairs recently admitting that the wave of “lawfare” attacks on Trump by Democratic prosecutors on multiple fronts may be a perversion of justice. I wonder if Harris, if she becomes president, will show even a glimmer of concern over such things.
Does anyone believe that a Harris Justice Department will even probe further into the accidental or deliberate mishandling of security preceding the attempt to kill Trump, for that matter? Is there a snowball’s chance in Hell of a Harris Justice Department going further and, say, investigating Amazon for fraud or political collusion for “accidentally” replacing the cover image for the first book about the Trump shooting with gay black fashion photography? Will Harris laugh maniacally in her first presidential press conference if asked why her former political rival Tulsi Gabbard got put on the TSA’s list for heightened passenger scrutiny right after criticizing Harris, as if criticizing her is a sign of potential terrorist activity?
Does Harris, much like Trump in his more intemperate moments, eschew humility and take the attitude that political victory means a chance for revenge on one’s enemies?
The unintended benefit, I suppose, of politicians choosing egomaniacal self-promotion over intellectual humility is that the egomania, vengeance, and petty one-upmanship are all forms of truth in advertising. Unpleasant as they are in the short term, these rhetorical moves at least help alert the smarter members of the public to the fact that something’s terribly wrong. By contrast, the left-liberal establishment achieved its “long march through the institutions” over the past century by being subtle and coy much of the time. The public never knew what hit them.
So, after a century of the progressives’ soft sell, if a politician such as Tony Blair announces that he wants more control over the internet and sounds as if he has humane reasons for it, much of humanity will fall for it. If the United Nations presses all manner of green urban planning ideas on cities around the world but then balks at chipping in $150 million for the East River walkway near me in Manhattan that’s slowly turning into a magical park-like path to the U.N.’s headquarters at taxpayer expense, the public will probably accept that the U.N.’s money is tied up in nobler pursuits such as ending hunger or peacekeeping somewhere. If Oregon, a bit like Chicago, doesn’t merely allow migrants to settle there (as they should) but subsidizes them to the tune of $30,000 each so long as they buy a home, many people will nod along, assuming that vast governmental expenditures (and artificially-enhanced cultural deformations) are just the boring logical corollary of a tolerant attitude.
It all just seems like procedure, in other words. Vast, glacial, unstoppable procedure. By contrast, Trump or Harris acting like a jackass is jarring enough to wake people up and sometimes put them on guard. Maybe we need that. I take back my earlier call for humility and civility. Let them fight, bitterly. Let the public back away in horror.
And I think they are increasingly backing away. It helps in particular when politicians let the mask slip and the monster underneath all the high-falutin’, grand-planning rhetoric shows through. A New York City Councilwoman recently admitted during a video conference about the migrant influx that she needed it just to compensate for the votes her area might otherwise lose through population-weighted redistricting. That’s honesty worthy of Boss Tweed’s era.
Similarly, it’s surely telling that Nancy Pelosi, likely after putting hours of thought into what to call her memoir and how to make it sound like a counterpoint to the Trumpish thinking of her political foes, called it The Art of Power (likely in conscious contrast to Trump’s The Art of the Deal). Well, Trump’s de facto defense of b.s. is not business’ moral high point, but I hope we can agree that Pelosi isn’t a shining argument in favor of politics if she wants to be known not for, say, The Art of Democracy or The Art of Collaboration or something but, brazenly, the art of power. That’s as frank a confession as one could ask for of what the liberal establishment now values and wants. Let none pretend the right has a monopoly on sociopathy—on “reptilian” thinking, as Pelosi has repeatedly said of her own side.
By all means, let those reptilian masks keep slipping, for the sake of the rest of us. It’s as close to confession as some of our overlords will ever get.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey