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Daily Kos Staff
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If you were looking for the first Republican debate to be anything but the usual dismal fare, consider this a life lesson. The state of political debates has been trending toward all-night vapidity every year since the invention of television, and you can blame the network heads for that.
You usually need only the first two minutes or so to judge how much of a car crash any particular evening will become. The more the opening song-and-dance looks like the introduction to a sports broadcast complete with a drone zipping around the auditorium, the worse the questions will be. The moment any commenter begins talking in metaphors like "tale of the tape" or "punching above his weight," you know that that talking head is going to be a big bag of uselessness.
We have real-time dial technology, you know. There's no good reason why the pundits brought in between debate segments can't be wired up so that a powerful electric shock is dispensed to anyone who thinks choosing national leaders is just another game of nerd football. If a running back drops the ball it might cost a game. If an incompetent blowhard is elected to the presidency, it could lead to the deaths of 1 million people and a new grassroots movement to bring back polio.
There's a push by numerous pundits to declare the absent Donald Trump the "winner" of the debate by virtue of the sheer dullness of everyone else's performance, and I'm not seeing it. If anything, debate night proved that Republicanism can trundle along very well indeed without ever mentioning Trump again—which of course raises the question of why they haven't gotten on with that already.
You want anti-immigrant hate? Republicans have that. You want know-nothing blowhardism? Check out the Elon Musk impersonator. The guy can thumb through a magazine on the toilet and come away thinking he's more of an expert on the things he read than anyone and everyone who does that shit for a living. Predictably, Musk was heaping praise on Ramaswamy after the debate.
If you're an insufferable godbotherer then you've got Mike Pence, who's willing to channel Jesus Christ Himself at the drop of a hat so Jesus can tell you all about how brilliant Pence is while Mother looks on with adoration.
If you want a rough-and-tumble asshole, Chris Christie is your guy. Nikki Haley is for the fans of tactical evasiveness, and Ron DeSantis is the jackass who grew up thinking he would be America's Julius Caesar, only to learn that the general public already has a lot of people like that in their family and at their workplace and aren't particularly interested in adding in another.
What Trump brought to the party last time was racism, lies, and penis jokes, and it turns out the party can still do just fine without the penis jokes. If Trump were silenced tomorrow, either by a bad cheeseburger or an inability to abide by his bail conditions, the Republican base would soon forget he ever existed. Nobody was buzzing about Trump's supposed counterprogramming when it was all over. The man buffooned his sloppy way through a question about a new civil war on Channel Elon and still, nobody cared.
Oh, but Trump did contribute to the debate even in his absence. His name and his snarling, violent coup attempt brought us the debate's highlight moment: When the candidates were asked whether they would still support Trump as Republicanism's presidential nominee even if he were convicted for the anti-American conspiracy, all but one of these malignant fuckers took sheepish looks at one another and timidly raised their hands. Including, yes, the man who spent a week in an intensive care unit after Donald Trump gave him COVID, and a man who had to flee from the insurrectionist mob that Trump aimed squarely at him.
It again makes a joke of all those flags the candidates scatter around themselves during every public appearance. If it's a choice between insulting the segment of the Republican base that supports violent coup or supporting Trump's supposed right to commit any crimes he wants, then Donald can wipe his ass on every flag in the country and they'll salute him for doing it. Not even Pence thinks sending a violent, police-attacking mob after him is something that should disqualify a person from being granted the power to try it again.
Fascism is always this pathetic, by the way. The reason it hyper-focuses on supposed masculinity is because its adherents tend to be vapid, adrift, and powerless in their own lives. The militancy is a way to redeem themselves by substituting state-sanctioned violence for their own lack of success and courage. You've got a stage full of the most ambitious so-called patriots in the county. They think if they agree that attempting to overthrow the damn government ought to disqualify a person from the presidency, it would be much too risky a proposition to do so publicly.
So no, none of the hand-raisers will "stand up to" Vladimir Putin, or to Chinese human rights abuses, or take a hard line on dismembering journalists. They can't even stomach turning against a sneering ex-reality television star who's spent his entire life believing that he, personally, can break whatever laws he wants. They would be Oval Office chair-warmers signing their name to whatever their donors' lobbyists set down on their desk.
Mostly the debate continued to show that the problem with Republicanism is that not even Republicans believe in Republicanism. The candidates gave their best lying jabs trying to stoke anti-abortion sentiment, and even the crowd of candidate-provided hyper-partisans mustered up only token applause. It is a small, small set of Americans who have invested themselves in banning abortion, and the party still does not realize that not even their own base wants the sort of theocracy Republican political figures have promised them.
All the talk of patriotism and freedom and rule of law was nothing but a hollow joke, dismantling itself immediately when the question turned to what to do about the phalanx of Republicans now being booked on felony conspiracy charges.
The question on climate change and necessary response landed with a wet thud and the usual evasions. Fox tried to stoke the usual Fox hatred of immigrants with a question aimed mostly at giving DeSantis another opportunity to say he'd just call them drug dealers and start shooting them all, but the hand-picked audience did not want blood as much as Fox seems to have presumed they did.
The question of defending democracy in Europe led to Ramaswamy mouthing off with another round of techbro self-praise, which appears to be the precise moment everyone else on the stage decided that they would turn their just-forged hatred of this pompous little twit into a new lifelong passion.
Fox dutifully performed the Ask a Really Stupid Question to Cap Off the Night task; this time it was about UFOs and was stupid enough that moderators, candidates, and the audience all cringed even as the question came out.
That was a good capper because it emphasized that there just isn't anything else in America left to ask about. Might as well kill off the last few minutes with some fluff.
Again: nihilism. It was all just another evening of dull nihilism, one with a flashy opening and a lot of yelling and no real principles you could plant your flag in.
This is a party that has lost its way, a set of performances even the most partisan of crowds appear to be tiring of. There should be a lesson there, but there's nobody left in the party who seems capable of finding it.
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