NPR

Lisa Van Dusen

September 9, 2024

(Updated to reflect the outcome of the September 10th Harris-Trump debate)

On Tuesday night at the National Constitution Centre in Philadelphia, Vice President Kamala Harris strode across the same stage where former President Barack Obama delivered his “More Perfect Union” speech in 2008, firmly shook the hand of the man who represents the greatest threat to that union, then spent the next 90 minutes eviscerating him with the rhetorical scalpel of a seasoned prosecutor.

By the time it was all over, even the RIA Novosti headline was “Trump is doomed”.

In the Before Times, when American politics had not yet been repurposed as aversion therapy for troublesome democracy romantics in incipient autocracies, the presidential debate was just another cyclical feature of campaign culture — like the Styrofoam boater, the oppo-research honeytrap and the Iowa State Fair butter cow.

That pre-chaos debate montage, quaintly sprocketed by sweaty Lazy-Shave meltdowns and “There you go again” knockouts, captures a catalogue of moments that not only fit reliably within the parameters of psychologically and behaviourally normative human comportment but which broadly adhered to a loftier standard applied to applicants for the most powerful job in the world.

Participants were expected to, and generally did, display an abundance of knowledge, a convincing acquaintanceship with empathy, a sophistication of worldview, intellectual acuity and a mastery of policy that reassured voters of the crucial gap between the qualifications of presidential candidates and their own, dispelling any lingering questions as to why they were not in possession of the nuclear codes. To the extent that a candidate deviated from those norms, even fleetingly, they were seen to have lost the debate (see Ford, Gerald, second 1976 debate, Dukakis, Michael, second 1988 debate).

Since the 2016 presidential election cycle, when Donald J. Trump made his colourful leap from reality-show host and Atlantic City casino impresario to chatte-grabage tutor and candidate for president of the United States, the campaign debate has — like so many democratic institutions, pillars, indicators and rituals — evolved.

In practical terms, that has translated to the unprecedented un-reality of presidential debates in which one participant is a relentless, unapologetic liar — Pathological? Performative? Congenital? Habitual? All of the above? — it matters not. The important thing is that, apparently, it matters not. He is afforded the same legitimacy and extended the same credulity as his truth-tethered counterparts who have not lied hourly, been impeached repeatedly, or staged deadly attempted coups against the United States Congress to preclude an elected successor from taking office. In this age of reality-show wonders, Trump and his enablers have made the presidential debate yet another showcase for bafflingly suspended disbelief as a tactical asset.

The bigger-picture, overarching story is the unprecedented dynamic of a presidential debate in which the major threat to America is represented by one of the actual debate participants. It’s the only thing Nancy Pelosi and Dick Cheney have ever agreed on.

Perhaps the most vivid example of this was the landmark June 27th debate in which a Republican nominee who would not have been on the stage in any previous era, whose behaviour would have made him patently unelectable in any democratic context uncorrupted by propaganda and covert interference, was actually not the candidate disqualified by his performance that night.

Which brings us to Philadelphia, and the second and final extraordinary presidential debate of this extraordinary campaign.

With President Joe Biden replaced by Vice President Kamala Harris as democratic nominee after the last debate, the story this time was the contrast between a former president with obvious cognitive challenges, two impeachments and a longer rap sheet than John Gotti, and a vice president, former California attorney general and former US senator who displays such a dismaying lack of crowd-size fixation, alarming absence of galeophobia and tenuous grasp of bacon-omics that this campaign is apparently, as of Sunday’s pre-debate New York Times/Siena poll, an actual horse race.

The real contrasts were, of course, starker than those of any previous presidential debate. Harris represents: an America of inclusion and diversity; personal achievement un-nuanced by inheritance, privilege or entitlement; an approach to politics characterized by possibility, competence and joy; a relationship to power based on transformation, not transaction; and a respect for democracy based on equality, human rights and the rule of law. Trump is a caricature of both American and personal power whose public persona does a walking disservice to — to cite Tim Walz — old white guys; he represents a philosophy of personal achievement based on the perversion of both privilege and predatory entitlement; his approach to politics is based on corruption, belligerence, intimidation and force; and his disrespect for democracy has manifested in so many ways deceptive, disruptive and unprecedently contemptuous of its institutions that they are too numerous to list here.

The bigger-picture, overarching story was the unprecedented dynamic of a presidential debate in which the major threat to America — a thematic focus of so many presidential debates from the Soviet Union and China in that first televised Kennedy-Nixon debate to the “war on terror” in the Bush-Kerry debate of 2004 — was represented by one of the actual debate participants. It’s the only thing Nancy Pelosi and Dick Cheney have ever agreed on.

That Trump — who has brazenly diplayed all the characteristics of an autocrat-in-waiting — has remained politically viable despite his record speaks volumes about the larger problems afflicting American democracy. Those characteristics — including his affection for dictators, his willingness to overthrow and deny election results, his disdain for his fellow citizens — coincided in an American presidential candidate at a time when the liberal world order is, per CIA chief Bill Burns and MI6 chief Richard Moore in this weekend’s Financial Times, “under threat in a way we haven’t seen since the cold war.”

So, as Biden has been saying since 2020 and as the Harris campaign has underscored, this election is the American, existential battle in a global war of values between democracy and autocracy, freedom and dictatorship, truth and industrialized mendacity.

It didn’t require an experienced, credible, patriotic, fundamentally decent president or vice president to frame it that way. Donald Trump himself has done that, over and over again, including on Tuesday night in Philadelphia.

Policy Magazine Associate Editor Lisa Van Dusen has served as a senior writer at Maclean’s, Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.