“The American Claimants” Biden, Trump, Twain and America’s (Mis)Fortune
We know, the US is short for the USA, in turn an acronym for the United States of America, which could very well stand for The-Somehow-Still-United-Despite-Constant-Divisions-and-Bickering-States-of-America. Race and class, gender and religion, all craftily packed in (debilitating) ideologies, are some of the cruxes for (or rather, causes of) the many fault lines that stubbornly drive wedges within the highly regarded and widely praised “land of the free, home of the brave”. These boundaries date back to the time of pilgrims and pioneers and will endure in an idiosyncratic form of patriotism, just like their political coalescence has become, paradoxically enough, the driver of American society and statehood. The polarity between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, aka “the left” versus “the right”, aka “liberals” versus “conservatives”, keeps America in motion, even if the image of the debate (debacle?) Biden-Trump on the evening/morning of June 28/29, was one of an American political class that “went to pot” than of candidates “running for POTUS” (President of the United States).
Grown Ups is the title of a relatively low-budget, second-rate Hollywood comedy that would be fit ex post to the event televised by CNN where the titular grownups would be vulnerable elderly veterans of the American political scene. Nevertheless, politics everywhere has always included mechanisms for more or less “natural” selection where maturity, merit and morality rarely if ever line up. The protagonists of the ongoing political polemic have taken the notion of debate up on what could be aptly termed “abysmal heights” as they seamlessly (or senselessly, the cynics would say) carried it between adulterine boudoirs and golf courts. This was the first presidential debate with no spectators in the studio since the one between J.F. Kennedy and R.M. Nixon in 1960, where the candidates’ combined age was about 90, compared to the present-day combatants reaching a total age of 159. Thence, instead of seniority’s benevolent wisdom, we witnessed the vintage edition of senescent bullying and bullshitting.
A sensible view on politics (despite the latter’s rather strained relationship with common sense) is that those who choose to enter this arena had better do it later on rather than too early. The reasoning here is that one can only start “dividing” (the quintessence of politics itself) people’s productive contribution to share it with others only after one has first “multiplied” it; one does not simply hop into politics straight out of college. Here, and only here, Trump has respected the natural order of things, whereas Biden has long since lost any sense of their measure. Biden is a former young politician having long since aged into politics, yet it’s not biological age, but the privilege of power that corrupts judgement, for “(absolute) power corrupts (absolutely)” in Lord Acton’s famous words. The true affliction is the hypertrophy of the politician’s mindset, not the atrophy of mental lucidity. And yes, it is more ethically reprehensible and economically pernicious for a political class to be too young rather than too aged due to it encouraging the societal delusion that, through the state, “each can live at everyone else’s expense” (Bastiat).
The greatest mystery is how the two political mega-parties of the exemplary (as well as… exportable) brand of American democracy could present their electors with candidates of the likes of the ones now at the forefront of the presidential race. Politics is an extremely competitive jungle, one where political, not professional, acumen ensures the survival of the strongest, not of the most productive. The politician’s toolkit thus obligatorily includes promising and pressuring, demagoguery and intrigue, bribery and threats, and the only difference between the application of these tools in mature democracies versus other political systems lies only in skilful dissimulation. Invariably, beyond the grand themes they sport in order to garner external popular support, political factions are career grinders for the politically (im)patient and (un)principled. Optimizing the political supply, proposing and promoting “the best candidates” is a comical exercise dense in amorality, a mystery lying beyond affiliations and algorithms. Still, how does one end up with… “Biden v. Trump” or anything of the sort?
The transcript of the debate should be a goldmine for high school graduation exams everywhere in the world. It is extremely educational in the sense of “not like this”. It would be suited for a wide range of subject matters such as literature (with ample lessons on how slang turns into jargon in the language of politics), mathematics (with the tendency of politicians to fumble numbers reaches orders of magnitude), economics (with fables on inflation, deficits, jobs, and social protection), history (contaminated by public propaganda and private fake-news campaigns), geography (noticing the United States’ “household” application thereof, i.e., militarism and migration) or biology (from the basic reproductive impulse to dilemmas related to abortion). If anything, the televised debate can be viewed as an exam gauging the (im)maturity not just of the US, but of all other nations it cohabitates with in a troubled world full of ideo-/techno-/eco-/logical biases. In light of the reference in the title[*], this clash would’ve given pause to Mark Twain’s irony and humour for, after all, how can one parody a parody?!
[*] Mark Twain (1892). The American Claimant. New York: Charles L. Webster & Co. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3179/3179-h/3179-h.htm.