Breaking Down The GOP Debate
Reaction chats with Matthew Yglesias and Crooked Media's What A Day podcast
As much fun as we had in Wednesday night’s real-time debate thread, the second Republican presidential debate was, to my great surprise, not a terribly edifying event.
I left the experience with two big-picture takeaways—about the debate itself, yes, but really about the whole GOP primary.
To the extent that Republicans are debating issues at all, they are doing so on what is now familiar terrain, and it will take continued effort (as it has for many years now) to remain aghast about the positions they’ve staked out for themselves. Avoiding the natural processes of acclimation, desensitization, and boredom takes real effort, so we have to remind ourselves: They are coalescing around inhumane ideas without any limiting principles, and if we become complacent about what they’re advocating now, we’re likelier to test even uglier depths. If we thought child separation was bad, what happens if the next GOP administration really does try stripping citizenship from the natural-born U.S. children of illegal immigrants?
The electoral dynamics of this primary are genuinely pretty boring, and will remain so unless the handful of candidates who know they’ll never be Donald Trump’s running mate, or serve in his cabinet (Mike Pence, Chris Christie, Nikki Haley) experiment with more aggressive tactics.
For a more thorough and freewheeling dissection, I discussed these and other impressions of the debate with some of my old colleagues at Crooked Media, and at greater length with Matt Yglesias of Slow Boring, who invited me to do a semi-impromptu post-debate review. You can listen to that whole conversation here:
Matt and I have been personal friends for nearly 20 years. We’ve aired some of our disagreements about liberal politics in that time—particularly in the Trump era—on Twitter, and occasionally in our lengthier writing. But I think we converged last night on an interesting synthesis—specifically around what it would look like for Democrats to do meaningful political damage to the GOP using conventional tools of policy (Matt’s favorite tools) in a way that also advances my preferred approach: rising out of the defensive crouch and bludgeoning the Republican elite with its moral and ethical degeneracy.
The conversation was wide-ranging, but that’s where I think we broke the most new ground.
Then over at What A Day, my pal Erin Ryan and I had fun mixing it up with and taking questions from hosts Priyanka Aribindi and Juanita Tolliver.
I hope you’ll listen. And as always you can let me know what you agree and disagree with in comments, or however you prefer to reach me.
Fully support this crossover content, great job with this one Brian!
While I support your offensive approach, I think you underestimate the amount of sheer resolve and organization it takes. These sorts of strategies are rarely sustainable in the long run precisely because they take so much effort to keep up with, and tend to risk breakdowns of your own coalition.
For instance, maybe it's easy enough to have a series of votes on some abortion bill or whatever, and keep everyone in your conference on board with the plan of sticking it to the other party despite their personal disagreements with whatever that bill says. But after the umpteenth time of being told to swallow something for the good of the party, maybe some back-bencher finally breaks on, I dunno, gun control. Maybe they figure they can make a name for themselves. Maybe they are just so genuinely moved by the issue that they can't treat it like a game. The point is, the cohesion eventually breaks down, leading to splits.
I think that's why leadership is always so leery of such strategies: the splits. To use a military analogy, it's one thing to rally your troops to cross the Alps with elephants *once*. It's another thing to ask them to do it again and again, no matter how effective it'd be in theory. You can say you're fine with defections and AWOLs all you want, but at some point you simply don't have an army left*.
* Simon Bolivar learned this the hard way. Sorry for history-nerding out on you.