Reflections on the Non-Debate

I can’t say I have anything original to add, because what is there to say? There was supposed to be a debate, but there wasn’t and isn’t going to be. There was a fight, for which one contestant wasn’t fully prepared and fought with a hand tied behind his back.

But that’s how it had to be. While Biden is a normally decent human being with an average intellect, whose life is full of compromises because that’s how politics works, he is clearly not evil in any meaningful sense. Trump is a straight-out psychopath, whose only observable emotions involve hurting other people. That’s what he lives for. Deprived of the opportunity to do that, or confronted by someone who wants hm to stop doing that, he becomes enraged, which is therefore his normal state of being.

It’s not possible, therefore, to have any exchange of ideas with him. In that game the unashamed liar starts ahead, since he can always resort to the opposite of what he just said he said. Trump’s followers, from every interview the Times grants us, are down with that. They want–let’s call it–civil death at least for everyone who opposes him and therefore them. It’s totally misguided to try to argue democratic “norms” with them, since the destruction of the republican form of government, and of the restraints on unfairness and coercion it entails, are the whole point. They do not want to turn the rascals out; they want to destroy the rascals and all their works. And it’s useless to try to figure out, as Auden put it about Hitler, “what huge imago made a psychopathic god…” He’s there.

Finally, in case any of us were in doubt , his concluding remark on white supremacy made it perfectly clear. He told the Proud Boys, who are as white supremacist and violence-prone as you can get, and always travel armed, to “stand by.” Retracting that is impossible. As Kamala Harris so neatly put it, that’s “a dog-whistle into a bullhorn.” If, and probably when, the election is “stolen” from him, he calls for violence, that is what they are trained for. They will come; and a lot of others too. At which point, as Ellery Queen once put it, “Only God knows, and He’s not spilling.”