Democrats: Rome Is Burning While You Fiddle On The Debate Stage

Democratic Debate Round One, July 20, 2019. Photo by CNN

Regarding the current spate of “debates” and the rush to morph one-liners and soundbites into policy:

I’m 70. Old enough to remember a time of lynchings, Jim Crow, Watts and DC and other cities inflamed by racial frustrations and bomb throwing, Chicago convention violence, outrageous conduct by a president and his minions, three assassinations and multiple assassination attempts, George Wallace, George Lincoln Rockwell (look it up), segregationists at the top of school front steps, hatred-shouting and spit-dribbling white mothers, terrified black children, backs and fronts of buses, whites-only lunch counters, police dogs and fire hoses, marches across bridges and down the National Mall, Vietnam protests, body counts, a letter from the Birmingham jail (and if you have to look that up, you have some reading to do), the Texas Tower, and a host of other terrible socially-eviscerating events all within the span of 20 years.

I went to school in cities totally bent toward racism, and small towns in which few, if any blacks lived or had ever been seen by a white child. In one school in Tennessee, I attended a class in which the history of the Civil War was twisted in such a way that Union victories were portrayed as Confederate successes, facts (and Yankee students) be damned. I drove past miles of cotton fields in which black share-cropping families in tiny shacks eked out livings working the land for white land owners—but it wasn’t slavery, no, not 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Give me a break. I knew enough even at 15 to see the lie in that sad tableau.

I followed the news and watched the half-step advances of Civil Rights legislation, and saw Lyndon Johnson sign landmark bills that dragged white Southern politicians kicking and screaming into the 20th century, if only for a moment in time (by the way, Mr. Trump, you have not done more for blacks than any other president). But I also saw the hatred that followed those laws, and the attempts by white racists, white nationalists, white-is-righters and other xenophobic groups to amp up their attacks on blacks and on the increasing populations of Hispanics, Asians, and Middle Easterners who were beginning to build new lives in the United States. The peaceful world we dreamed of in our youth, the world we believed we would bequeath to our children, is little more than ashes now.

So, just for the record, I want to make it clear that what is happening in America today is not new to these aging eyes or playing out for the first time on the silver screen of my still vivid memories. What is new, and more disconcerting than many of those past events is the nationwide normalization of behavior that subverts the ideals and future of basic humanity. There is no outrage among the citizenry that is accompanied by serious debate and sense of purpose and commitment to do anything more than mouth soundbites, point fingers, and wring hands. Folks, that will not help. Such group-think passivity only strengthens the bullies who, so far, have not paid any significant penalties for their malfeasance and near-traitorous actions.

You know that Trump will win in 2020 if there is not a course change among the non-Trump electorate. So far, there is no evidence that any Democratic candidate for the presidency is capable of energizing and leading the public to defeat this most egregious piece of inhumanity ever to live in the White House (though Jackson does come to mind as a close second). What passes for debates is pure show, and poor show at that. Debate, by definition and once-upon-a-time practices involves well thought-out positions that can be defended with logic and clarity, and countered with equally illuminating information. I state my case, present supporting information, and you listen. When I’m done, you take my points in order and refute them with facts. We go back and forth a few times, sharpening the initial question or hypothesis with each pass. Eventually, the judges award the debate to the most persuasive and well-prepared debater, the person who has, through a preponderance of evidence and oratorical skill, made his or her case.

I think it’s fair to say we have not seen such a debate form in decades. Nor has such a form appeared in the latest Circus Maximus arena sponsored by hyperbole-driven television networks. So, we are left with nothing to show for all the shouting and name-calling and stapled together policy soundbites presented by the Democrats.

If I were a betting man, basing my bet on what has transpired so far among the Democrats, and based on the Democrats inability to raise the level of national outrage beyond the boiling point, 2020 will go to Trump through pure incompetence on the part of his opposition. The Republicans behind Trump stand for all that is wrong, all that is contentious, all that is divisive, destructive, and degrading to non-whites and non-them. They have exhumed the bodies and anthems of the early1900s America-Firsters; they have pumped a new kind of toxic gas for their base to use, and use it they will—to destroy the very foundation of our democracy in order to exterminate the vermin they have been told infests our nation’s cities.

This is not a time for shallow and meaningless sound-bite "debates." Rome is burning while the Democrats fiddle and vie for points in their ivory towers and television stages. The time for debate is long past—someone had better take action, and that someone is the American electorate writ large. All I ask for is someone--man or woman--who will take off the gloves and lay a hard, punishing, take-down blow to the madman of Pennsylvania Avenue, and who can deliver an equally mighty blow to his weak-sisters on the HIll.