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Linda Mitchell, KCMO's avatar

HCR you made it into the NY Times morning newsletter! David Leonhardt quoted you directly!! Here it is:

At other moments, though, Biden conveyed his ideas clearly. “Biden made the debate about the country and the American people, not about Trump,” the historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote in her newsletter. “While Trump listed his own grievances, Biden spoke to the camera, asking Americans what they needed, what they think.” He behaved as many previous presidential candidates, of both parties, have during debates.

This is not just an important acknowledgement of your excellence--it acknowledges the importance of historians in presenting a rational analysis based on facts and data. I'm kind of ecstatic!

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Laura Nelson's avatar

I made it a point NOT to watch the debates. I assumed they'd be a shitshow, so I read a book on my Kindle about Socialism (how's that for irony?) and went to bed. I woke up around 2am and couldn't go back to sleep so I went online. Whereupon I hear Dana Bash saying "that was not a debate: that was a shitshow." Told ya.

I do not see why Biden bothered with this nonsense. It is like mud wrestling with a pig: you always lose, you get dirty, and the pig likes it. What disturbs me most of all is that most of the earlier presidential debates -- Nixon/Kennedy in 1960, Reagan/Mondale in 1980, Clinton/Bush/Perot in 1988 -- seem positively Ciceronian by comparison. I don't think that it's intellectual snobbery -- at least I hope it isn't -- to lament this as a type of culpable ignorance on the part of the American electorate. How do we stand for this? Can we not even notice it anymore?

It is important to keep the fire burning for Liberal Republican Democracy, and not only vote but organize and be politically active in whatever way one can. The struggle will go on long after all this mishegoss is finished. But there is also something a little disingenuous in saying that we cannot let Donald Trump undermine our faith in the American experiment. and American institutions. The American experiment was on life support long before 45 came upon the scene and, with a talent characteristic of able con-men, ripped all the IV tubes out.

Biden promises us an interregnum of calm while we take deep breaths and start getting things to work again. And boy, that would be a relief! But the interregnum can't be too long. The problems that eat away at our trust in US institutions will remain. Biden needs to realize he is a transitional figure. And frankly, I don't think his shoving his party's progressive wing aside in this farcical debate helped much -- he needs the Sanders/Warren/Squad wing of the party to help establish the cool resting place the polity needs so badly. But Biden is a stopgap and a temporary bulwark, and I hope he realizes that Trump is just the advance wave of illiberal, undemocratic, unrepublican authoritarian force, and there are other aspiring demagogues far more cool and collected than Trump who are just as bad or worse. "President Tucker Carlson" is a prospect that sets my teeth on edge.

In short, the problem isn't just "them" -- the rich and powerful elites, even though they bear a larger measure of blame. As Walt Kelly's Pogo cartoon once said: "we have seen the enemy and he is us." We got us into this mess by inattention, thinking with our adrenal glands instead of our brains, pettiness, and a devotion to a uniquely asocial and apolitical individualism, the cult of wealth and fame. "Exceptionalism" is the original sin of the USA. We must dispense with it. Otherwise the shitshow will get even messier.

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